Billie Eilish isn’t the only person who thinks three-hour-long concerts can be a lot to handle.
Earlier this month, the pop star, 22, made headlines for calling long concerts “psychotic.” She told fans via a Stationhead app Q&A: “I’m not doing a three-hour show. 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.”
Hoda Kotb agreed with Eilish’s criticisms during the Tuesday, May 28, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna. “I kind of think a three-hour concert is a long time. … ‘Cause usually, they save the really great [songs] for the end,” she explained to her cohost, Jenna Bush Hager. “And you’re like, ‘Ugh,’ ‘cause sometimes it’s like there’s some good ones and some not, and then you’re waiting, waiting, waiting for the big one at the end.”
Bush Hager, 42, shared her sentiment, noting that “three hours in a very long time to do just about anything.” However, Bush Hager joked that some of the things she and Kotb, 59, could happily do for that length of time include reading on the beach and enjoying a nature walk.
Many fans interpreted Eilish’s comments as a dig at Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, during which she performs songs from all of her 11 studio albums throughout a nearly three-hour-long runtime.
Kotb and Bush Hager, who are big Swifties, each attended The Eras Tour last year with friends and family and gushed about the show at the time. Bush Hager, for her part, stated she was “sore” after her concert, but went on to praise Swift, 34 for her stamina.
“I’m not even Taylor, I didn’t do anything, and I was like, ‘How does she do this?’” the TV personality stated on Tuesday. “When you think about what she does, it is amazing.”
Swift recently updated her Eras Tour show to incorporate songs from her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, into the setlist. The album, which dropped last month, beat out Eilish’s new record, Hit Me Hard and Soft, for the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s 200 albums chart. According to Billboard, TTPD is the first album to spend five weeks in the chart’s top spot since Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time in 2023.
Ahead of Eilish’s latest album release, she criticized music artists for releasing multiple vinyl versions of their albums in a March interview with Billboard. “It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that s–t,” she told the outlet.
Her comments upset some Swifties, who quickly took to social media to defend the Grammy winner for releasing several vinyl editions of TTPD. Eilish proceeded to respond to the drama via her Instagram Story last month, writing, “Okay so it would be so awesome if people would stop putting words into my mouth and actually read what I said in that billboard article. I wasn’t singling anyone out, these are industry-wide systemic issues.”
She continued: “When it comes to variants, so many artists release them, including me, which ! clearly state in the article. … The climate crisis is now and it’s about all of us being part of the problem and trying to do better sheesh.”
