Attention Bird Utopia — the new collaborative project of guitarist / songwriter Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers, Matt Berninger, Conor Oberst) and producer / songwriter Eli Hirsch (Suki Waterhouse, Cautious Clay, Say Lou Lou) — began when Eli was executive producing Suki Waterhouse’s 2024 LP Memoir of A Sparklemufin at his studio in Los Angeles and Harry dropped in on an afternoon recording session. The two hit it off, and soon Whitford started coming over to Eli’s home studio to blow off steam while playing chess (Eli humbly admits, with a hint of awe, that Harry is the superior chess player: “I’ll never beat him”). They bonded over their love of The Beatles, Jackson Browne, and Paul Simon, and Harry exposed Eli to the deeper cuts from the songbooks of country legends like Hank Williams and Willie Nelson.

While both accomplished, in-demand collaborators, they both shared a sense of restlessness about their own songwriting — they realized that years could go by only working on other peoples records, ignoring their own creative impulse. So they made a pact: they would meet every Friday to share new songwriting ideas, a kind of accountability exercise. These hangs quickly escalated into a collection of new songs. While they had a deeply ingrained shared musical language, their artistic approaches, as Eli recounts, were perfect counterbalances: “For me, Harry’s notes were usually about things not needing to be so literal — he’s definitely a poet. And my notes for Harry were usually structure related, like how to shape the song.”