Billie Eilish Says She Would Never Play a Three-Hour Concert: ‘That’s Literally Psychotic’

Billie Eilish leaves it all on the stage during her concerts. But unlike some of her peers — or even such elder statesman as Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney — the “Lunch” singer has no interest in pushing her concerts into the three-hour zone.

Related

At a time when Taylor Swift is regularly pushing past the 180-minute mark on her Eras Tour after Beyoncé also crossed the two-hour-plus pop rubicon on her 2023 Renaissance tour, in a pop-in chat with fans on the Stationhead app over the weekend Eilish was asked if her audience can expect that kind of Hollywood epic length show from her on the upcoming Hit Me Hard and Soft tour.

“I’m not doing a three-hour show, that’s literally psychotic,” Eilish said per fan recordings of the comments. “Nobody wants that. You guys don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t even want that as a fan. My favorite artist in the world, I’m not trying to hear them for three hours. That’s far too long”

While it seems Eilish won’t be joining Swift in the three-hour concert marathon anytime soon, the two women were tied together on the charts when, last week, for the first time in eight years two albums earned more than 300,000 equivalent album units in a single week in the U.S., according to Luminate. On the most recent Billboard 200 albums chart (dated June 1), Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department held onto the top of the list for a fifth straight and total week with 378,000 units earned in the week ending May 23 (up 45%) while Eilish’s third LP debuted at No. 2 with a career-best 339,000 units.

In keeping with her pledge to not cross into Oppenheimer-length productions, when Eilish was asked on Stationhead if fans can expect to hear all the new Hit Me Hard songs on her upcoming world tour – which kicks off in North American on Sept. 29 in Quebec — the singer said she “can’t do that” because then her shows would be “like a million years long.”

Gil Kaufman

Billboard