“Some of the things that age most quickly are electronic drums”: FINNEAS on making Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather sound “timeless”FINNEAS, Billie Eilish’s brother and longtime producer, has opened up about the creation of Birds of a Feather, a standout track from her acclaimed 2024 album Hit Me Hard and Soft.
According to FINNEAS, he and Eilish were initially hesitant to release the song as a lead single due to how much it diverged from the rest of the record.
“I think one of the reasons we didn’t want to put a single out – and the reason we didn’t immediately lean into Birds – is that we are careful about how singles make you perceive something differently,” says the producer [via Variety].

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“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?’ And the truth was, it’s an outlier,” he adds. “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.”
Even more so considering the song took an “excruciating” 11 months to make: “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,” says FINNEAS.
Looking back on the song’s production, FINNEAS says that “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.”
“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.”

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