PODCAST
Finneas on Scoring Beef Season 2, Natural Instinct, and Why He Never Stops Listening
From the opening ten minutes of Beef Season 2 to a temp track full of Bach, Finneas O'Connell is deep into his life as a composer. The instincts were always there, and the listening never stops.
In this conversation, our host Charles Steinberg sits down with the composer and producer to talk through what the process actually looks like: building the wall-to-wall opening cue for Beef Season 2, navigating temp music when the benchmark is Bach, going back through a composer's catalogue the moment you fall in love with their work, and why deadlines might be the best thing that ever happened to his creative process.
Finneas O'Connell is the kind of person who has seen Phantom Thread three times and listened to Jonny Greenwood's score for it over a hundred times. He raises this early and without any prompting, in the tone of someone presenting a case for themselves and with a slightly infectious enthusiasm for the subject. He is warm, funny, and very easy to talk to, which is either surprising or entirely expected depending on how much you already know about him. What becomes clear within the first few minutes is that the composing world has gained someone who takes the listening as seriously as the writing.
In the years since he and his sister Billie Eilish built one of the most remarkable pop careers of the last decade from a bedroom in Highland Park, Finneas has been accumulating a second identity: as a film and television composer, learning the craft with the same systematic attention he once gave to production. He is thirty-something, thoughtful, and by his own account still very much in the middle of figuring it out.
"Much to learn from great scores," he says, and means it. He is currently going deep on the Mandalorian and Grogu soundtrack, which he started listening to before seeing the film after cues began going viral on TikTok, and he simply could not help himself. "There's a month and a half worth of a college course for me in just listening to that and thinking about how he got from A to B."
This appetite for the form shows up in how he works. When he scored Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón's Apple TV+ series, the entire cut had been temped with Bach. He wrote the cues, played them to Cuarón, and was told, politely, that they were not quite as good. Not quite as good as Bach. "Yeah, dude," he recalls thinking. "Either go ahead and use Bach, or I'll do a different thing. I'll add some synths." When you cannot beat the temp on its own terms, you change the terms.
His most substantial scoring project to date is Beef Season 2, Lee Sung Jin's country club satire for Netflix starring Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac. The first task he was given was also the hardest: score the opening ten minutes of the show continuously, wall to wall, introducing an entire new cast before a single scene change. "It was not dissimilar from scoring a whole episode." He worked backwards from emotional peaks, finding the right music for the most significant moment first, playing it to showrunner Lee Sung Jin, and then connecting forwards and backwards from there. "It's like dropping little droplets of ink on a piece of paper and letting them seep into each other." He would have preferred to do it last. They did it first.
What he built was arpeggiated Moog synths: analogue warmth wearing something that reads as almost digital, serene on the surface and unsettled underneath. The sound was chosen to mirror the show's social world precisely. "Everything's fine, we're fine, we work at a country club, the grass is cut and watered and fine, and then underneath that is the anxiety that would accompany doing that job and working for these people."
The scoring life has taught him things the pop world could not, and one of them is the value of having no choice. He has turned in pieces he was certain were perfect and watched them land flat. He has sent things under deadline with no faith in them at all and been told they were exactly right. "The thing I was sure they would love, they're like, yeah, it's okay, but it's not doing its job. And then the piece that I was like, I don't even think this is good, they're like, this is exactly what we wanted." He has come to appreciate this. "What a gift to sort of get you out of your own way." "I'll keep wanting to score stuff," he says, "as long as I keep learning as much as I feel like I do on these shows."
The full conversation with Finneas is available now on The Blank Chat. Listen on all platforms.