Billie Eilish's "Birds Of A Feather" Music Video Analysis

Why give cursed office core when fields of wildflowers exist?

We are introduced to a lonesome Billie Eilish as she sits in a blue steel frame stacker chair in what appears to be an abandoned room, inside of a corporate office. Gray tiled carpet squares that run flush against mahogany paneled walls suggest this space has been untouched since the 80’s.

Styled in the hyper-relaxed, 2002 Chingy adjacent attire that fans have long admonished and admired her for, Billie’s languid blue eyes gaze dreamily underneath flickering fluorescent lights as she is dragged around rooms and up the walls of this carpeted, corporate purgatory by an apparent apparition.

            The lyrics describe the laments of a person doomed to eventually experience the inevitable departure of a soul mate by the hands of death. She grins as she sings “I want you to stay/'Til I'm in the grave/'Til I rot away, dead and buried/'Til I'm in the casket you carry”.

            She appears to be shivering. There is an open door to her right and source-less wind dragging her dark tresses upward toward the one panel of light above. The apparition begins to tug on her arm as she resists playfully, continuing to sing: “If you go, I'm going too, uh/'Cause it was always you, alright/And if I'm turning blue, please don't save me/Nothing left to lose without my baby”.

            The scene is framed intentionally to emphasize the size of the room in contrast to Billie’s petiteness, successfully illustrating how cavernous being alone can feel in the wake of loss.

            The chair begins to tip backward on a hind leg until her 2005 plaid and black Nike Dunks are off the carpet squares, and the apparition has free reign to pirouette the chair with Billie still in it, joyfully singing the chorus beloved by fans and popularized by social media content creators: “Birds of a feather, we should stick together, I know/I said I'd never think I wasn't better alone/Can't change the weather, “might not be forever/But if it's forever, it's even better”.

            Her arm is yanked aggressively toward the open door by the apparition, who proceeds to drag her – still smiling - down a hallway, out her chair, and through a wall as the music delivers an auditory crescendo to the lyrics: “And I don't know what I'm crying for/I don't think I could love you more/It might not be long, but baby, I/I'll love you 'til the day that I die/'Til the day that I die/'Til the light leaves my eyes/'Til the day that I die”.

            No context for Billie’s arrival and apparent entrapment inside of this office is necessary for the viewer to understand that this apparition is not an entity for her to fear, but rather her only apparent comfort of choice among the dingy abandon everywhere else.

The video continues as Billie picks herself up from the shattered sheet of glass the apparition left her on, the black corduroy newsboy cap she had previously been wearing backward, now missing, as she continues her laments: “I want you to see, hm/How you look to me, hm/You wouldn't believe if I told ya/You would keep the compliments I throw ya/But you're so full of shit, uh/Tell me it's a bit, oh/Say you don't see it, your mind's polluted/Say you wanna quit, don't be stupid”.

She often disengages her gaze from the camera to glance around at the empty space adoringly, insinuating that she is speaking to the apparition directly. She seems delighted to receive physical declarations of eternal companionship as a response to her verbal ones rather than nothing at all. The frame adjusts.

Sitting atop dingy floor tiles now, Billie’s back is against a yellowed floor to ceiling cabinet as she allows the apparition to drag her own knuckles up her cheeks and into the air, until she is floating toward the ceiling singing again: “And I don't know what I'm crying for/I don't think I could love you more/Might not be long, but baby, I/Don't wanna say goodbye”.

She is suddenly released to drop back onto the floor, where the apparition recaptures her hand and drags her, screaming, through the office as she closes with the chorus and a variation: “Birds of a feather, we should stick together, I know/I said I'd never think I wasn't better alone/Can't change the weather, might not be forever But if it's forever, it's even better/

I knew you in another life
You had that same look in your eyes
I love you, don't act so surprised”.

All the scenes are washed in a soft teal filter that mollifies the brutalist connotations of the lyrics against the earth toned set and the crude metaphysical themed plot.

The Birds Of A Feather Music Video (directed by Animal&Object Studios) answers the question of “What would life feel like without you in it?”. When held against the lyrics, the choice to illustrate the apparition’s presence as a source of comfort rather than fear despite the violence it causes proves to be a poignant way to convey the elastic darkness that the common emotions after loss maintain.

The choice of a neglected corporate setting injects themes of unproductivity among the haunting, which could represent the idea that without this person, fundamental survival activities such as working your job, maintaining wellness, even having aspirations at all, would diminish in urgency until all that’s left is a deserted version of who you were - what may have once been an energetic hub of innovation.

            The office setting could also have a multi-layered meaning, with layers more personal to the artist. My thesis for one is this: Billie Eilish is singing this song as a homage to her co-writer and brother (the multi Grammy Music Award winning songwriter/producer/audio engineer) Finneas O’Connell, of whom Billie has accredited as her inspiration for starting a music career in the first place, and is responsible for a large portion of the craftmanship of her music.

The lyrics: “say you wanna quit/don’t be stupid” may be referencing a recent interview on iHeartRadio’s The Zane Lowe Love Show, to which Finneas confessed he has struggled with desires to quit music altogether due to stress and bureaucracies within the industry. The cursed corporate setting may also be representative of the fact that without him, the work they’ve done within the music industry that circumscribes a lot of their identity as siblings and individuals would feel overwhelmingly desolate and pointless to continue. The apparition may be representative of Finneas’s legacy in her work, and Billie’s refusal to ever abandon it, choosing rather to co-exist with the brutality of grief in this hypothesized world of loss.