Billie Eilish’s “Birds Of A Feather” was a massive hit. It somehow never hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, but it has racked up over 3.1 billion streams and was one of 2024’s defining songs. In a new Wall Street Journal feature, though, Eilish says she frequently wanted to cut the song from Hit Me Hard And Soft.
The piece notes that Eilish and Finneas struggled to finish the song for 11 months, “retooling the chorus and struggling to find a way to deploy the line ‘I’ll love you till the day that I die’ in a way that didn’t feel trite.” When they did finish the track, Eilish wasn’t feeling the most confident about it. She said, “Multiple times, I was like, ‘We should cut this.’ Even when I played the whole album for the label, I was like, ‘Guys, this one is kind of stupid.’”
(This comes shortly after Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker shared his own experiences with almost giving the ax to songs that ended up being hits.)
She also noted that while working on the song, she wanted an element of “something dark” so it wasn’t just “rainbows and smiles,” saying, “We wrote about the idea that you’re going to die soon, and let’s make it last.”
Elsewhere, she discussed her new rules for touring, which include not being on the road for more than three consecutive weeks, go home between stints, and don’t do too many shows consecutively. She said, “It takes longer, and you make less money that way, but for me, it’s magical.”
Read the full feature here.