Songfacts®:

• Rachael Yamagata is a believer in signs, so when birds crashed into her window while she was thinking about loved ones who have died, she saw the symbolism and wrote about it in her song "Birds."
  
  "I do think that I have a slew of friends and relatives that come in the form of birds," she told Songfacts. "I've had hummingbirds just sitting in front of my face and I'm like, that's Aunt Fran, and Tina's the cardinal. My uncle who passed recently, he's a crow. But that was literally birds smashing into the window."
• "Birds" was the first new music we heard from Yamagata in nine years. It was released in 2025 as the first single from her album Starlit Alchemy, her first since Tightrope Walker in 2016. She worked on the album both before and after the COVID lockdown.
• John Alagía, who produced Yamagata's 2004 debut album, Happenstance, worked with her on this track as a co-producer. "We got to that song and knew that it was most likely the heart of the record," she said. "It reaches the deep material in that it's sort of hopeful and it acknowledges what's happening, but it leaves it where it is. That there is something bigger than us."
• Yamagata plays both a regular piano and a thumb piano (also known as a kalimba) on "Birds." She and John Alagía worked out the unusual rhythm of the song when they were working on it during a thunderstorm - nature's percussion. She started playing the thumb piano and "started doing these weird textures."