Family Bands

Public Opinion
March 11, 2024

A Note from Jack

I don’t typically get anxious before interviews but I was definitely a little anxious the night before filming with Kings of Leon. Sure I was nervous because they’re one of my favorite bands but more because I didn’t feel great about the songs I was going to play for them. Often when I’m laying in the dark unable to fall asleep I’ll have some unresolved idea in my head that needs to be figured out. That night the big idea was the songs weren’t right. There was something better that I was missing. I played out the introduction in my head, it would be me and Kieran, two brothers, meeting Caleb, Nathan, Jared and Matthew, three brothers and a cousin. Family. How many people get to work with their family? How often does it happen in music? Wide awake at 1am I opened the notes app on my phone to frantically type FAMILY BANDS. And then I fell asleep.

– Jack

Billie Eilish and Finneas’ Sibling Magic

By Quinn Moreland

Last night, Billie Eilish, 22, and her brother Finneas O’Connell, 26, became the youngest two-time-Oscar-Best Original Song winners for Barbie’s “What Was I Made For?” It was a predictable win—the siblings’ heartbreaking ballad already won this category at the Golden Globes and took home two Grammys. Though “What Was I Made For” also features production and arrangement contributions from Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, both previous Best Original Song winners for A Star Is Born’s “Shallow,” its success is ultimately the result of Billie and Finneas’ singular sibling magic.

Born four years apart, Billie and Finneas have been working together since their first collaboration, 2015’s “Ocean Eyes,” became an unexpected breakout hit. After the song’s viral success, Billie was encouraged to attend writing sessions with more established songwriters and producers, which is traditionally how major label pop music is made. The process immediately repelled Billie. “It was horrible for a lot of reasons,” she later said. “I was a little tiny teenager who hadn’t written with anyone besides my brother. And there I was, 14, in a room with 40-something-year-old dudes who were trying to write a song with me and Finneas, who was 18.”

But those experiences helped the pair realize what did work for them, which is writing together in their literal home studio. They recorded Billie’s 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? from Finneas’ childhood bedroom. Though Finneas moved out by the time they started working on a follow-up, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, he recreated a similar coziness in his new basement studio.

“What Was I Made for” was written here in a similar fashion to the siblings’ previous hits, with Finneas posted at the piano and Billie curled up on the couch with her preferred mic. Both had been struggling to write music for their own projects but after Barbie director Greta Gerwig invited the pair to a rough screening of the film, they decided to try to write from the perspective of the titular character. Ideas immediately began to flow, resulting in a ghostly piano ballad that touches on themes of idealization, isolation, and the desire for self-actualization.

Unlike the pair’s previous Best Original Song Oscar, for 2022’s No Time to Die’s theme, “What Was I Made For?”’s emotional insight is consistent with Billie’s larger catalog. The track could have been a lost cut from Happier Than Ever, which explored Billie’s relationship to fame and autonomy. Though it’s so apparent in retrospect, only upon playing the song for a friend did Billie realize that the song captured her own lived experience. Though the pop music machine works tirelessly to replicate the conditions that would allow for such vulnerable self-reflection, Billie and Finneas’ success proves that trust and intimacy can’t be faked.