Billie Eilish, the Unofficial Biography

by Adrian Besley

  Images of hills burning, waters rising, trees disappearing, and waters or our air being poisoned powerfully express the theme of climate change.

  “Wish you were gay” and “when the party’s over” take the album to the halfway mark, and then in “8,” we reach the oldest of the tracks. Back in August 2017, the song was played on the livestream and became known as “see-through.” Billie and Finneas didn’t seem to like that title, though, and called it “8” because it was the eighth song on the album (it was called “7” until they added “!!!!!!!” as a separate track at the front). The rejected-lover song, which Billie had written from the perspective of someone she had spurned, had been given the Finneas touch. He had played with her vocal and ukulele sound, speeding it up to give the achingly raw song of the livestream a boost of energy and a more quirky feel.

  “My strange addiction” and “ilomilo,” sandwiched either side of “bury a friend,” both feature Billie wearing her Gen Z credentials on her sleeve. The first has a delicious bass-guitar note as a beat and develops into a seventies disco-sounding chorus. Written by Finneas, it is a song about an addiction to a person, but typically Billie hijacks the meaning with inserts from her favorite TV comedy series, The Office. They needed the writer’s and cast’s approval, which was readily given, with B. J. Novak, star and writer of the series, saying, “I was like, wow, bonus, this is a banger.”

  “Ilomilo” is an altogether different kind of song, but it references something many of her teen fans would recognize. Ilomilo was a cute video game that involved reuniting two characters who separate and fear they will never find each other again. In the song, Billie takes the idea and runs with it, letting her mind spin over love and the fear of loss. The insistent pulse, skipping notes (and echoes of the game’s sound effects), along with vocals that feel so tense they are at a breaking point, make for an intriguing and beguiling track. It is so far from being filler—and, indeed, Billie would sometimes name “ilomilo” as her favorite song.

  She was determined that her last song would have a sense of finality.

  The next track was never completed and therefore wasn’t included. “I don’t know, i just wish i wasn’t breathing” was due to come before “listen before i go,” “i love you,” and “goodbye,” which when read together made a sentence, but nevertheless the sentiment remained. Of the new tracks, “i love you” proves that Billie and Finneas can write a traditional ballad when they choose. Accompanied by a gentle acoustic guitar, the lyrics, which try and fail to deny love, are deft and poetic (with a cadence that brings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to mind), while Billie’s voice exudes a tenderness that is absent from most of her songs.

  Billie told MTV News, “I don’t like when a song just ends an album and then nothing feels like it’s actually over.” She was determined that her last song would have a sense of finality; so, taking “Please, don’t leave me be” from the backing vocals of “xanny,” she then picked a line from every single song on the album, from last to first. “When it gets to the top,” she added, “it just kind of dies down and it feels like it’s a goodbye. It almost feels like an RIP.” Even if you don’t realize this, the two-minute song stands alone and has a lullaby feel, which is, as ever, undercut by Billie with the final line of “I’m the bad guy.”

  Billie and synesthesia

  Synesthesia is the blending of one sense with another. It can involve any of the senses, so a smell can be associated with a color or the feel of an object with a sight. It is a technique used by writers and poets, but some people experience it involuntarily and constantly. Associations can be random, such as people with numbers or the taste of honey with a certain song, but the perceptions are permanent; the same number always comes to mind with a certain person or honey whenever you hear that song played.

  Both Billie and Finneas experience synesthesia. Billie has said that everyone she knows has not only their own number, but their own color and shape in her head too. This goes some way to explaining her visual approach to songwriting. In a YouTube music video she explained how “everything that I make, I’m already thinking of what color it is, and what texture it is, and what day of the week it is, and what number it is, and what shape.” She has described “bad guy” as yellow but also red, the number seven, hot, but warm, like an oven and smelling like cookies; and talked of “xanny” as velvety with the feeling of smoke.

  The Billie Eilish Experience pop-up in Los Angeles was timed to coincide with the album release. It enabled fans to see her music how she sees it, by giving each song on the album its own room with a distinct temperature, number, color, shape, texture, and smell. They could experience each song, from racing toy cars around a course of cookie dough and vegan milk in the “bad guy” room to the puppies in the “8” room and the throbbing bass in the uncomfortable, smoke-filled “xanny” room.

  Billie once claimed that her music is “all about comfort and it’s about ‘I know how you’re feeling and you are not alone.’ ” As media commentators almost unanimously praised the album, they picked up on how well her lyrics reflected the teenage sensibility and the attitudes of Gen Z and millennials to the world around them. They recognized how Billie and Finneas had succeeded in producing a cohesive piece of work with its own unity, and how easily they moved across genres and created totally different songs. Some even credited the album with breaking down boundaries in pop music, which was praise indeed for a collection recorded in a bedroom and a series of hotel rooms.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Festival Girl

  Billie’s “bad guy” video took everyone aback. She’d done weird and freaky before, but she was pushing it further and further.

  Like the song itself, the video was part humorous, part self-mocking, part scathing, and more than a little disturbing—and it hit the sweet spot. It received over 7.5 million views in just twenty-four hours and 35 million in its first week.

  Billie had turned to Dave Meyers to direct the video. Meyers was the best in the business. He had worked on videos for Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, and Travis Scott; had won GRAMMYs for Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” and Missy Elliott’s “Lose Control;” and earlier in the year had directed “Señorita” for Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello. He had a reputation for collaborating with artists and allowing their personality to shine through.

  In the “bad guy” video Meyers’s love of color blocking, bold imagery, and stunning backdrops is evident, but so is Billie’s imagination and visual creativity. The two came together in the stunning set pieces that are so skillfully edited together. Billie’s ungainly entry through a yellow paper wall, her gang cruising down the road on tiny tricycles, the milk being poured into a man’s mouth in the middle of a red desert and, of course, the enduring images of Billie nonchalantly singing with blood smeared on her face, sitting cross-legged on a guy’s back while he does push-ups or, weirdest of all, the heads hanging in plastic bags.

  The video helped catapult “bad guy” to the top of charts in over a dozen countries across the world, from Australia to Iceland, and into the Top 10 in as many again, including the UK, Japan, and Brazil. In the US, after nine weeks at Number 2, it finally displaced Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” to gain the top spot. Not only did he send her a congratulatory tweet, but Billie achieved the distinction of being the first artist born in the twenty-first century to have a Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

  When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was running away to similar success, matching or even surpassing the single’s chart placing. In the UK she became the youngest-ever solo female act to top the album chart, while the album went straight to Number 1 on the Billboard 200 (it would return to the top twice more), with Forbes deducing that its fourteen songs were streamed 194 million times in the first seven days after release. It must have been beyond Billie and Finneas’s wildest dreams. With an album recorded in his tiny bedroom, they had instantly joined the ranks of Drake, Ariana, and Cardi B.

  I
t must have been beyond Billie and Finneas’s wildest dreams. With an album recorded in his tiny bedroom, they had instantly joined the ranks of Drake, Ariana, and Cardi B.

  If Billie was the new queen of pop, she needed a coronation—and where better to be crowned than at Coachella, perhaps the most famous music festival in the world? On two consecutive weekends in April around one hundred thousand people flock to the Colorado Desert festival in California to see pop, rock, and dance music’s biggest acts. Despite growing up just a two-hour drive from the festival, Billie had never been able to afford a ticket. Until a year previously, she hadn’t envisioned ever being successful enough to play the festival. Yet here she was with a Number 1 hit as the most anticipated act on the bill.

  If Billie was the new queen of pop, she needed a coronation—and where better to be crowned than at Coachella?

  Despite Billie’s meteoric rise to fame, she had been booked on the smaller second stage, the Outdoor Theatre. That meant a crush at the gates and even in the VIP area to see what was so special about this teenage sensation. At first, a technical problem with the big screen behind the stage delayed her appearance, heightening the tension, and the crowd started chanting her name—but after half an hour some frustrated fans began to trickle away. However, five minutes later, they hurried back. The screen had come alive, flashing with scary silhouettes and creepy images that eventually framed the real-life Billie. Her hair was now dark, and she was dressed all in white—a Siberia Hills hoodie, baggy shorts down to her calves, socks, and high-tops.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that within the hour Billie owned the festival. She began her set with the first-ever live performance of “bad guy,” the audience a sea of bodies jumping in unison, waving their arms and often drowning her out with their singing. She then swept into “my strange addiction” as images of Blohsh flashed on the now-working screen, and went on to debut “all the good girls go to hell” and “ilomilo” in a performance that took the breath away. She had that massive audience—who even knew every word of songs she had released just two weeks earlier—in the palm of her hand. They leaped when she leaped, sung along intently to her ballads, and delighted in the unexpected, such as the twitching bedridden dancers or when she ghoulishly stood on a levitating bed to sing “bury a friend.”

  She had that massive audience—who even knew every word of songs she had released just two weeks earlier—in the palm of her hand.

  When she forgot the words in the second verse of “all the good girls go to hell,” she styled it out so coolly that it endeared the audience to her even more. Even when Vince Staples’s microphone failed to work during “&burn,” no one seemed to care. Not least her new celebrity fans—Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott, members of 5 Seconds of Summer, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga—watching from the guest area or, in Bruno Mars’s case, on TV as he tweeted “@billieeilish I’m seeing these live clips and you’re killin! A vibe like that at 17? Sheesh.” No wonder fans were calling for the festival, which the press had dubbed Beychella following Beyoncé’s 2018 performance, to be renamed Billiechella!

  The next weekend she did it all again, this time with Justin and Hailey Bieber, Jaden Smith, and members of Blackpink in the audience. High winds meant there was no floating bed, but the show was slicker. Billie had switched to an all-black outfit, including a (soon-to-be iconic) freaky neon “Joker” T-shirt from the NYC brand Bond. To headline Coachella, let alone smash it out of the park, was a big, big deal for Billie. She took it all in her stride, performing like a seasoned professional, but just occasionally the enormity of her achievement seemed to dawn on her and she was that seventeen-year-old again. At one point, as her fans screamed out their love, she told them, “I literally used to sit in my room and cry because I wanted this s*** so bad.” Later, she wiped away tears and told them, “I promise you, if I could stay up on this stage for the rest of my life I would. Forever.” She added: “I feel like I’m not here. Like this isn’t real.”

  Justin Bieber

  “I saw [him]. I know what Bieber looks [like]. I know his body language. I know how he stands. I know where he wears his pants,” she told James Corden as they went on their “Carpool Karaoke” trip. “So I look over and he just stood there. Like five feet away from me. Perfectly still. And he had the face mask so all I could see were his eyes.” Billie was recalling the moment at Coachella where she had met her fangirl crush, Justin Bieber.

  Billie had made no secret of how big a Belieber she once was. Before, but not so long before “ocean eyes,” her bedroom had been covered with posters of the Canadian pop star and a sign on her bedroom door read, “Forever Belieber, Billie’s room.” In a video made when she was twelve she even says how she is worried that when she gets a boyfriend, she won’t want to be with him because she actually loves Justin.

  In March 2019, the two stars’ orbits had moved closer when she revealed that he had started following her on social media—sending a screenshot of a DM she had sent him in 2014—as she prepared to go on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. On the program she made it clear that he still meant a lot to her and seemed visibly nervous that he would appear as a surprise guest. He didn’t, but a month later, in the California desert, here they were, hugging like long-lost friends and dancing together as NSYNC performed with Ariana Grande.

  They were now good buddies. Bieber provided a rap-style verse to a remix of “bad guy” in July and to celebrate Billie shared a picture of her at twelve, dressed in a rainbow ballet dress, standing in front of her poster-adorned wall. The remix was seen as taking the edge off the original, but it was fun and still sold well, with fans loving the novelty.

  Their friendship made headlines again in February 2020, when a tearful Bieber recalled the difficulties he’d experienced being a teenage star and told Beats 1 that he wanted to help Billie avoid going through the same things. “If she ever needs me I’m going to be here for her,” he told listeners. Billie would share the clip in response, and as Justin and his wife returned the love, the bond grew stronger.

  The Coachella experience was about to be repeated in arenas and festivals across the globe as Billie set off on her When We All Fall Asleep World Tour. At the very first of these, at the Sparks Arena in Auckland, New Zealand, Billie and Finneas sat on the front of the stage and delivered the first live performance of “i love you,” an acoustic stripped-back version. The crowd stopped singing and screaming—for a minute—and just soaked it in.

  With her friend Denzel Curry or (occasionally) Finneas opening, the show moved to Australia, where Billie played to thousands in arenas in big cities and at Groovin the Moo festival venues all around the country. She returned in May and June to tour North America, playing venues five times bigger than she had ever played before. But whether she was performing at massive venues such as the sixteen-thousand-capacity Budweiser Stage in Toronto, the classy Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia, or outdoor venues like the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, she had the ability to create an intimate relationship with her audience. She was known to throw the photographers out of the stage pit so that fans could get closer and mosh. She would involve fans in the songs, telling them to crouch down during the bridge of “COPYCAT” (“Lower, lower, lower,” she’d cry) and leap up in a frenzy, imploring them to put down their phones and feel the moment in a ballad or even get them to hold hands and say “I love you” to one another.

  She was known to throw the photographers out of the stage pit so that fans could get closer and mosh.

  It really felt like the summer of Billie. She was on the radio, constantly interviewed online, and on the cover of so many magazines. She appeared on the cover of Billboard in the US, Vogue in Australia, the Sunday Times Magazine in the UK, Rockin’On in Japan, Glamour in the Netherlands, Elle Girl in Russia, and many others, always looking elegant, fabulously styled, and interesting. For Billie, Nylon Germany, however, went too far. Its futuristic cover portrayed her as bald, with shiny metallic skin like a robot, and Billie responde
d angrily to the use of the fake photo, particularly as it made her—still a minor—appear as though she wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  She had also spoken out on her body image in an ad for Calvin Klein in May 2019. The thirty-second ad, “Billie Eilish speaks her truth,” finds a green-tracksuited Billie in the bathroom. As she looks closely in the mirror (kissing her reflection) and lying fully clothed in the empty bath, she declares, “I never want the world to know everything about me.” She goes on to explain: “That’s why I wear big, baggy clothes. Nobody can be like, ‘She’s slim-thick,’ ‘She’s not slim-thick,’ ‘She’s got a flat ass,’ ‘She’s got a fat ass.’ No one can say any of that because they don’t know.”

  At the same time, Billie appeared in a video for the American Ad Council’s campaign “Seize the Awkward,” which was designed to encourage young people to speak to friends about their mental health. Billie talks eloquently about anxiety and depression. She asks people to look out for their friends, check they are okay, and help, even just by giving them a hug. “I have seen it and I have been it,” she says, talking from personal experience about how reaching out to someone can make a difference.

  Billie talks eloquently about anxiety and depression. She asks people to look out for their friends, check they are okay, and help, even just by giving them a hug.

  Just as Coachella had underestimated Billie’s popularity, in the UK the iconic Glastonbury Festival had booked her for their Other Stage, the smaller sibling of the famous Pyramid Stage. However, the organizers had the good sense to move her up the bill, as forty thousand excited festival-goers packed the surrounding fields and matched the numbers attending the concurrent Miley Cyrus show at the Pyramid Stage.