From across the virtual divide of a transcontinental Zoom call, Finneas O’Connell is trying to connect telepathically with his friend and bandmate, singer-songwriter Ashe. 

“I’m literally willing you to answer,” he says. 

“I can feel it, I can sense it,” she replies with a laugh.

The two musicians have had plenty of time to get on the same wavelength. They met by chance at a crosswalk in LA in 2017—they knew of each other, but as they said their hellos, the light changed and they went their separate ways. As fate would have it, only a few weeks later, their managers put them in touch for a songwriting session. “That was the beginning of the end,” Ashe jokes. 

Over the last decade, O’Connell has cemented himself as one of pop music’s preeminent producers and hitmakers. His work with his younger sister, Billie Eilish, has earned him two Oscars and 10 Grammys, including one for Producer of the Year in 2020, but he’s also forged his own path, composing scores for Alfonso Cuarón’s disclaimer* and films like The Fallout and Vengeance while releasing his own solo music, and working with artists like Camila Cabello, Selena Gomez, and, of course, Ashe.

From their earliest sessions, there was an effortlessness—an easy, artistic rapport that began with them co-writing a song for Ashe’s debut EP in 2017, which then blossomed into O’Connell producing her 2019 EP, Moral of the Story: Chapter 1, and eventually yielded their Gold-certified duet, “Till Forever Falls Apart,” in 2021. But eight years into their friendship, the two have decided to embark on a new kind of collaboration: they’re starting a band. 

In early June, Ashe and O’Connell reintroduced themselves as The Favors—a four-piece band that also includes their friends, drummer David Marinelli and guitarist Ricky Gourmet. Their debut album, The Dream, is due out this fall. 

But why not just continue making music as Finneas and Ashe? Why don a new name and go from collaborators to bandmates? 

It took root in 2023, when Ashe thought she might leave music behind entirely. The singer, born Ashlyn Rae Willson, had found success recording vocals for dance and house tracks, writing for other artists, and releasing her own solo music until her 2019 song, “Moral of the Story,” catapulted her to viral fame around the same time O’Connell was releasing his own debut EP as a solo artist, Blood Harmony.

Ashe’s viral ballad written about her divorce,  “Moral of the Story,” became the soundtrack to hundreds of thousands of TikToks, was featured in Netflix’s wildly popular To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, and spawned a duet with Niall Horan. The song’s success, bolstered by her subsequent albums, Ashlyn and Rae, opened the door to a dizzying few years of nonstop recording and touring, in parallel with O’Connell’s first two studio albums, Optimist, and For Cryin’ Out Loud!

By February of 2023, Ashe was set to hit the road again. O’Connell was on a solo tour in Australia. The two were creatively full throttle, separately, chatting occasionally as friends.

Then, in the spring of that year, Ashe canceled all of her scheduled shows for the year, writing in an apology to her fans, “After nearly three years without stopping, I no longer feel mentally healthy or resilient enough to go back on tour yet.” 

“There was a window of time there where I thought, ‘Maybe I just quit. We did a good job, had some cool peaks, and maybe that’s that,’” she says, reflecting on that period of her life. 

Over the next two months, she let that possibility sink in, trying to process what it might be like if she never made music again. For a moment, it was freeing. She turned her creative energy into a play about a band, and began working on a script.

But there was little else she loved more than making music. She thought about her play, and realization struck: “Wait, why can’t I start a band?” she asked herself. When she thought about who she’d want to join her, O’Connell was the first person who came to mind. 

“I weighed the pros and cons of starting a band with your friend, because that’s a risk,” she says. But her idea was simple: They’d start a band, make one album, play a few weeks of shows, and then “call it a day.” When she pitched it to O’Connell, he didn’t hesitate.

“Oh, I eagerly obliged,” he says. “I was so excited.”

They went back and forth thinking of possible names—Ashe’s initial favorite, “The Ballet,” was already taken—trying to aim for something timeless. “The Favors just sounds like a band that’s been around forever,” says O’Connell. 

Plus, it had a deeper meaning to it: “There are favors you only do for the people closest to you, and Finn is one of those people for me,” says Ashe.

Becoming The Favors provided O’Connell and Ashe with an opportunity to step outside of themselves as solo artists and into new creative personas. “We got to play on this album in a way that I think neither of us have gotten to do before,” she says. “It felt like writing a script for a movie—it kind of took on its own life.” 

Bits and pieces may have been drawn from each of their lives, but writing for characters rather than about themselves opened them up to new possibilities and inspirations. “At the end of the day, Ashe and I are storytellers,” O’Connell says. “I don’t want to blow up my life to write the kind of song that makes it sound like I’ve blown up my life, but I also don’t want to limit myself to writing about my nice, privileged life.” 

Whether they set out to or not, so much of the time they’ve spent together has revolved around writing. It’s a shared language—their preferred method of understanding themselves and the world. Ashe calls it the “anchor” of their friendship. So while they didn’t formally plan on it, the next time they got together after deciding to start a band, they wrote six songs in two days. 

“Ashe just has this sense of melody and turn of phrase that’s not only foreign to me, but unique,” says O’Connell. 

The Dream drops the listener into the world they created together—nostalgic and warm, with lush, 70s-inspired production. Conceptually, it’s like a marriage between The Last Five Years and Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends, a musical narrative told from different perspectives, chronicling lost love, missed opportunities, and regrets. And while the story they’re telling might be fictional, their musical chemistry is the foundation of the album—it’s in the way their harmonies melt together, and the electric back-and-forth of their lyrical sparring. 

Lead single, “The Little Mess You Made,” has the singers trading jabs about a relationship that’s fallen apart, while “Lake George,” a melancholy piano ballad, feels like it comes months, or even years later—far enough removed to think about what they had, but clear-eyed enough to know they can’t go back. 

It’s a testament to the way the songs informed each other throughout the writing process. With each new addition, an overarching narrative came into focus. “I think the characters are people who are trying to live out their dreams and be artists,” O’Connell says. “They’re chasing something that takes them from New York out to Los Angeles, where they’re trying to be something that they’re not, and they can’t escape their past.”

Ashe calls it a “dramedy,” loosely centered around the ideas she explored in her play. By the end, it had become its own thing. “It felt like we were working off of this hidden narrative that this was actually our second album,” she says. “We had written this sort of toxic, chaotic love story, and I imagined that they had already been in a famous band together, and this is what came after that.” 

Right now, the band is still in the “honeymoon phase.” The Favors are no longer a secret, but with just two singles out at the time of our conversation, the full story they’ve created is still waiting to be heard. 

“I hope the world is touched by it and broken by it,” Ashe concludes. “Until the album is out, it almost feels like this is a playful, fictitious thing, but I’m really excited for it to be part of my history for the rest of my life.” 

Photographed by Dennis Leupold

Styled by Maddie Louviere and Anton Schneider

Written by Cat Cardenas

Ashe Hair: Paula Peralta

Ashe Makeup: Emma Croft

Finneas Grooming: Anna Bernabe

Producer: Eliza Hoyland

Cinematographer: Kamel Bentot

Flaunt Film Editor: Roberto De Jesus

Photo Assistants: Stanley Stewart and Ben Chant

Production Assistants: Calvin Hite and Amanda Geraci

Car: Bella Baskin

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