Billie Eilish is leaning in to the soft side of her third studio album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. On Monday, the singer and songwriter released a series of live performances stripping four songs from the record down to their acoustic forms. The selections — including “Birds of a Feather,” “Skinny,” “Wildflower,” and “L’Amour de Ma Vie” — are now available as part of Songline, the first installment of Amazon Music’s new songwriting series.
For the performances, Eilish — joined by Finneas — was backed by a robust string section and a live band made up of vocalists Eloise, Rozzi, and Jane Horner; drummer Solo Smith; and bassist Andrew Marshall. The new arrangements lean into the singer’s vocal performance style, which noticeably expanded across the album.
“I think ‘L’Amore’ is the one I’m vocally probably the most proud of on the album. The whole album I’m very proud of, but ‘L’Amore’ is exactly where I like to live vocally,” Eilish explained about the jazzy single from the album. “As Finneas was playing those chords, that’s exactly how I started singing, and that’s how we wrote the song … That’s how I’ve always loved to sing, it’s the way that I feel the best and the most comfortable singing, even though so much of our music has been soft and really high.”
The singer’s performance of “Wildflower” is a chilling moment in the 24-minute special. Her voice intertwines with the harmonies of her supporting vocalists as she delivers some of the most heart-wrenching lyrics of her catalog. She follows the record with “Birds of a Feather,” a true standout from Hit Me Hard and Soft that was a labor of love for Eilish and Finneas during the writing and recording process.
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“We killed ourselves over ‘Birds of a Feather,’” Finneas explained. Eilish noted that the pair doesn’t often have trouble deciding when a song is finished, but kept going back and forth over the smallest additions to the song. “The first day we made any of it, it was, like, very demo-y — a little drum, a vocal. And Billie loved it,” Finneas continued. “And we just started putting stuff on it and shifting stuff, and it got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And we kept taking things off and restarting and using this and restarting. And the final version, of course, is so similar to the first thing we made the first day.”
Toward the end of the performance, Eilish added that she felt grateful to be able to perform these particular songs in this format: “I feel so honored to be singing with you guys.”
