Finneas Talks ‘Beef,’ Billie Eilish and the Evolution of the Record Producer
On Billboard On the Record, Finneas explains how the role of a music producer has changed over time — and how he's seen his own process evolve as well.
Black News 
Finneas O’Connell is one of modern music’s most respected pop producers. After first becoming known as the producer for his younger sister, Billie Eilish, he’s gone on to become a trusted collaborator for a variety of talents including Justin Bieber, Halsey, Kid Cudi and Ashe. As a solo artist, Finneas has released two albums including 2024’s For Cryin’ Out Loud! and 2025’s The Dream and crafted original songs and scores for film and television.
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In the latest episode of On the Record, Finneas talks about the evolution of record production as an art form all the way back from the days of tape recording to now, when recording is cheap and accessible to all. He explains his own evolution as a producer over the last decade, dating back to his rise during the SoundCloud era to his latest project and how he applies his skills to craft the score for the newest season of the hit TV show, Beef.
Check out the full episode of On the Record below on YouTube, or check it out on other podcast platforms here. Read a condensed and edited portion of the conversation below.
There’s a Quincy Jones quote where he says, essentially, that the record producer is like the director of film. Do you find that to be accurate for you doing this role today?
Finneas: Yeah, I think of that as the same. I also [think] the artist should be the other director of the film. I think that maybe there are artists that are really put together by a committee, and they are given songs that they haven’t written, they’re put in outfits that they didn’t choose, and maybe that’s a different thing, because I would make that analogous to a movie star. But when I work with an artist, I let them be a director over me. If I’m a director, they’re the superior director, because it’s my job to sort of go like, “Yeah, I don’t know, between those two, I like this one better,” but at the end of the day, they’re going to go off and play the song every day for 20 years, so I want them to like it even more than I like it.
I imagine there are some artists you work with that don’t have production savvy, so they might struggle to articulate what they’re looking for. Is that a challenging position for you as a producer?
There are pros and cons to the lack of technical vernacular, and I’ve said this to Billie a lot lately, because Billie, over the course of the three albums we’ve made, I’ve hipped her to more and more of her own vocal engineering, because she’s got a great ear, and it just makes her life 20 seconds faster all the time… One of the things I said to her like a year ago was, one of the challenges with the more you know is the less you imagine, I think. So what I want is for an artist to just be purely imaginative.
If Billie goes, “I want it to sound like the vocal is falling apart,” that’s such a metaphoric way to put that, and then I get to interpret it, and I get to be like, okay, what would I do to achieve that? And then I play it for her, and then she goes like, “Yeah, but I want it to start earlier. I want it to feel more broken,” and then I interpret that. I think I love the interpretive quality of being a producer. And so I think sometimes, the more educated you are, the more you’re like, “Throw some delay on that,” and I’m like, yeah, but that’s less exciting. It’s less open-ended. Sometimes I work with artists who know nothing about instruments, even, and it can be kind of a gift, because you’re like, cool, I’ll play by your interesting description that I would never think of.
I’m curious, what do you think about the Rick Rubin style of production, where he basically claims to be there to provide his taste, not technical ability?
He’s made work that I’m really inspired by. I’m a little confused by his kind of — he swears that he knows nothing at all about music, and it’s like, just Google Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash. There are many videos of him setting up the mics. He doesn’t know nothing. I think what I assume he means by that, and I respect this, is similarly to what I’ve said before: There are a lot of people that know a lot more than I do. I don’t know the most, but I also don’t know nothing.
I think he’s probably underestimating himself a bit because he’s likely around people who are so technically proficient that he feels he can’t say that.
I think it’s an effective — I think I try to do the same thing, which is, I don’t want to make people feel like it isn’t achievable. I think that you don’t want to intimidate somebody out of trying to make something by way of, “I have my 10,000 hours, I know so much, you’ll never know as much as I do.” So I like that about that. I also think that the other thing that he really does, and I’m sure he is happy to talk about this, is he provides this environment. And I think that environment is incredibly important to me. I sometimes do think that, similarly to him, that’s the best thing I can offer some people.
You’ve said that work hard to set a good environment for an artist to come in, feel comfortable and do their best work. You came up with your sister Billie, and I imagine there is such a built-in level of comfort between you two as siblings. When you started working with other people outside of Billie, sometimes people who you had never met before, what was that like?
I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as comfortable around another writer-artist as I do around Billie. I don’t know that I should even try. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t loved working with other artists and made stuff I’m really proud of. Artists often have found a way to pour as much of themselves into a conversation as they can every time. The amount of artists I’ve worked with where I am meeting them, and within an hour and a half I’ve heard truly intimate, vulnerable things — and what a gift they’re giving me, right? And also, sometimes it’s much like going to a good therapist. It’s not their job to say what happened to me last week. They’re listening to you. So I think that is what I shoot for with other artists, especially. And when I’m working with Billie, I also am trying to not get in the way of writing the best song with her for her album by being like, guess what I was up to yesterday? That’s for later. That’s for our day where we’re not making music. But yeah, with an artist that I’m not close with, I have been really wowed by artists coming in and being like, here is so much of myself laid bare emotionally. That’s a real gift.
The music that is made is often shaped so much by the time we are in and the technology we have at our disposal. You came up during the SoundCloud era. Splice had just become popular, and beat marketplaces were prevalent. Looking back, do you think your early music was shaped at all by the moment you were in?
Absolutely. I mean, certainly from what I was inspired to create. There was this kind of surge of minimalistic production, sort of synth-y, bass-y nontraditional percussion — meaning not a drum kit, but this kind of like bits and things, very vocal-forward, very choral.
[Back then, the audio quality online] also sounded bad. The bitrate was really low. You’d watch a video and it was like 480 or whatever. But that was kind of fun. I don’t know — when stuff sounds degraded, that’s inspiring to me and interesting, because you’re also not shooting for as much perfection. You’re like, yeah, it sounds kind of rough, but so does everything on SoundCloud. Even if you put Daft Punk on SoundCloud, it would sound crunchy. I said to whoever listened [back then] that I wanted to start producing music, and so I was saving up to buy Logic Pro, and it was like $799 or something, and I was saving up, and in a couple months I’d have enough money, right? And then they dropped the price to like $199 and I was like, bro, I can afford this.
I wanted to ask about Beef season 2. You did the score for this season, but it’s not your first time working in film/TV music. Beyond other composition gigs, you’ve had major success with original songs like “No Time To Die” and “What Was I Made For?” How do you compare crafting the original songs versus a score?
There’s a lot of overlap. I think that you’re living in a world and you’re trying to aid the story, and you have these sort of clear goalposts. It’s an assignment. That’s sort of one of the magical parts of making a song with no guidelines is you’re like, who knows? And I love that. But I also love the specificity. I love when we made “No Time to Die,” to use that as an example. That sounds like a James Bond song. If we put that on a Billie solo record, somebody would be like, song eight sounds like a James Bond theme song, and that’s a good feeling. Similarly, if we were sending a song in for them to consider for James Bond and it just sounded like a totally likable piece of music but had no identity, they’d be like, sure, but what does this have to do with this James Bond film?
So similarly to making the music for Beef, what I’m looking for is an excuse to make a piece of music that I wouldn’t otherwise have an excuse to make. On this job I recorded sprinkler systems and tennis balls getting hit, golf balls getting hit, and lawnmowers and bees and cars and dogs whining and barking. Some of that stuff is at the fore, some of it is so buried that you might not even hear it, but I know it’s there, and it’s weaving itself through the DNA [of the music.]
