It was only six weeks into 2018, and already Billie had played concerts and launched what was to be one of her biggest songs. But it wasn’t about to slow down; she still had three more months of solid touring to do.
Chapter Eight
Lovely
On Valentine’s Day 2018, Billie was onstage at the famous Heaven club in London.
Appropriately she had a romantic tale to relay. She told of how she’d had a date two years earlier on the eve of Valentine’s Day. She and a boy had been to see a lousy film and then gone to the roof to sit and watch the stars. That’s when it happened, she told an audience who were hanging on to her every word: her first kiss. But this was Billie, so it didn’t end there. With evident disgust she revealed that the boy told her that it wasn’t as “magical” as he thought it would be—and with that the opening chords of “my boy” struck up.
That story was repeated as the tour wound its way through Paris, Milan, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Cologne, and Oslo, before she landed back in LA. She could have had nearly a week off then, but she couldn’t resist a festival and the Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival in Florida was calling. In no time she was setting off on tour again. The sold-out tour began with a show in her home city and then moved on to the iconic Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. It was here that a fan took a film of the “first kiss” story. When she uploaded it to YouTube a year later, it had an additional punch line, because in this version she went on to dedicate “my boy” to Henry—even sharing his last name. Remember poor Henry? Having been humiliated in front of his friends in LA, he now faced the ire of hundreds of Billie’s fans who tracked him down on social media to harass him for his treatment of their idol.
The 2018 North American Wheres My Mind Tour poster featured Billie dressed in layers of green and standing awkwardly on billowy green fabric. It listed more cities and bigger venues (this time they visited seven-hundred-capacity bars, clubs, and halls) than the Dont Smile at Me Tour, but all still sold out within an hour. Billie’s team had also upped their game to ensure the show was engaging and dynamic. Andrew Marshall was now employed as Billie’s regular live drummer, and they invested in an automated lighting system—a white screen framed by bulbs—that synchronized with the sound-mixing software.
Although the opener was still an emerging act, alt-hip-hop artist Reo Cragun was known to some of the audiences as he had recently released a successful album called Growing Pains. His positivity and banter with tour DJ Keiro would bring the crowd to boiling point before two (toy) gun-toting men dressed in white overalls and wearing green Billie Eilish bandanas as face masks burst on to the stage. When they shot at the audience, the guns showered the expectant crowd with billion-dollar bills that featured Billie’s face. As the men (who the audience now realized were Finneas and Andrew) took their place behind the keyboard and drums, the stage was set for Billie’s entrance.
The guns showered the expectant crowd with billion-dollar bills that featured Billie’s face.
For this tour Billie opted for darker gray hair and wore her hip-hop-inspired clothes—often a hoodie, beanie, and gold chains—or oversized patterned suits. In the live shows she had become a force of nature. She would jump and feverishly bop across the stage, involve Finneas in dance moves, or hog the front of the stage, crouching to look eye to eye at the audience. Toward the end of the show, she would try to get the mosh pit going or even jump down into the crowd (after they’d promised to dance with her and not crush her). In the ballads she would stand still at the mic, but kept the audience’s gaze fixed on her as she gracefully swayed and danced with her arms and hands.
Toward the end of the show, she would try to get the mosh pit going or even jump down into the crowd.
Most noticeable of all was how she maintained the bond with her fans. She would repeatedly tell them how much they meant to her, she would reach out and grab the outstretched hands, and when she spoke, there was none of the bullish, don’t-care-what-you-think attitude reserved for the general public—she was a sweet and self-deprecating teenager who was among friends. Perhaps the most powerful moment came when she sang “when the party’s over” and she would ask them, even if they were filming on their phones, to engage with her directly, to share the moment and cement a bond between them.
Those who witnessed a live performance from Billie in these times were privileged indeed. Never again would she play to such an intimate crowd and be able to interact directly with her fans. When each show finished, she would go back to the dressing room, have a bottle of water, and then go out to talk to those who stayed to meet her. At some shows she stayed for three to four hours to make sure she had met everyone.
The tour was divided in March by a five-day return to the SXSW Festival in Austin. The year before, Billie had played to curious audiences who knew little about her. This year she played in five different venues. Perhaps best of all were a return to the Central Presbyterian Church at SXSW, where she and Finneas played a special acoustic midnight show, and being pretty unanimously picked as the breakout artist of the festival. What a difference a year made!
Those who couldn’t get tickets for the concerts were given a taste of what they were missing when the tour hit New York, and Billie appeared on the super-popular Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In a set drenched with yellow light and punctuated with white strobes, Billie took the stage in the brown Gucci Imran Potato short suit (complete with matching socks!) that she sported on the tour with Andrew and Finneas in their stage costumes of white overalls and bandana face masks. It was a scintillating performance as Billie danced, leaped, staggered, and pouted around the stage, even kneeling at the front to sing to her TV-watching fans.
To some it might have been confusing to see this young woman dressed like a rapper, strutting around like a rock-and-roll star, and singing like a diva, but to those who got it, this was the real Billie. But so was the Billie who performed in the show’s Cover Room (where artists record their favorite songs for the show’s website). Billie’s intense bossa-nova acoustic rendition—with fabulous harmonizing by Finneas—of the Strokes’s track “Call Me Back” serving as more proof of their ability to interpret others’ songs and add something special.
The tour came to an end in April and was celebrated with a short souvenir video from photographer and videographer Gibson Hazard. If The Tonight Show was an indication of Billie’s popular appeal, then a Gibson Hazard tour video gave her a certain hip-hop credibility. The twenty-two-year-old Hazard had earned a reputation for groundbreaking editing techniques in his work on surreal tour videos for rap artists including Drake, Wiz Khalifa, and Future. His Wheres My Mind Tour video was no exception. Looking like a multimillion-dollar movie trailer it combined concert footage, 3D effects, and CGI to a broken mash-up soundtrack of her songs. It featured Billie standing among falling billion-dollar bills, leaping from a burning skyscraper, flying horror-movie-style through a cemetery, and jumping onstage in front of ecstatic fans. It really made you wish there was a full movie on the way.
Billie the vegan
In 2019 Billie took to Instagram to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of the international campaign Meat Free Mondays. “I’ve been vegetarian my whole life, vegan for five years,” she wrote. “Help the world—I try.” Billie has never known what it is like to eat meat and has no desire to do so (although she once confessed to accidentally swallowing an ant that was swimming in her soy milk). At the age of twelve she made her own decision to become vegan and remains so to this day.
Billie herself rarely mentions the issue, although interviewers occasionally feel it merits raising. She has said that she is vegan for a number of reasons, but mainly that she loves animals. “I just think there’s no point in creating something out of an animal when the animal is already there,” was her logic when questioned on Tumblr, signing off with, “Leave animals alone.” A rare occasion of Billie getting vocal on animal-welfare issues came in June 2019, when she shared video fo
otage of workers physically abusing newborn calves on a farm in Indiana. She commented that if anyone can watch that and not care that they are contributing to the cruelty, then she pities them.
None of this should imply that Billie doesn’t like her food. Her mouth waters at the thought of her mom’s mashed potatoes and gravy, she loves her avocados (when she can find them), her coffee preference is for a Starbucks salted caramel Frappuccino (with soy milk and extra caramel), and she loves to bake peanut-butter cookies when she gets time in her own kitchen. Most of all, though, she adores burritos—“I’m going to get 18 bean burritos with only beans,” she said at a Taco Bell drive-through window in a 2019 Instagram video (they were for a party!).
She has said that being vegan was difficult when touring in the early days as they were on a budget and vegan food could be hard to find, especially in Europe. Nowadays, of course, she is well catered to wherever she goes and even made a vegan road trip for an Uber Eats promotion that listed her favorite vegan restaurants across the US. The menu ranged from Electrified Wild Blueberry Pancakes in Austin to a Love Life Salad (“one of the most Instagrammable meals in the land”) in Miami to Guac Burgers with cashew-cheese sauce and shiitake bacon in New York. And her advice when you can’t get good vegan food? Just eat some chips.
“Bitches broken hearts” had been released as a single during the tour, but there seemed no sign of any brand-new material being released. Then, on April 19, 2018, just two weeks after the tour came to a close, Billie tweeted, “Lovely with @thegreatkhalid.” That was the modest fanfare for the appearance of “lovely,” a duet between Billie and rising star Khalid. Incredibly, the track was not some contrived mash-up of fresh, new talent, but the result of friends getting together and writing a song.
The two artists had much in common. Khalid had broken through with “Location,” an electronic R & B track with hip-hop influence, which had been a viral hit around the same time as Billie’s “ocean eyes.” A friend had played the song to her, but at the time it wasn’t available on any mainstream store (it would eventually reach Number 17 in the Hot 100). Finally, she tracked it down on SoundCloud and was amazed to discover that Khalid was already following her on Twitter. She got in touch, and the two young artists hit it off, meeting up when Khalid attended one of her first shows in LA back in 2016. Khalid admired the fact that Billie wasn’t a typical teenager. Her carefree attitude appealed to him: she wore what she wanted and said exactly what she felt. At the time neither of them knew their music would be successful, but they recognized the talent and star quality in each other.
She wore what she wanted and said exactly what she felt.
The friends hadn’t planned to record together. “He just came over and we hung out. Me and my brother hung out with Khalid in our house,” Billie told Zane Lowe on his Beats 1 radio show. “And it was literally, this is us hanging out as friends and we ended up writing a song.” Sitting in Finneas’s bedroom, they had been playing around with ideas just for fun, and Billie had come up with a melody. As they repeated and repeated it, it dawned on the three of them that they had to do something with it.
Together, they pieced together lyrics that meant something to them: a song about trying and failing to escape depression. This was a feeling that Billie was experiencing all too frequently around this period, but it was also an issue with which Khalid was familiar. Back in December he had even tweeted, “I’m not feeling the best RN and my anxiety is super bad.” The song was a devastating description of a fragile, painful, and frustrated frame of mind laced with the sarcasm of “Isn’t it lovely” and “Welcome home.”
Finneas was left to work his magic on the track. Over the following months, he had built upon the vocal and piano track they had made that day. He layered the voices and introduced a soft percussion, but essentially he gave the track a swirling, heart-wrenching vibe by the introduction of a violin. This was played by Madison Leinster, who had become a YouTube star with her violin covers of pop hits. “You can’t fake strings like that,” Finneas would write of the virtuoso on Instagram.
This was another big step for Billie. It was a real duet, not just the inserted verse that Vince Staples had supplied for “&burn.” Khalid was a star on the rise with a bigger profile than her’s; he already had three Top 20 songs and a massive hit with rapper Logic, and his album, American Teen, was in the Top 20 on Billboard 200 (dont smile at me was at 144). In May the track was further boosted by its appearance on the soundtrack to episode 13 of the second season of 13 Reasons Why and then by being widely sampled in Juice WRLD’s Top 5 album, Goodbye & Good Riddance.
By that point the music video to “lovely” was racking up views on YouTube. Released a week after the single, it was directed by Taylor Cohen, who had previously made videos with the Saturdays and Nicki Minaj. Of course, Billie had major input into the concept, coming up with the idea of her and Khalid being trapped inside a glass box and subsumed by water and ice. A slow walking dance poignantly shows them together, but with an overwhelming feeling of loneliness.
The two singers are both dressed in black. Khalid wears a number of silver chains but is trumped by Billie, who is draped in a plethora of chains in varying lengths and weight. In New Zealand’s Sniffers magazine, she recalled how difficult it was wearing that many. “I would go to the bathroom and people would be like, “Are you OK?” she told them. “They drift one way, and I’d suddenly be walking the other way. It wasn’t even just around my neck, it was around my neck, my arm, over my feet, draping all around me.”
In terms of chart success, “lovely” was Billie’s breakthrough hit.
Khalid and Billie would soon be reunited as they were both on the list of artists appearing at the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City’s Randall’s Island Park in June. During Billie’s set she invited Khalid onstage and the two delivered an exhilarating performance of “lovely” that was acclaimed as a highlight of the festival. By this time the track had reached Number 78 in the Billboard Hot 100 and was making a splash around the world too. In Billie-loving Australia and New Zealand it cracked the Top 5, and in Canada, the UK, Austria, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden it was gaining airplay and hovering around the Top 50.
In terms of chart success, “lovely” was Billie’s breakthrough hit. It was her first single to achieve the Hot 100, and the track received airplay and publicity beyond Billie’s usual sphere, introducing her to a whole new audience. The collaboration could have been a record-company executive’s dream or a publicist’s masterstroke, but it wasn’t. It happened because Billie and Khalid were real, were friends, and respected and valued each other’s creative abilities.
Chapter Nine
Wearing The Crown
By the summer of 2018, Billie Eilish was truly on the map.
“Lovely” had nearly fifteen million views on YouTube and had been streamed 150 million times, and her Instagram following had leaped from two million to three million in the month after the single’s release. Perhaps most tellingly, she was featured on the opening page of the “Vanities” section of Vanity Fair, which is regarded as the magazine’s second cover. The section showcased artists that were on their way to the top, and in back issues Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Keira Knightly, Margot Robbie, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tom Hardy had been spotlighted. With the obvious exception of Justin Bieber, few musicians had been honored, so it was a major achievement for Billie, who posed like a top model in Gucci, Fendi, and Burberry finery.
Success had enabled Billie to indulge in her passions. After a lifelong interest in clothes, she was now given access to the latest designs from top fashion houses, and her love of dance was finding an expression in music videos. In July 2018 she released a video for “hostage” through Apple Music (it would not appear on YouTube for another three months). For the video, Billie brought together some of her favorite artists. The production team was Mosaert, which comprised Stromae, a Belgian musician whose distinct style and interests mirrored her own, and his br
other and artistic director Luc Junior Tam. They had produced the mesmeric Dua Lipa video for “IDGAF” along with director Henry Scholfield, who was also enlisted by Billie.
The video is a piece of contemporary dance arranged by top choreographer Matty Peacock. A two-person dance, it features an amazing male dancer called Devyck Bull (who also danced with Ariana Grande on her Dangerous Woman Tour) and Billie. Scholfield revealed that only when pushed did Billie admit to having danced before, but added: “She has an incredible sense of self, great ideas, and a confidence that lets her craft crazily compelling performances.” This was certainly one of them, as she matches Devyck move for move, despite only recently recovering from injury.
Billie described how she wanted the video to capture the feeling of “trying to be so close to someone that you can end up suffocating them and destroying the very thing that you wanted so much.” The movement between the two dancers ebbs back and forth—romantic and aggressive—as the video tells the song’s story of the possessive and ultimately destructive lover. Billie asked the team to create a room equal parts intimate and suffocating, and the result was a white room with white furnishings and lighting that changes from blue to lilac and yellow. As the two protagonists dance, dressed all in white with gold chains, the room comes to life, incredibly echoing her emotions and eventually engulfing him completely. It was a great achievement, not least because it had been made while Billie was on tour. She had to learn the choreography before a show in Philadelphia, rehearse over the next couple of days as the tour went from New York to Montreal, and finally shoot it before the show in Toronto on the following day. It must have been exhausting.
Billie Eilish, the Unofficial Biography Page 7