Finneas O'Connell is perhaps best known as the co-producer and co-writer behind his sibling Billie Eilish's chart-dominating pop songs, having worked with the Grammy-sweeping artist across all of her projects since they began collaborating in their teens.
Alongside his production work, the multi-talented Finneas is a successful solo artist – most recently releasing 2024's For Cryin' Out Loud! – and a composer for film and television, having penned scores for several productions, including the second series of hit Netflix show Beef, which premiered in April.
It's no surprise, then, that Finneas chose to pick out several musical moments from film and television scores when digging into his favourite "weird production choices" during a recent episode of the Track Star Podcast, a popular music show hosted by filmmaker and content creator Jack Coyne.
Talking through unconventional production in tracks from Outkast, Pink Floyd, Frank Ocean and The Beatles, Finneas also highlighted the work of Ludwig Göransson and Hans Zimmer, with whom he collaborated on Billie Eilish's Bond theme for No Time To Die.
Alongside these Hollywood heavyweights, Finneas singled out a composer behind one of modern television's most memorable theme tunes: Cristobal Tapia de Veer. The Chilean-Canadian is responsible for the music heard in The White Lotus, an Emmy-winning comedy/drama with an instantly recognizable opening theme characterized by a strangely ululating vocal melody.
Finneas reveals that he has a personal connection with the show: his partner Claudia Sulewski is a friend of actor Lukas Gage, who played a central role in The White Lotus' acclaimed first season. "I remember in 2021, this show starting to air, I'm in New York... I'm with Lukas and I'm like 'this show is so sick'," Finneas says.
"Each episode I would be saying to my girlfriend, 'this is the sickest music, this is so cool and weird'," he continues. "Cristobal Tapia de Veer, goated composer to me."
Digging into the origins of the show's theme music, Finneas surprised us with the revelation that elements of the eccentric theme song were originally created for Kanye West. "Apparently, the lore is, that beat was originally for Kanye, like years ago," Finneas tells Coyne. "Then that didn't work out, but he was like... 'I know where to put this', and he used it for the show."
As it turns out, the lore is entirely accurate: back in 2021, Tapia de Veer revealed in an episode of the Broken Record podcast that West reached out to him to collaborate on music for a Nike-related project he was working on. West tasked the composer with figuring out how a certain "Nike shoe relates to music", and he set to work crafting ideas based on this somewhat unconventional brief.
"I had those voices and I tried to find a way to play melodies that is really striking, and this happened by accident," Tapia de Veer said. "At that point I knew that this was like gold. I was like, ‘OK, this I’m going to show to Kanye.'"
West wasn't so enthusiastic, however: "I was there for like a week and I had to leave, and there was problems, and Kanye started firing people and his lawyers and everything was too long," Tapia de Veer recalls. "It was a mess.”
The composer never heard back from West, but what seemed like a lost opportunity later turned into one of the most successful creations of his career, when he dug those "tribal voices" out of his vault and used them as the basis of The White Lotus' Emmy-winning score.
Check out the full episode of the Track Star podcast.
