Hi, my name is Phineas and this is the wired complete interview. These are questions from Reddit, not usually a place I look up myself on. This is from Yinyang. Am I the only one who feels as though Phineas Billy's brother does not get enough credit or they both should be seen as a duo? I've seen that comment before, so you're not the only one, but I disagree with you. I think that I get more credit than almost any producer deserves. I get so much credit, and it's purposefully not a duo. I think that what you think of as an artist is uh more than just the music that is written and recorded in a studio. It's the live

performances and it's the visual representation of that artist and it's how they move through the world and their fashion and those are all really entirely Billy. We sit around together making albums and then she dreams up these great, you know, album covers and uh music video ideas and even when I used to play every show with her, she's out there commanding the room. I'm just trying not to up the baseline. But yeah, I'm very happy with how it's all panned out. I'm I'm uh I'm having such a better life than I thought I would have. It's really great. Um why you trust me? What genre of music does Billy's Chihiro fit in? I'm very genre illiterate. So, you'd have to tell me what genre Chihiro is in. What it

felt like to me when we made it was it felt synthy and cinematic. And I've seen a lot of videos of people like running through fields in slow motion on TikTok to that song. And I'm like, that's exactly what you're supposed to feel like doing when you listen to that song. Do you remember how the baseline came about? Yeah, I played it. But to explain it, I'm a better pianist than I am a basist by a mile. you know, to use this guitar as a reference. Like the bass is the first four strings of a guitar. But if you play a baseline, you're playing these little and you might play little octaves to pop it on. And you can make it sound pretty fun, but on a piano, those notes are all laid out right here. And so I loaded up like a

synth bass patch which sounds very realistic. It sounds like a person playing bass really well. And then you play it, you know, hopefully uh in a melodic way. And I played this crazy baseline that kind of meandered through the whole song. And I felt really good about it. And um I thought about re-recording it, but I thought the tone was so cool. And I'd already recorded Billy's vocals and stuff. And I was like, why am I trying to fix something that isn't broken? You slash awesome O01. Do you think it is okay to use AI programs or song generators to write and produce music? I have never talked about this in an interview, I don't think. And so why not talk about it? I grew up the beneficiary of all of this music

technology, right? Like I always say that like Logic Pro, which is what I produce music on, was like $7 or $800. And right when I was saving up to buy it, they made it like $200. And so suddenly I could afford it. And then you go in Logic and there's built-in synth sounds and there's loops and I didn't record a real drummer for like the first 6 years of my career because it's expensive to record real drums. So I think about AI not through the like candidly, I've never used it. I've like downloaded the apps to see what's up and I've been like confused and I've I've deleted them. Like that's my current relationship with it. But if I were broke again and 17 again, I would be

figuring them out and I'd be figuring out how to get something juicy out of him. I think because it's free. So I don't want to sort of poo a thing that I think is accessible to everybody. And if it inspires you, I think that that's that's cool. But I think that having ownership over like I didn't invent I didn't invent those chords. A million times those chords have been played by a million different people. But I'm playing them right now. Here I am playing them. And if I make a mistake, it sounds kind of cool. And I think that if I was relying too heavily on thinking up an idea, by the way, I'm not thinking about what I'm playing. I'm just on the keys. I know the shapes, but I'm not premeditating this.

And I think that the premeditation being the key ingredient to AI is I'm dubious about because I think that always having to think about what you want to hear would not inspire me to be honest. So if you find a way for it to inspire you, that's awesome. But then do you feel like you made it? Radics 69. How did Billy Isish's Ocean Eyes accelerate her into popularity and fame? Well, funny you should ask, Reddit. Billy and I loved listening to music on Soundcloud and we started making music and then we started uploading it to Soundcloud and Ocean Eyes was the third thing we uploaded to Billy's Soundcloud

account. And then people started texting me the next day that it was on a blog called Hilly Dilly. And at the time it was this very big buzzy music blog and Chad Hillard wrote this little thing about how much he liked Ocean Eyes. And then that was enough momentum to like draw more attention to Soundcloud. And then other people saw it from that and then other blogs wrote articles about it and people played it on the radio and stuff. It was amazing. And I said to Chad, I finally met him and like took him out to dinner to thank him for like kind of giving us a career. And I was like, "How did you I was like, nobody even followed us on Soundcloud. How did you hear Billy's song?" And he was like,

"Somebody posted on a Reddit thread." And I was like, "What Reddit thread?" And he was like, he was like, he was like, "I'll never reveal my secrets." And I was like, "Lame." But whatever. That's where Chad heard it was some Reddit thread. So, thank you Reddit poster for taking a break from whatever strange thing you were posting to be like, "I like this song. It's very cool of you." Anita Rangel is how I'm reading this. Creative folks of Reddit, what's the weirdest or most unexpected place you've ever had a creative idea hit you? Um, I've woken up with some ideas that have all been terrible. I have some like

really embarrassing cuz I wake up and in my dream the idea was fantastic. And so then I wake up and I grab my phone and I record into it and I go back to sleep and I wake up again. I'm like, "This sucks." Have you heard Paul McCartney's origins of Let It Be? Uh, I haven't heard Let It Be. I know about Scrambled eggs. Oh, he dreamed Let It Be. Maybe a little more. He's a better songwriter than me. I heard a really good Paul McCartney story, which is my excuse to do my Paul McCartney impression, which is that he, a friend of mine was at a studio in LA and Paul was like in one of the rooms.

And so they're all taking their lunch break and he there's Paul McCartney and somebody was like, "Can I ask you a question?" He's like, "I'm trying to write a song right now and I'm feeling uninspired and I feel like I'm not writing the best thing I've ever written. What do What should I do?" And he said that Paul was like, "The just songs." And I was like, "Gas." So cool. Um, Flimsy Mango. What makes Frank Ocean music so unique and what can I learn from it as a producer? I feel like very few people I've been more inspired by than Frank Ocean. I love his music and I love his voice. So many artists are influenced by Frank Ocean and I feel like you can tell that they're influenced by Frank Ocean because they

sound kind of like an imitation of him. Um, and I heard years ago that his favorite artist is Dolly Parton. And that's not who I would have guessed was his favorite artist, but it's such an example of how gifted a songwriter he is that he's absorbing things from Dolly Parton's music without trying to copy Dolly Parton, but he's taking those ingredients and he's making them his own. I just was like, "Oh, that's probably one of the reasons that he sounds so unique is that he's able to listen to something completely different and make his own thing out of that." This is from character log 6775. I wonder if that's the gate code to his house or something. What is your favorite song from newest album uh for

crying out loud? I wrote a song about my sister on that album. It's called Family Feud. And that was important for me to write cuz it was like at this sort of point in our lives where we were no longer uh touring together all the time. I was off on my own tours. she was on her tours and it was really about her kind of going off into the world without me and sort of saying good luck and being like you'll probably make you know you'll do things you regret and make mistakes and that's okay. Um Dr. Trey, what is the one riff you wish you wrote? There's so many great riffs. I wish I'd written so many of these great riffs, but Seven Nation Army comes on at a baseball game or, you know, a grocery store. Equal opportunity riff.

Unbelievable riff. And also any riff that a crowd, especially in a place like England, just sings. That's sick. That's really cool. Singing the instrumental riff and not the vocal part. Very cool. Anxious art hoe, what do you think about the pitchfork ratings? How much do you agree? Pitchfork ratings are funny because I basically am never thinking about agreeing with them. I am just looking for the tall poppy. I am just like, damn, they gave that album a two. That's cold. And I'm kind of enjoying how mean the review is. or I'm like, "They gave that album a nine. That's ridiculous. That album's fine, but it's not a nine." Um, and then if it's my own

album, I'm like putting my fingers in my ears and closing my eyes and I don't want to um know about it. How about this? Go look up some of your favorite albums ever on Pitchfork. Some crazy scathing reviews of the most important album of your life. And you're like, damn. Okay, well then never mind. Because when you love something like that, a review is not going to make you disavow it and hate your favorite album. Let's see. Uh, slash terrible Main 3379. Who's your dream collab as a producer, Dead or Alive? Very inspired by Elliot Smith's music as of late. And I actually think the recording techniques are pretty sick, even though they're very minimal.

It's like very cool doubletracked vocals and like really spooky guitar tones and um I love the drum tones. So I think that what would be fun about that as a producer would be like just setting up those mics around him and experimenting and trying stuff. I don't think I'd have to do a big lift. Songs were so cool. Can you give me an example? Say Yes is so amazing. First of all, I'm obsessed with song titles. Best title for that song. Say Yes. There's so many things in that. So that song could be called the morning after. There's so many things that song could be called and say yes is like coolest title. Um but he has that like bridge thing like does a little spooky thing on the bridge turned around.

So cool. very impressed. This question is from Vasso the Serb. How is the process of writing TV film music different than writing concert music? Is film music easier? Easier and also harder is my answer for it. Right. So, what is easier about it is maybe the scene is 45 seconds long. What's hard about it is just making sure that it's matching the emotion of the scene correctly and the timing. oftentimes if you're working two picture, which I did a lot on the season of Beef that I worked on, you gota play everything to like line up right when the character says the thing or turns to leave the room. So that could be very challenging, too. But they make you better at the other thing, which is why I keep doing both.

Girl in Aura, what's an album you consider a 10 out of 10 with no skips? Honestly, The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance is a no skips album for me. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. How about this? If I'm in the mood for that album, I'm in the mood for the whole thing. That was all the questions that I was uh allowed to answer within the time frame that I'm here. And I appreciate Wired for their time. Have a good one.