If brevity is the essence of a hit, then Phineas may be on the verge of delivering the biggest hit of all time. Apple asked multiple Oscar/Grammy Award winners to write a theme so short it can’t even be called a theme, a series of short sound themes that will play before all future Apple Original shows and movies. He probably won’t get the attention or recognition that being a co-creator of a huge hit like “Birds of a Feather” would have. But in the long run, if this song sticks around for years, it might become his most widely heard song, or his shortest.
Phineas said mnemonics are “beautiful words that are perfect for logos” with sounds. “What I think is the real classic mnemonic is NBC, you hear it in your head, but HBO has the static mnemonic.” Phineas is well aware of how modern streaming consumption has made this particularly pervasive, household to household. “If you binge-watch Ted Lasso or Disconnect or an entire season of Disclaimer (the last of which was a limited series for which he composed the score himself),” he says, “you’ll hear mnemonics 10 times a day. So it must be like a bite of ginger between bread rolls, you know?”
He says he was approached by David Taylor, Apple’s head of music, about the brief for this assignment, which was to do something very simple. “They were talking about the future of Apple TV and how they could simplify it to some degree, starting with it not being Apple TV+. They wanted to take this new logo graphic and have new music to go with it. You have a very short amount of time to create something that is effective but also kind of memorable. So that was both the challenge and the fun part here.”
There are actually three versions of mnemonics, all of which definitely fall into the “minimalist” camp to varying degrees. “There’s something like the main version, which is a five-second thing you hear before an episode of a TV show. There’s a one-second version that’s just a stab at what you might hear when you watch a movie trailer, and it just introduces the production company. And there’s also a longer version (about 12 seconds) that you’ll see in movie theaters at the beginning of an Apple Studios original movie, like Killers of the Flower Moon.” It took a long time to get from point A to point B, so we tried to make it feel a little more cinematic, a little more epic, but it just felt like a different environment. ”
“Finneas was the perfect creative partner to create our new sound,” Taylor said in a statement. “His relationship with Apple is one of great trust, from our early music production days to more recently, the incredible score for Disclaimer.” When we set out to create a mnemonic to represent Apple Originals, we wanted to work with someone who truly understands the creativity and storytelling that our brand values, and who approaches the process in a beautiful and emotional way. He delivered a completely original sound that felt cinematic and magical, and served as an invitation to welcome viewers into the world of Apple Originals. ”
Speaking via Zoom from his home studio, Finneas points to the piano behind him as the starting point for a fleeting musical piece whose instrumentation is not easy to pinpoint, before disappearing from one ear to the other at the start of the viewing experience. “I have an upright piano here, so I sat there and started working. I can create things faster with a physical instrument than I can with software. I played chords that had a kind of hopeful, optimistic feel to them, but I felt like they had a gravity to them and, hopefully, a slightly mysterious, mystical quality to them.” So, this chord thing happened, and then I started building sounds around it. I had these pieces of zinc and I was hitting them and reversing the audio and playing real stuff.”I’d play the piano and then reverse it, and then I’d play the bass synthesizer and then pitch it up and slide it.” ”
It might be silly to wonder if he “scored picturesque” in such a short production, but in reality, it’s not such a silly question. “Here, I was able to visualize the logo as I was making this music, looking at it over and over again. There was a lot of movement in the logo, and that inspired the music very directly. If I had been making it without seeing what was happening on the screen, I never would have come up with exactly what I came up with.”
Phineas said he didn’t do any arduous work that was disproportionate to the length of the mnemonic, and initially spent only a few hours on the pre-tweak process. “Because it was so short, at first I was like, ‘Well, let’s make about 10 of these. I’ll make a bunch of options and maybe they’ll like something out of the 10. I thought, “Even if they don’t like something individually, they’ll give me good feedback, so I’ll make it again.” But as I started working on this song and started adding more and more layers to it, it felt rich enough that I thought, “I think this is a song that I really want them to hear.” I love this. I don’t even want to give them the other two choices because I want them to hear this and think it’s correct. ‘And they made some nice little tweaks that changed the visuals a little bit, so we tweaked it here and there, but I think it worked for them to have the correct version from the beginning. ”
Finneas feels loyalty to Apple, first and foremost, as the company that enabled him to become a creator by supporting his and his sister and collaborator Billie Eilish’s music from the beginning.
“I think they were the first big supporters. Billy was the first big supporter of Apple Up in September 2017. That was a huge deal for us when we did the Next campaign. We were able to get James Corden to appear as part of that campaign, and Billy sat down and talked to Zane Lowe, which was a meaningful vote of support early in Billy’s career. They’ve given Billy Artist of the Year twice and they’ve been big supporters of us. But we’ve always been a part of their family. As a buyer, I’ve always felt that I was able to build a career as a producer and songwriter when I was born. I think it’s because I got an iMac, and when the price of Logic Pro dropped from $800 to $200, I was able to buy it and teach myself how to use it, so I’m very grateful for their product from a creative standpoint.”
It’s okay if many Apple Originals viewers don’t know he’s the one behind the hum. “I love being an invisible part of something. My favorite compliment is when someone says, ‘Hey, I was listening to this song by this artist and I looked up their credits and I saw your name. I didn’t know you worked on that piece.’ The reason they didn’t realize is, doesn’t it sound like me or Billy or something?” I always want to be in service of the art itself. So the exciting thing for me is that just as I hope people don’t even think about it, they see the Apple logo and hear what I hope is the perfect way to hear it in their brain.”
