Billie Eilish joined host Bru across Audacy Pop stations taking us inside her brand new 2024 offering on the release day of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, shining a spotlight on a few of her favorite tracks while giving us behind-the-scenes stories, inspiration, and more.
LISTEN NOW: Billie Eilish: On The Record
Hosted by Audacy's Bru, Billie Eilish: On The Record featured exclusive content from Billie herself, talking through hand-picked tracks from her new album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT including her creative timeline, album inspiration, and how she wants her fans to feel listening to her new music.
Starting off with the album opener, “Skinny” -- “I would say pay attention to just the vibe of it and -- I don't know -- how you feel with that song,” Billie says. “I think for me, that song makes me feel very calm. I feel like it forces me to take a deep breath. So, I would hope that it would do the same for you.”
Up next is the first single from the album, “Lunch,” and Eilish says of the accompanying music video, “I wanted almost like an ode to ‘90s Hip Hop videos -- and all the videos that I grew up loving so much based on the cameras they used to use and the fun quality of it. It was just like me just dancing around.”
Continuing our deep dive, Billie tells us the song “The Greatest” is “very special” admitting it’s “the reason for the rest of the album being made… It's really like the heart of the album that song -- I really don't know how to explain it. I love that song so much.”
“We started working on the album in, I believe, October-ish of 2022,” Billie explains. “But now that I think about it, we wrote the chorus and the verse of “Bittersuite” in August of 2022, but then never got back to it. That was really the first idea that we worked on. But of course, we didn't know it was going to be for anything or for this or anything.”
Her brother FINNEAS, she says of this album specifically, sees it as “the kind of thing where, if somebody asked us for whatever reason to make something that no one's ever gonna hear and we only like it, and it doesn't matter what anybody thinks because we are the only ones that are gonna hear it… As soon as we finish it, it's gonna get thrown away for some reason, we would be making the same album, because we are making an album that we like.”
“I think that at the beginning of the making of it,” Billie says, "I was very in my head about, ‘What are people gonna want? What are they gonna think is cool? Are they gonna like this and why? What do people want me to do?’ I was just very in my head about it, and I literally had a moment of like, hold on, the reason that people liked me in the first place was because I just was doing what I wanted to do -- and that's how it is for everyone."
Acknowledging that what you put forth you are bound to receive, Eilish adds, “We should just do what we want to do because the people that are drawn to the thing we wanna do are people we might actually like. Whereas, if we make something, or are someone, and try to be someone that is not somebody that we like -- or we're not making something that we like -- the people that are drawn to it are gonna be people that maybe you don't want to like it because you don't see eye to eye.”
“I've been thinking about that a lot and I feel really good about where the music is right now and how I like it -- that's what's important to me -- but I also keep the fans in mind all the time,” Billie says. “I'm always thinking about them. So, it kind of, it kind of goes hand in hand. I think that they're growing with me. I think that we have similar tastes at the same time, so hopefully it'll work for them."
“A fun fact about writing this album -- and I think it was different -- is that we really put our all into it. Like, we really went hard on this one. If there's one thing we did, it was that we were not lazy at all,” Billie adds of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. “We worked really hard on it right up until the end… changing things, making things interesting and adding stuff, and hopefully you think it's all great. I think that it's for anyone and everyone.”
HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, Billie Eilish's highly-anticipated follow-up to 2021's GRAMMY-nominated Happier Than Ever is available now.
Related
Eilish will also be hitting the road to support the new album, with North American tour dates currently scheduled to kick off on September 29 and run through December 17. Check out the full list of North American dates. For overseas dates, additional information, and to purchase tickets — click HERE.
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