Voice of Voices, Song of Songs: On ‘Birds of a Feather’ by Billie Eilish

By Andrew Jamison

Billie Eilish performing 'Birds of a Feather' with her brother and co-songwriter Finneas O'Connell, as part of the NPR Tiny Desk Concert, 2024. The song received 1.775 billion streams on Spotify in 2024, making it the platform's most streamed song of the year.

I’m late to the party with Billie Eilish, and I can’t claim to know her whole back catalogue but I can’t stop listening to her latest track ‘Birds of a Feather’. While the official version is great (and there are already some interesting cover versions online too - hear Jungle's on the Radio 1 Live Lounge), I’ve been listening to her live versions on YouTube including this Tiny Desk Concert version (from 18 mins onwards) pretty much on loop. These are small scale performances, and I love to hear her music stripped back in this way which, for me, brings us closer to the heart of the song. So, without further ado, here are the reasons why I love this piece of music, why I think it’s important, its relation to poetry, and why it gives me hope for the future of art in a technological age.

Purity and timelessness

In his poem 'At The Wellhead' Seamus Heaney writes ‘Sing yourself to where the singing comes from…’ When we hear Eilish sing this song it’s clear that she has this connection. In many ways she is a voice of voices, and this is a song of songs. Walter Pater famously declared the Mona Lisa was ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’, and this can also be said of Eilish. There is a timelessness and inevitability about her music. The song is at once new and like something we’ve heard before. One of my slight concerns about so much contemporary art is that it’s driven by issues, ideas, projects, academic research, as opposed to instinct, impulse, feeling, music, song. So, I love that Eilish eschews all of that, and gives us an old-fashioned heartbreaker of a tune, and with this single garnering almost two billion streams on Spotify I don’t seem to be alone in that.

The lyrics

While the line 'birds of a feather, we should stick together' might not dazzle with originality and, like most pop songs, while the rest of the song's lyrics read on their own come across as pretty incoherent, I don’t really care because they work so well with the music. I feel like she has the right kind of disregard for clarity with her lyrics. A poem, I think, has to have a certain degree of clarity but song lyrics not so much. I’ve always loved melody and harmony and this song is full of both. Song lyrics need the music, and work in tandem with the music, whereas words in poems generate their own music. The lyrics in this have enough music, but not too much - the song achieves a perfect balance.

She wrote the song with her brother

I feel like we live in a time where very few acts actually write their own music. We live in a time where it’s more lucrative for the great songwriters to get big names to record their music for them, and we lose so much this way. It feels like a rarity to find an artist who writes great songs and performs them so well nowadays. ‘Birds of a Feather’ is one such song, and gives me hope that we still have an appetite for songwriters to perform their own work, and that, actually, it’s most powerful when they do. The success of this song gives me hope, in our age of science and fact, that we still crave feeling, expression, authenticity, beauty and music. It gives me hope that after all is said and done, we still hanker for the simple pleasure of someone singing us a song (surely there is something primal about that). There’s also something special about the artistic bond she shares with her brother Finneas O’Connell.

She can sing live

I’ve watched several of her live performances, and while I don’t have a trained ear, she sings it beautifully, and, to my ear, flawlessly. Each live performance brings with it slight variations, which could only be rendered so confidently by someone who knows the bones of the song, a song they had written themselves.

Authenticity

When was the last time you read a poem where you felt like the poet really had to write it? How many artworks have you walked past in a gallery that stopped you in your tracks because there was something urgent about them? There must be an intensity and passion and urgency about all great art that can’t be faked. Art is at its most powerful when the artist has no other option but to create. We get a sense that it’s not just that they felt in the mood, it’s that if they didn’t have an option to write that poem, or paint that painting or sing that song there would have been a problem. Does all great art find a way? There does seem to be a sense of the imperative about it, and with ‘Birds of a Feather’ we also get this sense – particularly when we hear Eilish sing it live – that she had to write the song, that she had to sing it, not out of fancy, but compulsion.

Hope

‘Birds of a Feather, we should stick together’ - At its heart, it’s a song about hope, unity, and love.

Her originality/ non-conformity

There is a fearlessness about her non-conformist image which I admire and find refreshing. It seems to be that despite her success and, we'd suppose, wealth she has remained totally true to herself, seen in her baggy, distinctly un-glamourous dress sense. Indeed, I have a feeling this is why she is so successful: Eilish is an antidote to the superficial, and gives me hope that in our world of showiness, deep down we admire those who are willing to be themselves without compromise.

Andrew Jamison is a writer and teacher who has published three poetry collections with The Gallery Press. You can buy signed, first editions of his books in paperback or hardback at his online bookshop, or browse his writing subscription services here. Sign up here for the Spring Term of The Poet's Workshop beginning on Thursday 16th January.