Billie Eilish and her brother and collaborator Finneas revealed in a new interview that they got into a “big fight” during the making of their latest album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”
The 22-year-old singer shared details of their fight over the “context and subject matter” of their latest LP in a new interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe.
“We’d been writing these fragments of stuff and I felt… I’ve been proven wrong over and over, but this was the jag I was on that night. I was like, ‘Subject-wise, I’m not being led into what you’re actually feeling. And I think that there are real guards up,'” said Finneas, 26.
“Oftentimes in your life, you’re going through the thing that you’re going to write about later. And that was for sure happening to Billie at that point in time where I’d be like, ‘What’s this about?’ And she’d be like, ‘Nothing’,” he recalled.
That led to a fight between the Grammy-winning siblings, with Finneas telling Eilish, “Just say how you feel, and let’s write a song about whatever you’re scared about feeling.”
Eilish said she was scared when her brother said “I don’t like doing this anymore. I don’t want to write music right now.”
“I used to be like, ‘[I] hate making music, [I] don’t want to make it, [I] don’t like making it’,” Eilish said. “It’s frustrating. It’s irritating. I love having made it. I love performing it. I love when it’s good, but I really have always struggled with the process.”
But on the latest album, Eilish said she was “finally enjoying the process” when Finneas became the one who didn’t.
“It was very interesting because I saw myself in that. I was like, ‘I have felt that way and you have always been the thing that keeps the ship moving, and now you feel that way. What does that mean for us? And what are we going to do?’ I think Finneas also had this totally understandable thing just repeating in his head of, ‘I have nothing to say. How could I say anything with the life that I live that anyone could relate to that I wouldn’t sound like a huge—”
“—Pompous douche?” Finneas finished.
“I think that, and also when we’re talking about being out of sync, my whole strength as a collaborator with any artist, and it’s always been innate with Billie because we’ve shared so much, is I do have to understand that person to be able to feel like I’m providing something,” Finneas explained.
The 10-track album was released on May 17, with Eilish describing it as the real her in a Rolling Stone interview.
“I feel like this album is me,” she told the magazine. “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.”
Eilish is set to take “Hit Me Hard and Soft” on tour at the end of the summer, kicking off a North American leg at the end of September. In February 2025, the tour will head to Australia before embarking on the European leg, which will wrap in Ireland in July.
Story via TMX