It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “ Birds of a Feather ,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated.
“I was like, this ain’t it,” she says. She’s telling this story, about the music video that wasn’t, a few days after she came to that particular realization. We are sitting in the cool dark of her rehearsal space, curled up on a couch with her gray rescue pit bull, Shark , gently snoring between us.
She is dressed in the kind of figure-obscuring oversized streetwear she’s favored (with certain gala and editorial exceptions) since she first became famous: wide khaki cargo shorts, black and white FTP high-tops, a well-loved orange Air Jordan tee. It’s as good an outfit as any for writing the next page of the rest of your life. Eilish has been directing her own music videos for the past five years.
But in this case, faced with the not-quite-working video, she decided to start over and hand the reins to someone else: Aidan Zamiri, a friend who also directed the video for the Eilish-featuring remix of Charli XCX’s “Guess.” And she found she enjoyed cedi.