For a man with 10 Grammy Award wins, including a 2020 statue for Producer of the Year that, then-aged just 23, made him the youngest ever recipient of the title, Finneas talks an awful lot about failure. Calling in from Los Angeles, he recalls his early days working with sister Billie Eilish, and the acute sense of doom that would come from what he describes as “not only imposter syndrome, but imposter reality”.
“Early on in my life of working, especially with Billie, I didn’t know what I was doing, and when you don’t know what you’re doing, that can be really stressful because it’s like… I [literally] don’t know how to do this. I’ve never made an EP or an album or whatever. So I was failing a lot of the time in my own mind,” he explains. “And then luckily what we had made was received really well, but even then I had the feeling of, ‘Well, if I can make something that people like but I can make it in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a failure every time, then I’ll feel better about my life’.”
Releasing his own debut solo album ‘The Optimist’ in 2021, following the gargantuan global success of Billie’s material, underscored the need to truly love and feel at ease with the process of creating itself. That record, he readily admits, “super under-performed in my mind; that album did not sell”. He continues: “I made it very alone in a dark room for several months. My recording studio had flooded so I was in a temporary studio that I didn’t like very much, sitting around alone. It wasn’t a process I enjoyed, so if that album had really crushed then I’d feel like, ‘Well, I’m glad I made that because it did really well’. But because it didn’t then I was like, ‘Well, I should just focus on having as good a time as I can making records and maybe that’ll bleed through…’”
Enter, The Favors. Joining Finneas on today’s call is Ashe – celebrated indie-pop star in her own right and, now, the other half of a project that could not be further away from the isolated sessions and pained creative flagellation that categorised Finneas’ early work. The pair have previous together; Finneas produced Ashe’s 2019 EP ‘Moral of the Story’, including its breakout title track, and the two have remained close ever since. But the gorgeous world of The Favors – part ‘70s Laurel Canyon; part old Hollywood – isn’t just a meeting of musical minds. At its heart, it represents a concerted attempt to prioritise the good bits: to have fun with a friend away from the pressures of the outside world, and to worry about the results later.
“Maybe as artists, when you first start out you can be a little delusional that it’s all just joyful and fun and a good time. But the reality is this is also really hard work,” says Ashe. “I needed to just do the best part of the job [for a while], which is creating the thing. And you can really tell when an artist has had an amazing time. Listening to Addison Rae’s stuff right now, I feel like she had a blast making that music, and I love listening to it even more because of that. Hopefully the listener gets that from this album – that it really was from such a place of fun, and it was so pure.”
Deciding to keep their burgeoning musical union a secret gave the two songwriters license to try anything. “No-one was expecting us to deliver this. We didn’t sign a record deal until it was fully done so there was no pressure, and that made me feel like I could be braver,” Finneas notes. Listening to their now-signed, sealed and delivered debut ‘The Dream’, there’s an audible lightness to it all. There are satisfying hooks and earworms aplenty, as you would expect from two celebrated songwriters, but The Favors’ debut is a world-building record that plays like a considered, whole piece rather than merely feeding the single-hungry algorithm.
The pair came up with “rules and limitations” to ensure that, from the soaring, sepia-tinged duet of first single ‘The Little Mess We Make’ through the ‘50s swoon of ‘Ordinary People’ to the string-laced melancholy of new single ‘Times Square Jesus’, the musical language of the band felt cohesive. It wasn’t just about reference points, although they cite Simon and Garfunkel as an artist they both name-checked early in the process, but about keeping things “retro” and stripped back. “If I’m producing a record alone in a room I might layer seven guitars and really build out an arrangement, but there was a big rule of not overcrowding it,” Finneas says.
The music of the ‘70s was certainly in mind. “It’s just aged so well,” he continues. “You look at something from the past and go, ‘Wow, if this still sounds great in 2024 then it’ll probably sound good for another 20 years’.” But, far more surprisingly, so were the big-hitters from two decades further down the line – and, in particular, a pair of formerly warring brothers who’ve recently laid down their arms… “We’re not singing big Noel Gallagher melodies on top of it, but there’s a feeling when I hear ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’; there’s a tug that I wanted to imbue this music with,” Finneas grins. “‘The Bends’ by Radiohead, and songs like ‘High and Dry’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ – they don’t feel old but they don’t necessarily feel modern either. They have this ethos that’s ageing super well and the foundation is just great lyrics and melodies and a heartbreaking quality.
“I was in the pool a month and a half ago with some of my songwriter friends and we were listening to ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers, and I was like, ‘Man, it’s always been that simple!’” he laughs. “What are we doing going, ‘Yes! I made it on New Music Friday! Yes! I’m on the Chill Hits playlist! Stop! Just write a great melody with great lyrics and it’ll never go away.”
On ‘The Dream’, the two musicians have done exactly that. Following a loose narrative involving fictionalised versions of themselves who, says Ashe, “move to LA and put it all on the line and totally embarrass themselves and fall in love, and then have this tortured experience where they end up back in New York as the album ends”, it feels both cinematic and yet strangely comforting. It is, we suggest, a record that lowers the blood pressure when you listen to it. “That’s kind of the sweetest thing that could be said, and also such a reflection of how we made it. It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had making music, and it was so relaxing,” Ashe smiles. “We’d get to the studio around 11am or noon with endless supplies of cold brew, sit down at the piano and just hang out. Every time we do an interview, I get to be so nostalgic about such a special time.”
Nostalgic, sweet, special – as it turns out, Finneas’ predictions were right after all. Make an album in a certain way and the results do, indeed, bleed through. With a clutch of tour dates planned for the end of the year including a trio of ‘Evening with…’ shows designed to be a celebration of both the band and the back catalogues of its two component parts, the pair have a handful of duties to fulfil and then, who knows? But as an exercise in pure creative joy, if you do yourself a Favor, the results speak for themselves.
‘The Dream’ is out on September 19th. Pre-order the vinyl.
