Consider us intrigued, because it turns out that the title of Billie Eilish’s upcoming third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, is derived from her mistaken belief that this is the name of a synth - or perhaps synth preset - in Logic Pro, the DAW that the record was made in.
The revelation comes in a new Rolling Stone interview with Eilish and her brother Finneas, her co-writer and producer.
“I thought it was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does,” she says of the title. “It’s an impossible request: You can’t be hit hard and soft. You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time. I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”
The bigger question, though - for nerds like us, at any rate - is which synth or preset she actually thought was called Hit Me Hard and Soft? A search of Logic Pro’s sound library doesn’t throw up any obvious candidates; there are presets with both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in their titles, but none with both.
Could Eilish have been referring to the name of an Apple Loop, then? Again, a search yields nothing, though there are various ‘hard hitting’ bass and drum loops.
We can only assume, then, that if this isn’t a preset name that Eilish or Finneas came up with themselves, it’s from a third-party plugin that the pair were using.
So, we’ll throw it open to you: do you know of any factory synth preset names someone might mistake for Hit Me Hard and Soft? If the answer’s yes, do let us know and we can all get on with our lives.
Another thing we learn from the interview is that Hit Me Hard And Soft has more in common with Eilish’s debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, than it does her follow-up, Happier Than Ever.
“I feel like this album is me,” Eilish explains. “It’s not a character. It feels like the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”
Of her decision not to release any singles from the new record, Eilish says: “I don’t like singles from albums. Every single time an artist I love puts out a single without the context of the album, I’m just already prone to hating on it. I really don’t like when things are out of context. This album is like a family: I don’t want one little kid to be in the middle of the room alone.”
You’ll be able to hear how the ‘family’ sounds when Hit Me Hard and Soft is released on 17 May.
