As well as achieving huge success with her own album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, Billie Eilish also scored a big hit this year with her guest spot on the remix of Charli XCX’s Guess. However, based on her past comments about the idea of working with another artist, the match-up could very easily not have happened.
In her latest annual interview with Vanity Fair, Eilish is shown a clip of her talking in 2023 in which she says: “You listeners don’t understand how unpleasant it is to collaborate with people. It is not a fun experience.”
Laughing at the way things have turned out, 2024 Eilish suggests that she was happy to make an exception for Charli XCX - who Billie recently invited on stage to perform Guess in Los Angeles - and that their collaboration took place “in the greatest way possible.”
“She sent us stems. Finneas and I went on a hike, came back, went into the studio, sat there, played the song, wrote a verse, sent it back,” Eilish recalls. “That’s my dream.”
In fact, the whole Guess campaign came together in double-quick time. After a bit of back and forth, the song was complete, “and then we literally shot a video, like, two days later,” says Eilish. “And then the video got edited the next day, and it came out like the next day. It was the craziest, fastest, like… that is the dream.”
Eilish says that she first heard Guess when the original version appeared on the extended version of Charli XCX’s Brat album: “I remember being, like, ‘wow, that’s such a good song. God, I wish I had a song like that. And I just went on with my life.”
She goes on to say that the idea of her working with Charli was first mooted when her producer-brother Finneas met her backstage at one of her shows a few weeks later.
“He was talking with her and one of her teammates or something, and they just talked about, you know, ‘Would Billie be down… you know, we should do a… Billie should hop on something.’ And I had a call with her, talked about it - it was going to be another song, and then we decided on Guess.”
Speaking before the remix had been confirmed, Eilish and Finneas alluded to the fact that they’d been working with another artist - and how nervous she was about it - in an interview with Apple Music.
“Billie tried to get out of it, like, three times!” said Finneas, with Eilish adding that “I was like, ‘Why are you making me do that - what are you talking about?”
Check out the full Vanity Fair interview below.
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