Hey y'all, DJ Louis here just dropping a preview of this week's Pop Pantheon all-access episode in which myself and the LA Times Michael Wood got together to talk about Billy Eilish's recent third record hit me hard and soft, which came out last Friday. If you enjoy this snippet and you want to hear the rest of this episode, you can go to patreon.com slash pop pantheon or click the link in the show notes of this episode or you can subscribe

directly in the apple podcast app for this and weekly bonus episodes of the show. So I hope you

enjoy this snippet of my conversation with Michael Wood about Billy Eilish has hit me hard and soft.

One of the things that I have been like interested in with Billy and like wondered how like the

rest of her career would sort

of address is sort of like the push and pull between what felt like at the beginning a true

sense of like innovation both like formally with pop stardom and also in the music like I felt like

Billy obviously as we were speaking about has been an innovator in the space of pop

stardom, obviously drawing on things that were there before via Lana Del Rey, via Frank Ocean,

via Lord. But like, again, creating kind of like a cultish version of pop stardom that is making

zero concessions and is kind of like a world building exercise. Again, the Phineas collaboration

speaks to this. Like there is no sense of capitulation. It's all their own art project. And like that

works. Like that you don't need to do more than that. And I think she's been a real like trailblazer

in how that can still be like large scale. So there's that. Then the music also felt in many ways

kind of unclassifiably modern. Like I think that was one of the things that really was the

innovation that aesthetically of the Billy Finneas thing was that like it was able to sort of draw in a lot

of different styles into a singular vision. Like it sometimes felt like it had hip hop going on. It had like dubstep and

electronica flourishes going on. It had like theater music going on. It had like acoustic folk

vibes going on. It had lots of different styles that somehow felt like that real postmodern thing

of like what even is this aside from pop music or Billy Elish music or whatever it was. And I

really enjoyed that. But I also think Billy Elish is like kind of a real classicist at heart in many

ways, like a real traditional songwriter, somebody who's singing style is definitely like

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