Billie Eilish’s producer-brother Finneas has been discussing the making of Birds Of A Feather, the song that has become one of the biggest hits of Eilish’s career.
Taken from her 2024 album Hit Me Hard And Soft, Birds Of A Feather was quickly embraced by Eilish’s fans, but Finneas admits that, despite also getting an enthusiastic response from their record company, he and his sister were reluctant to make it a lead single because it didn’t really represent the rest of the record.
“If we’d put out Birds Of A Feather as a single before the album, people are gonna go, ‘Wow, this is a real pivot. Is everything on the album gonna sound like this?’” argues Finneas (prior to Hit Me Hard And Soft’s release, Eilish said that she was “not doing singles” at all with this record). “And the truth was, it’s an outlier. So the fact that Birds Of A Feather has gone on to have this insane life is such a thrill to both of us. We loved making it, but it’s extra-validating to have something blow up like that without pushing it as a single.”
Birds Of A Feather flows so naturally that you might assume that it was one of those songs that was written in about 15 minutes, but Finneas says that it actually came together over an “excruciating” 11 months.
“Billie was driven crazy by her vocal performance and redid that a bunch of times, and I added all these layers of production and then would take ’em out and add ’em again,” he recalls.
Ultimately, though, the song’s production is pretty traditional, particularly in comparison to some of Eilish’s other songs. And, as Finneas explains, this is no accident.
“One of the things we’ve moved towards as Billie’s career has gone on is trying to make music that feels like it might be a little bit irrelevant what year it is,” he confirms. “Some of the things that age most quickly are electronic drums, which I’ve used tons of, but they usually sound very of their time. So the drums on this song - real and programmed - all have a kind of organic feel, which helps them sound timeless. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar, which I think has never really gone in or out of style. And even the synths have a kind of a vintage quality that isn’t as bleeding-edge as some pop music going on right now.”
Thanks to streaming, which enables fans to elevate the status of particular songs simply by listening to them a lot, ‘accidental hits’ are now part and parcel of the music business, and Birds Of A Feather is a classic example.
Taking things to a more extreme level, in 2023, Taylor Swift’s fans pushed her 2019 song Cruel Summer to the top of the charts. Initial plans to release it as a single from the Lover album were shelved due to the pandemic, but the momentum behind the song was so strong that it did eventually get that honour, and it ended up being the opening song on Swift's Eras Tour setlist.
