When Finneas O’Connell and Ashlyn Wilson first crossed paths almost a decade ago – long before either had become an international success – the spark was immediate. In a world of fleeting, surface-level conversations, their instant chemistry has endured the test of time.
“People always compare session writing to speed dating, and it’s true,” FINNEAS begins. “You know very quickly, oh, this person who I’m being very polite to, we have so little in common, we have so little of the same fabric of our childhood. Or it’s like Ashe and me, where you just keep uncovering shared layers. There was all this shared backstory, even though we had different lives. A bigger part of it is how few people you really feel like kindred spirits with.”
Ashe echoes the sentiment: “I feel like any relationship where you meet younger in life – I mean, he was 19 and I was in my early 20s, but still – it feels like this foundational period of your life, where those friendships that you meet, if you do hit it off, kind of count for a lifetime. They’re such a part of those really informative years. It was such a consistent connection over time. When we started working together more, it just made sense.”
“Making music with your friend is all that matters”
That bond was cemented through collaborations like ‘Moral of the Story’ (2019) and ’Till Forever Falls Apart’ (2021), songs which reached millions and became defining moments in both careers. Yet, several years later, each found themselves in a different place. Charts, awards, the kind of fame where one name alone suffices – none of it guaranteed real fulfilment.
“I had had my big experience and success, a Top 10 record at pop radio, these barometers to show: okay, I did it,” Ashe reflects. “The luxury of experiencing huge success is that you learn that it has nothing to do with joy or being fulfilled at all. At the end of the day, the thing that you’re doing should bring you a sense of self, fulfilment or joy. I really just lost the plot for a second.”
During a self-imposed break from music, Ashe rediscovered her joy simply by being with friends, creating together. Writing for Suki Waterhouse breathed new life into waning embers. “I was with my friend in a room, and I was advocating for her as a songwriter and talking to the producers. It just kind of made me fall back in love with it,” she describes fondly. “Similarly, working with FINNEAS; that’s like, the thing. Making music with your friend, who you care about and respect so much, is all that matters.”
Despite a relentless schedule, building a new band from scratch felt essential and obvious to FINNEAS. The rest is history, and under The Favors, this duo have curated a cinematic, organic, harmony-driven debut LP, ‘The Dream’. Unfolding a narrative that exists in its own reality entirely, the era-agnostic world-building here is a key focus – but initially, the tone and direction of the music itself was not crystal clear. “We really came into this with a very blank slate,” Ashe states. “We sent more photos to each other than we did songs for inspiration.”
“It was like watching The Beatles’ Get Back, without the heroin”
Part of the appeal lay in stripping things back, dedicating an ode to times of decades past – away from celebrity culture, away from external expectation – and reconnecting with the collaborative joy that had first brought them together. As with any new form of experimentation, FINNEAS highlights the desire to apply lessons learned from every other musical chapter.
“I played in bands in high school, which was the lens through which I saw everything,” he says. “My band would work with producers, and I’d be like, this is such a cool job. So I’m trying to figure out how to do that. Then I work with Billie a bunch. I work with other artists, and I meet people like Ashe. By the time I return to put out music under my own name, I’ve picked up all of these weird tools that change how I think about it.”
“It really does enrich your life to see everything through this different spectrum of light. That’s why this band was so appealing to start with. I’m going to see everything through this different lens now. I’m gonna get to sing all these shared harmonies with Ashe. At the time, I was not making music with my friends David [Marinelli] and Ricky [‘Rat’ Gourmet], either yet. It was an excuse to fold them in, and the collaborative spirit of it was always going to reinvent how I look at making music.”
Bringing the four members together into one room allowed them to embrace a classic recording approach that felt new to them all: playing live as a unit and capturing the sound directly. No tricks, no synthetic layers – just four quality musicians locking in, with minimal post-production. It’s a methodology FINNEAS has since carried into his solo work, reshaping his own discography.
“When I was 15 or 16 in a band, my ego meant that even if there had been good writers in my band, I didn’t have a lot of room for it. I was like, ‘All right, guys, I wrote five songs yesterday, here they are.’ Everybody coming into this process with such an open mind, we really were like, what do you have? What can we work on together? What can we change? Man, that was the real key ingredient there.”
“It was very much the way that you imagine the Beatles might’ve shared ideas, like watching Get Back without the heroin; we were doing less heroin, you know, just a little less,” he grins. “That collaborative spirit was really great. It’s the difference between picking up something heavy alone and picking up something heavy with two people. It’s half as much work. There’s this divide in focus that I love.”
“I’ve had change-my-worldview moments in New York”
Across ‘The Dream’’s twelve tracks, each member shines. FINNEAS and Ashe’s vocals intertwine, Marinelli takes a lead moment, and Rat’s guitar lines bring unexpected colour. From the outset, the striking debut single ‘The Little Mess You Made’ set the tone – romance, mystery, and drama.
“It was such a juxtaposition from what you have ever heard from FINNEAS and me,” Ashe says of leading with the early track. “You’ve had ‘Till Forever Falls Apart’, which is such a sweet song, and there are songs on this record that nod to that vibe. But in ‘Little Mess You Made’, we’re beefing, we’re going at it, you’re seeing us in a different capacity than you have seen us before. It was just fun to play.”
That mischievous tension hints at the broader story woven through the record. Much of it is set against the deliberately specific canvas of New York City – songs like ‘The Hudson’, ‘Lake George’, ‘Times Square Jesus’, and ‘Home Sweet Home’ root the narrative in iconic scenery that underpinned their early memories.
“I have a couple of failed romantic experiences from my earlier life that I have very vivid memories of,” FINNEAS reveals. “Walking around New York as a 19-year-old, really not knowing who I was or what I was doing and being aware of that. I’m out here to be with this person that I love, and I don’t think it’s working out. I’ve had these change-my-worldview moments in New York, a city I love so much, so it does conjure these feelings from me. That’s why it’s so resonant.”
Those personal memories spiralled into a deeper world-building exercise inspired by the listening habits of youth. “I grew up listening to The Who and My Chemical Romance, where there’s a lot of like narrative and third person,” FINNEAS shares, tracing ‘The Dream’’s story from title-track to addictive disco-rock closer, named after his favourite Lower East Side bar. “We just kept having these like New York motifs, so it had started to have this pins-on-a-map feeling to it.”
As for live shows, that world is still waiting to be fully revealed. “We’ve had these little moments, but we still are ramping up to play our first ever headline show as The Favors, and that’s such an exciting thing,” Ashe gushes. “It feels like a mountain. We’re putting in what I would call an immense amount of effort for only a few shows, and it is so exciting and unbelievable. I can’t speak too much yet to how it’s gonna feel, but I know that playing with these guys is some of the most fun I’ve ever had on stage.”
The Favors’ debut album ‘The Dream’ is out now.
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