Finneas O'Connell

I would say that I do plenty of it, but Billy is deeply involved.

And I would say that as time has gone on,

Billie has become kind of more knowledgeable and articulate about what she likes and what she doesn't in instrumental arrangement and production and vocal arrangement.

So we're either brainstorming stuff together or at the very least she's reacting to what I do in a kind of a, I like that, go further, I'm not crazy about that, take that out kind of a sense, if that makes sense.

The diner is a slight anomaly in terms of the way that Billy and I most commonly work.

I would say the way that we most commonly work is I sit down with a guitar or I sit down at a piano and I play chords and Billy sings melodies and we come up with lyrics and melodies together over top of chords.

In the case of The Diner, on my own, I had made what became sort of most of the instrumental of The Diner.

I'd been sitting around one day playing that sort of

sampled re-articulated horn thing that you take kind of a one track of a horn being played and then you load it onto a keyboard and the horn is then chromatic on the keyboard and you play the that's me playing piano but through a horn sample and then I programmed drum samples and then bass synthesizers over top of that and I presented it to Billy and then she riffed

you know, these super menacing, cool lyrics over top of it.

First of all, we lived together.

We both lived at home with our parents when we started making music.

I was 18 and Billy was 13.

And over the ensuing years, even after I moved out into my own place as a 21-year-old, we still made most of the music in the bedroom in my childhood home.

And as time went on and Billy's tour became...

a more and more heavy lift.

She started to need to be more kind of diligent about how much vocal rest and physical rest she was getting on the road, which meant that we were making less music on the road.

And the sort of turn of the tide there was that we would come off the road and had made nothing new

And then we'd kind of have a detox at home where we would have just spent every day together for several months and we'd kind of chill out.

And then we'd sort of reconvene and start making new music.