When she announced her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, earlier this year, Billie Eilish made it clear that she was “not doing singles,” and suggested that the record should ideally be “listened to in its entirety from beginning to end”.
Speaking to Jimmy Kimmel as she prepares to start her Hit Me Hard and Soft world tour, Eilish has now been discussing her love of the album format in a little more depth, also revealing how she goes about sequencing an LP’s tracks.
“I’ve always been such an album lover,” she explained, “and I really love when something feels like one piece and is cohesive and is thought through. Specifically with this album… the set list and all the songs and the order of them where they all sit… we really worked hard on it.”
How is the track order decided, though? “It’s a long process; I’ll write down all the names and then I’ll tear them up and then I’ll move them and then change them around and then take some out and put them back in to make sure that it feels right,” says Eilish, “and then I’ll listen to them back to back and then sometimes they’ll sound wrong and I’ll move them.
Explaining what she’s looking for when she’s going through this process, Eilish says: “It’s all about dynamics and the flow of it, and also, once we choose it, it’s making all of the songs kind of go into themselves so they all flow.”
Eilish cites The Beatles’ White Album as an example of a record that has the level of cohesion that she’s talking about. “Every song goes into the next song, and there’s just not much of that anymore,” she says.
Elsewhere in the interview, EIlish was asked to name her favourite track from Hit Me Hard and Soft, but suggested that it would be impossible to pick one.
“It’s almost as if it was like a horse race but all the horses were really happy to be running and also none of them cared about being first,” she explained.
