Billie Eilish, the Unofficial Biography Page 4

  Billie’s identity was also being influenced by a publicist, Alexandra Baker, who put her in touch with a stylist, Samantha Burkhart. Burkhart didn’t create Billie’s style, but she understood what Billie was about and was able to help. Growing up in LA was pretty cool for Billie, but she was one of the few who didn’t love the Californian sun. The weather certainly wasn’t ideal for someone who loved big, baggy garments, colorful outfits, and plenty of layers. She would wear clothes that looked uncomfortable and made an impression on people—even an unfavorable one. “Sometimes I’ll wear four coats,” she told Vice magazine. “I’ve worn pants on my arms; I wore camel pants on my arms as a shirt once.” Burkhart describes how when she first met Billie, the then fourteen-year-old was wearing a giant white fluffy jacket. It looked cool, but it was 95°F (35°C) in the street! Her job would be to help Billie develop her style and source more cool outfits for her.

  She would wear clothes that looked uncomfortable and made an impression on people.

  The first evidence of this came in the video for “bellyache,” a three-minute gem directed by Miles Cable and AJ Favicchio (known as Miles and AJ). Under a blazing hot sun in the Californian desert, Billie appears in a bright all-yellow outfit comprising a turtleneck sweater, overalls, and a jacket, finished with fishnet socks and white Converse high-tops. Although to many, this appeared to be Billie dressing up for the song’s story, we would soon discover that this was in fact Billie dressing exactly how she wanted. As she pulled her wagon with garbage bags full of dollars along the empty road, she once again showed she was a natural performer. Not required to sing along, she acted out the role of fugitive killer-thief with humor, anguish, indifference, and even some short dance moves, leading the viewer delightfully into the twist as she walks straight into a waiting police officer.

  Billie said of the track that she didn’t need that many people to care: she liked it and that was what was important. Even though the radio play wasn’t forthcoming, critics seemed to love it. Digital Journal wrote that “all of the hype she is getting from music critics is based on talent and merit. Eilish deserves to become the next big female star in pop music.” In the UK, the BBC said that “bellyache” was “the pop equivalent of a Tarantino movie—finding comic absurdity in the midst of eye-popping gore.”

  “Bellyache” would mark the start of a new phase of Billie’s career. From playing the odd concert, working on songs with Finneas and other songwriters, and living like a normal teenager, life was about to change gear. It began with a festival. In a few years, she would be a festival queen, playing at the world’s biggest events, but the CRSSD Festival in San Diego in early March 2017 was the first. Focusing on underground electronic music, this festival was a good fit for Billie, who took to the stage in a shiny pink three-piece outfit augmented with a black bustier worn outside her shirt. It was early on the first day, and there were just a handful of people sitting on the grass to watch her. However, two of them were singing along to the chorus of “ocean eyes.” It was the first time this had ever happened, and she couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to have a massive audience all singing along.

  CRSSD proved to be a warm-up for an altogether bigger festival. A music, film, and arts festival, SXSW in Austin, Texas, has grown every year since 1987, and hundreds of artists appear. In 2017, Lana Del Rey, Weezer, and the Wu-Tang Clan were among the headliners, but way down the list of acts came Billie Eilish. It was a great opportunity to play to music-industry figures, meet journalists and, of course, win over new fans. Billie would play as much as she could over a couple of days at the festival, including headlining Apple Music’s artist-showcase event, where she was photographed with Kate Nash, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Bridgit Mendler. Also noteworthy was a gig Billie played on the patio of the La Zona Rosa venue before going inside to watch the main act, Vince Staples. “I wasn’t feeling good,” she said in a festival interview, “so I was just like, I’m gonna go mosh because I need to get it out, so I did.” It wouldn’t be too long before Vince would feature in her story.

  Before March was over, Billie would have another boost. Netflix launched a TV series called 13 Reasons Why based on a best-selling novel by Jay Asher. The series told a dark story of adolescent life and was an immediate hit, especially with teenage viewers. Part of the success of the show was due to the intense and haunting soundtrack from established acts such as Selena Gomez (the show’s producer) and the Cure but also from new artists, including Lord Huron and the Japanese House. Online forums were busy fielding questions from viewers wanting to know who recorded specific contributions to the soundtrack. Often the answer was the as yet little-known Billie Eilish, singing a track called “Bored.”

  The soundtrack was released at the same time as the TV series and included “Bored,” a track written (with input from Finneas) by established songwriting team Aron Forbes and Tim Anderson, who had previously worked with Banks and Halsey. The song, a bitter and self-assertive commentary on an uncaring lover set to a poignant synth backing, suited Billie perfectly. She delivers the lyrics in the same sweet, deadpan, but somehow loaded-with-emotion manner seen in the previous singles.

  Billie the teenager

  What has defined Billie Eilish more than anything else in interviews and articles written about her since 2015? Her voice? Her music? Her lyrics? Her clothes? All of those are regularly mentioned, but being a teenager trumps them all. She is never allowed to forget it; she is the star who has never bought a CD, who thought Bill and Hillary Clinton were siblings, who had never heard of Van Halen . . .

  Over the years she has constantly fielded the “How does it feel?” question in the same straight way. “What’s it like being fifteen?”

  “Oh my God, I don’t know,” she responded to Harper’s Bazaar in 2017. “It’s the way that I feel. I’ve never been older. Ask me every single year and I’ll give you the same answer.” What is clear is that Billie has never felt the need to apologize for her youth. As a teen, her experience of the world is as valid as anyone’s. When “ocean eyes” first became popular, few knew she was fourteen and the song stood on its own merits. Perhaps, in an ideal world, this is how she would have liked it to be forever, her age irrelevant to the quality of her music and art.

  When forced, however, to be the spokesperson for her generation, she rises to the occasion. She was entitled to write about love or betrayal, she would argue, because young people experience these things too—often more acutely. “People underestimate the power of a young mind that is new to everything and experiencing for the first time,” she told the NME in 2019. “We’re being ignored and it’s so dumb. We know everything.”

  In her songwriting, Billie writes about her own world, but it is one she shares with millions of teenagers around the world. She writes of broken relationships, depression, fantasy, and even TV programs; all things they can identify with. Her initial fans might have been twentysomethings (and many still are), but teenagers took her to their hearts as one of them. It was only recently that she was an obsessive fan herself, her walls covered with Justin Bieber posters, and like her younger fans, she spilled every thought and emotion on Instagram and Twitter, and like them, she is learning from new experiences and constantly changing.

  Reluctantly, Billie accepts that she is a role model for them and, especially when it comes to mental health, that she has a responsibility; she wants to be as supportive as possible. But what many teens admire in her is her straight-talking. As she told Entertainment Weekly in May 2019, “You have to be exactly what people love you for, even if that’s a f***ing psycho—people like you, girl!”

  The Billie Eilish train was in motion. In September 2019 she was invited to take part in a photoshoot for Elle magazine. Billie was featured in its annual “Women in Music” issue, as one of “19 women on the verge of star status.” She was shot alongside American Apparel model-turned-singer Kacy Hill. Billie hugged the freckled Kanye West protégé from behind, her silver hair matching her $1,500 Paco Ra
banne silver hoodie dress and $11,000 Tiffany necklace (along with necklaces of her own). If you had to guess which of them was the hip-hop-influenced star, you’d have surely picked the chain-laden Eilish over Kacy Hill in her Stella McCartney check jacket.

  Meanwhile, Billie and Finneas were busy in the studio rehearsing, tweaking their backlog of songs and getting them down on tape. “My sister @billieeilish gave one of the best vocal performances I’ve ever heard in the studio tonight,” tweeted Finneas. He later replied to his own tweet to say that it was the night she sang the first verse of “my boy.” And he wasn’t the only one working on Billie’s music. The songwriting and production duo Marian Hill had delivered a stunning remix of “bellyache.” Retaining Billie’s superb delivery, they wound down the acoustic guitar and introduced a bass-heavy synth feel that served to increase the drama and sinister tone. Not only did it introduce Billie to Marian Hill’s not inconsiderable following, but the track also made Spotify’s New Music Friday and Pop Remix playlists—each with thirty million followers.

  The strategy that Platoon, Darkroom, and Interscope had drawn up with Billie was going exactly to plan. The drip-feed of singles, remixes, live performances, and interviews had continued to raise her profile. Since releasing “bellyache” she had gained over thirty-one thousand fans on Facebook—three times the increase of the previous three months—while Instagram and Spotify followers had grown similarly, fueled by the 13 Reasons Why broadcast. What was perhaps more surprising was that this fifteen-year-old was such a refreshing persona in the pop world. She wrote lyrics at a level that belied her young age; she could perform with emotion, humor, and sincerity; she was developing an image that was unique, colorful, and recognizable; and, in interviews, she proved engaging and intelligent, while maintaining her identity as a teenager. If Elle had looked for just one woman on the verge of star status, they wouldn’t have had to look much further than Billie Eilish . . .

  Chapter Five

  Dont Smile

  On June 24, 2017, Billie posted a message on Facebook that just read, “Finished the EP.”

  It must have been a great feeling. In virtually every interview she had done over the last year, she had said that she was impatient to get her music out. The songs that eventually appeared on the EP had been written a year or even eighteen months before, and it had been a long process. Billie complained that so much time had been wasted by her label trying to get her to work with established songwriters and producers. “They’re all about eighty!” she exaggerated to emphasize her point.

  These “octogenarians” might have created hit records, but Finneas and Billie had made “ocean eyes” with no help from anyone. She soon became frustrated at having to tactfully decline these guys’ suggestions or politely persuade them to try her ideas, and she yearned for the easier and more open relationship she had with Finneas, where each of them just said what they thought. However, even when the label gave in and left Finneas and Billie alone in the studio, it still didn’t seem right. Only when they returned to his bedroom did they achieve real progress on the EP.

  The label executives were quickly learning that Billie might have been a young teenager, but she was also an artist who knew exactly what she wanted. Billie not only knew how she wanted her songs to sound, but she knew how she wanted to present them too. Even Finneas expressed surprise at how her vision for some of the songs seemed so different from his—even when he had written them. The point was perfectly illustrated by the video for “Bored.”

  Her sweet tones are undercut with venom and defiance.

  The song is about being trapped in a relationship that’s going nowhere, and other people might have filmed it with Billie acting all dreamy-eyed and soulful alongside some good-looking but doleful guy. Not Billie. She came up with the concept of climbing an endless ladder in a white space—a “timeless, anti-gravity space where no rules apply,” she explained. All in bright blue, outfitted in a hoodie, designer tracksuit, puffer jacket, and high-top Nikes, with her long silver hair, flawless skin, and pouting lips, Billie looks amazing.

  The new EP would also follow the strategy of drip-feeding Billie’s songs to an ever-curious public, with the tracks being dropped regularly until its release in early August. First up was “watch,” a song that Finneas had written alone just a week or so after “ocean eyes” had been uploaded. To an upbeat synth track, a beat provided by the sound of a striking match and a killer chorus, Billie completely owns the vocals. Her sweet tones are undercut with venom and defiance. “I’ll sit and watch your car burn with the fire that you started in me,” she warns. And it sounds more than a little scary.

  Billie and Tourette’S syndrome

  A YouTube video compilation appeared in late 2018. It had collected together moments from interviews over the years where Billie’s eyebrows had twitched, her eyeballs jolted, or her neck had jerked. These tics were subtle and would generally have passed unnoticed at the time, but placed alongside one another they were unmistakable symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome.

  Many think of involuntary and compulsive swearing when they think of Tourette’s, but such tics are much more common signs. Billie had been diagnosed with the syndrome at an early age and had largely been able to suppress any twitches when filmed. She hadn’t ever mentioned it as she didn’t want to be associated with the condition.

  However, the video brought matters to a head, so Billie went on Instagram to explain. She says how, having grown up with it, she was used to the tics, and her friends and family think of it as part of her. More sadly, she hints at how problematic it can be: “HAVING them is a different type of misery,” she writes and later in the post tells how suppressing the tics makes things worse once the moment has passed.

  The way she dealt with the issue in such a matter-of-fact way, even admitting the videos were “low key funny,” said so much about Billie’s relationship with her supporters. She understood their curiosity and was determined to be as open as possible.

  With the EP in the can, Billie was free to perform live again and it was time for her first headline show, but amazingly it took place over five thousand miles away from Highland Park, in London. The Courtyard Theatre holds only 250 people, and in just a few days it sold out to the curious and the already converted Billie Eilish fans in the UK capital. Accompanied only by Finneas on keyboards or acoustic guitar, Billie played a full set to an enthusiastic crowd who were happy to dance along. She was clearly still gaining confidence in her performance, but established a great rapport with her audience and must have been amazed, such a long way from home, to find them joining in with “ocean eyes.” “I love traveling and that specific trip was a dream to me, especially since the show was sold out,” she told Decorated Youth magazine. “I’ve never, never even had anything similar happen in my life so it was unbelievable.” The experience clearly stayed with her as she would recall playing the gig when she was on the Glastonbury stage two years later.

  At the Courtyard, as at every other gig when she’d played it, “COPYCAT” had been one of the best-received songs of the evening. Now it would receive a wider audience as the next of the list of tracks from the EP to drop. “COPYCAT” was Billie’s song. Her success had spawned a host of singers imitating her style, but the song was aimed at a particular girl who massively annoyed her by copying everything that she did. Billie described it as “the most honest song I have.” It follows a familiar style of minimal beats and haunting synth—loose enough to turn the song into a noisy rock out in some live performances—but it is Billie’s delivery and lyrics that make it stand out.

  If “bellyache” was fiction, “COPYCAT” is personal. It is very much Billie keeping it real as she lays on the swag and attitude in a cold, calculated tone. Billie said she wrote it to go straight to the heart of her imitator. The curt and cutting phrases are full of ingenious wordplay and the lyrics twist and turn the listener inside out—right down to the “heartfelt” apology followed by the retro-teenage sucker punch, “Psych
!” The whole song screams “don’t mess with me,” and you really feel you wouldn’t want to.

  If “bellyache” was fiction, “COPYCAT” is personal. It is very much Billie keeping it real as she lays on the swag and attitude in a cold, calculated tone.

  But then, just a week later, comes a new track, the fifth single from the imminent EP, in which Billie reveals a self far from the assertive arrogance of “COPYCAT.” “I just wish you could feel what you say,” she sings at the beginning of “idontwannabeyouanymore.” With more clever wordplay, she inverts the sense of the previous track. You want to be me so badly? Well guess what? I can’t stand me. On Instagram, Billie promoted the new track, saying it was “a very inside of me song that has finally come out so if you’d like to hear deep inside my HEAD then GOO LISTEN.”

  “Idontwannabeyouanymore,” with its soft piano, strings, and stop-start beat, has a jazzy feel to it, with Billie’s vocals measured but always threatening to crack. She’s putting her inner torment out there. Addressing her own image in the mirror, she sings of self-doubt and even self-loathing. In many ways it’s the perfect teenage-anguish song, addressing depression, insecurity, and body image; but for Billie, now living her life in public, these emotions are magnified. “This song is from the perspective of me towards me,” she said of the intensely personal track. “You are always you forever and that is terrifying . . .”

  It’s the perfect teenage-anguish song, addressing depression, insecurity, and body image.

  Another week, another track. The origins of “my boy” go back to one day when Billie ran into her brother’s room and shouted, “My boy’s being sus.” Finneas laughed and said, “I’m going to use that,” and they both sat down and wrote the song there and then. It’s a song full of surprises. At first, it seems like another plinky-plonk jazz-styled song, but then it suddenly switches tempo to become a cool trip-hop number. It shapes up like a misused-girlfriend ballad, but emerges as a self-assertive F-you tirade, and for all that the opening line is an attention grabber, the closing “If you want a good girl, then goodbye” is the ultimate kiss-off payofff.