Rachel Bilson is now aware — and can confirm — that the Kings of Leon song “My Party” is about her.
“Let’s not say [the song is] written about me. There was something that happened that inspired the, ‘She was at my party’ lyric. and it was me. I’m the ‘she that was at ‘my party.’ I’m the she, it’s me,” Bilson quipped during the Monday, October 9, episode of her “Broad Ideas” podcast.
The track, which is off the band’s 2007 album Because of the Times, details lead singer Caleb Followill’s interest in Bilson while being “lonely” and on a break from touring. While the song doesn’t mention Bilson by name — “Oh, she’s at my party, she’s at my party” the chorus vaguely repeats – Followill detailed the inspiration for “My Party” in an April 2007 interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I took a liking to Rachel Bilson from The O.C. I had my birthday in Los Angeles, and beforehand everyone kept asking me what I wanted. I kept saying, ‘I don’t mind, as long as Rachel Bilson’s there,’” the musician recalled to the outlet. “It was a total joke. Anyway, we had the party at this big club. There were a lot of people there, not just for my party, but there were other things going on there, too. We walked in, and as God is my witness, the first person I saw was Rachel Bilson.”
While Followill clarified that Bilson “wasn’t there for me, of course,” he claimed she did wave — which caused him to become so star-struck he shut down entirely.
“I just froze up. She had her boyfriend [Adam Brody] of the time with her, so I couldn’t just go up and say, ‘Holy s—t! You’re here!’ So I put that in the song. Hopefully, she’ll read this,” he joked at the time.
While the two didn’t connect back then — Bilson dated former O.C. costar Brody, 43, from 2003 to 2007 — the actress confirmed on Monday’s podcast that she “found” the article after producer Rob Holysz sent it to her.
Followill was one of the many celebrities vying for Bilson’s attention in the early 2000s. During an episode of “Broad Ideas” last month, Bilson revealed she once sparked a flirtation with Justin Timberlake — “I was so obsessed with him,” she gushed over the singer, 42 — at a party before cohost Olivia Allen ruined their moment by sitting in between them.
Bilson eventually settled down with now-ex Hayden Christensen, whom she met on the set of their 2008 film Jumper. The pair — who share 8-year-old daughter Briar Rose — were together for nearly a decade before calling it quits in 2017. She moved on with Bill Hader in 2020, but the duo split after six months of dating in July 2021.
Sharing candid dating and sex confessions on her podcast is something Bilson has become known for over the past few years. Following her breakup from Hader, 45, Bilson quipped on a March 2022 episode that she was going to miss the comedian’s “big d—k.”
One year later, Bilson shared that she didn’t experience an orgasm from sex until she was 38 years old — later clarifying that she didn’t blame any of her exes for it. “It has nothing to do with any partner,” she told Nick Viall on a March episode of “The Viall Files” podcast. “It had to do with me knowing my body.” In June, Bilson confessed she had also never faked an orgasm with a partner because it “goes against [her] whole nature of being a people pleaser and putting the dude first.”
Most recently, Bilson made headlines for her opinions on dating middle-aged men who don’t have a high number of sexual partners.
“This is gonna sound so judgmental, but if a dude is in his 40s and he [has] only slept with four women … but it all depends,” she said on the October 3 “Broad Ideas” episode. “Maybe he’s been in decade [long] relationships, totally respectable.”
When Whoopi Goldberg slammed her thoughts during an episode of The View days later, Bilson fired back, telling Entertainment Weekly that “it’s important to hear a whole conversation before casting your own judgment.”
Bilson insisted that her team makes the podcast “a very safe open place to discuss anything,” noting that she has the ability to edit the podcast but chose to “keep the conversation as a whole in, because a lot of the time in life, you say something, and maybe you have a minute and you reflect on it.”
She continued: “The point I get across is that it doesn’t matter, and maybe in the past I would’ve looked at it [judgmentally], but I wouldn’t do that anymore. I made it clear that I don’t want to sound judgmental, it was important that that point get across, not what I said initially.”
