Billie Eilish and Finneas are fresh off their appearance on Saturday Night Live, but this isn’t their final performance of the year: today, they released a video for an acoustic rendition of Happier Than Ever highlight “Billie Bossa Nova,” which isn’t too dissimilar from the original recording, which is sparse save for percussion and a few sonic embellishments.
According to the description, the video was “directed by Philip Andelman for Gucci,” which could indicate that it’s part of Eilish’s partnership with the brand, which began with the release of the Gucci vinyl edition of Happier Than Ever earlier this month.
Eilish previously told Spotify of the track, “‘Billie Bossa Nova’ is a little bit of a fancy, I don’t know what. We actually called this song ‘Billie Bossa Nova’ because in, I want to say, spring of 2019, my brother sent me a beat he had made. He called it ‘Billie Bossa Nova’ ‘cause it was just a bossa nova-type beat and I was like ‘that’s amazing,’ and then nothing happened for a year and a half. Then we listened to it again and kinda wrote this fantasy, romanticized, glorified, dream.”
Finneas also previously told Rolling Stone of the tune, “We have to do a lot of goofy bullsh*t when we go on tour, where we enter through freight elevators in hotels and stuff, so that paparazzi doesn’t follow us to our room. And so we acted as if there was also a secret love affair going on in there of Billie being like, ‘Nobody saw me in the lobby / Nobody saw me in your arms,’ as if there was a mystery person in her life during all of that.”
