But Houdini was not the choice for Finneas’ second solo album, For Cryin’ Out Loud!. The record (released next week) is a collection of ballads and airy bop that puts Finneas in the spotlight with a firm understanding of the message he wants to convey. Finneas now admits that his first album, Optimist, which he recorded at home during the pandemic and released in 2021, was a little too serious. Songs like “90’s” and “The Kids Are Dying” — “How can you sing about love when the kids are dying?” the chorus goes — carry weight and seek to convey something bigger. “I think my younger life experiences aren’t the most universal, so that’s why I sing out into the world,” he says. “Ultimately, I don’t even know if I really like other people’s songs about the world,” he admits. “I like songs about personal experiences.”
From this realization, For Cryin’ Out Loud was born. Finneas gestured to the space between us across the table. “I wanted it to feel like I was drinking and talking.” To create that intimacy, Finneas enlisted some of his closest friends, like Ricky Gourmet and David Marinelli. Marinelli came on board to collaborate and record the whole thing. “It was really chill, like a high school band room atmosphere,” says Marinelli, who plays modular synthesizer on the album. “We would just keep going until it got fun,” Eilish said, describing coming over to her brother’s house. “He would write and record something in a day; he would write and record something in a day;” It’s really impressive to make a live album like he did.
“He always knew that no matter what happened, it would have this outcome,” Marinelli said. (The two teamed up a year later to form The Slattery Family.) “He’s like the king of expression,” Marinelli says. “But he would never use that word in 10 trillion years.”
“Acting” – an overused word of Gen Z – seems inappropriate for Finneas, who is more mature than his peers. “It’s been about ten years since I’ve felt like an adult,” he said. He describes his teenage years as, “being too young to do this or that, and not being able to drive, and it made me crazy.” Adding adult emotion to Finneas’ life, he has interacted with six people. He has lived with YouTube star turned actress Claudia Sulewski for several years, with whom he shares a home and two rescue dogs – an outgoing bulldog named Peaches and a small Doberman (Moose). “The first source of inspiration is new love. It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “I have friends who are happy to ruin a relationship every couple of years in order to write a really good album. But it’s fun to find new ways to say what I’ve said before, because I’ve never had such heartbreak happen to me on the record.
When Finneas casually describes himself as “less interesting” than his sister, I ask him if he feels like he’s living in Eilish’s shadow. “Maybe for some reason I can’t write solo music,” he says, not dodging the question. “But I’m not.” He also sees it as an opportunity. “A lot of people don’t know that I’ve ever released music. So there’s a lot of new things to explore. “In some ways, it’s exciting.”
In this story: Luca Tullio Grooming; Manufactured by Jarrod Taber at authorized dealers.
