The video made the song’s climate-change allusions explicit—and if it still wasn’t clear to those helping the video rack up thirteen million views in the first twenty-four hours, Billie’s accompanying note rammed the point home. “Our earth is warming up at an unprecedented rate, icecaps are melting, our oceans are rising, our wildlife is being poisoned, and our forests are burning,” she wrote, before urging people to join the demonstrations later that month during the UN’s Climate Action Summit.
Around this time, Billie gave an in-depth interview to Elle magazine. Inevitably, the conversation got around to Billie’s depression. After describing the torrid time she had endured with her mental health over the past few years, she revealed that she was finally feeling better. She explained that it was not related to her success, but somehow connected to growing up and a change in the people around her. She used her own story to generate a positive message: “All I can say now is, for anybody who isn’t doing well, it will get better. Have hope.”
She used her own story to generate a positive message: “All I can say now is, for anybody who isn’t doing well, it will get better. Have hope.”
Having read this, it is easy to see a change in Billie in the TV interviews she gave in September 2019. While she had always been a great interviewee, thoughtful in her answers, and happy to talk on virtually any subject, here she seemed relaxed and her playful, humorous side emerged even more. This was evident at the GRAMMY Museum, where she and Finneas performed a short, laid-back set before being interviewed in front of the small audience. It was even clearer on show in her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Despite wearing one surgical boot and having a sprain in her other foot, she smiled and laughed her way through the interview and a game of true confessions with Jimmy and stand-up comedian Colin Quinn. Billie’s “confession” involved “farting in a friend’s mouth” and making her throw-up—and incredibly it turned out to be true!
The very next day Billie made her first appearance on the renowned Saturday Night Live (SNL), the biggest of all late-night TV shows, which is regularly watched by over seven million viewers. As it was the first episode of a new season, she recorded a teaser with the show’s host Woody Harrelson and other SNL cast members. The ninety-second clip cast Billie as a new girl at school and a skateboard-toting Woody as the cool pupil offering to show her around. It raised a few laughs, mostly when regulars Colin Jost and Michael Che play bullying jocks who try, and fail, to knock Billie’s book from her hand.
So much for the appetizer. The main course came on Saturday night as Billie took the stage to perform “bad guy.” It all looked pretty normal as she appeared in a self-designed black shirt and shorts emblazoned with primary-colored, graffiti-style symbols, and started dancing and singing in a small one-room set. After twenty seconds, however, the fun started as she began walking up the walls and dancing while horizontal. This was a live show; no one had expected that. Or that the fun would continue as she walked across the ceiling and danced upside down.
After twenty seconds, however, the fun started as she began walking up the walls and dancing while horizontal. This was a live show; no one expected that.
It was a real water-cooler moment and one that Billie herself described as a “peak life experience.” Billie later explained that it was inspired by a 1951 movie called Royal Wedding, where Fred Astaire pulled off the same trick. It involved the camera being attached to the set, which was rotated through 360 degrees. Billie worked out the choreography using her two fingers in a shoebox and figured that as long as she stayed focused, knew where she was at every moment, and ignored the pain from her two badly sprained ankles and the exhaustion from hours of rehearsal, she’d be OK.
Later in the show, Billie and Finneas returned to perform “i love you.” If proof was needed of Billie’s versatility and talent here it was, as she sang a song with a completely different vibe. In front of a star-filled background, wearing identical Gucci brown-patterned his-and-her suits, they delivered a beautiful live version, with Finneas providing the most perfectly judged harmonies.
The Vanity Fair interviews
On October 18, 2019, Billie Eilish sat down with Vanity Fair to respond to the same questions she had answered on the same date as a fifteen-year-old in 2017 and as a sixteen-year-old in 2018. Each video was shared on YouTube, with Billie commenting on the previous interviews in her responses. Each year, she believes she is about as successful as she could ever be—and yet her answers are testament to her meteoric rise. She reveals the number of Instagram followers she has (which grows from 257,000 to over 40 million!) and the most famous contact on her phone (from Khalid to Drake), while 2019 Billie just laughs at her 2018 self when she says she could probably go to the local grocery store, Trader Joe’s, without being recognized.
In many ways she’s the same Billie: speaking from the heart, articulate and sassy but sensitive. She is always willing to call out her younger self for being naive, for saying that all artists are sad, for going to ridiculous levels to avoid swearing, for being conceited for wanting to write a song no one has ever heard (“What an idiot!”), or even for just being cute—“Look at that nose,” she says. “Like a little button!”
Some of the more revealing answers concern her attitudes to fame. She changes from initially being excited about her fame to finding it difficult to deal with it, to accepting it for what it is. “I like being famous,” she says in 2019. “It’s very weird, but it’s very cool.” In the last of the interviews she is also able to open up on her changing mental health—how her drop in confidence in 2018 reflected the mood she was in at the time and the importance she places on maintaining her current happiness.
Some parts of the interviews remain comfortingly unwavering. She doesn’t have a boyfriend (although in 2019 she admits she actually was seeing someone when questioned in 2018), she should never relay everything she thinks on social media, Fruitvale Station is her favorite movie, Finneas is always her best friend, and when her mom appears at the end to give her a hug, it is always a tearjerker.
Billie has never shied away from supporting campaigns and causes that she believes in. She had launched Billie’s Closet, selling her personal clothing to raise funds for the Pawsitive Change Prison Program, which matches shelter dogs with prison inmates; she has spoken out against anti-abortion laws and supported reproductive-health advocates Planned Parenthood. She has also invited HeadCount, a group campaigning to get young people to register to vote, to every single date on her US tour.
As a chart-topping artist, Billie was receiving requests to help all kinds of charities. One of the most high-profile invitations she accepted was for the annual We Can Survive concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to raise money for cancer research. A crowd of nearly eighteen thousand were in attendance for an all-star cast that included Lizzo, the Jonas Brothers, Taylor Swift, Camila Cabello, Marshmello, Becky G, and Halsey. It was, however, Billie, resplendent in an all-green outfit, who was the most enthusiastically greeted and her miniset really got the Bowl rocking.
A week later, on October 27, she was performing at a more intimate event but for a cause that was just as important. The Annual UNICEF Masquerade Ball is promoted by UNICEF Next Generation, part of the organization that focuses on young adults striving to improve the lives of children, and Billie was the perfect guest. Photos of her posing at the Halloween event set the internet alight as she stood wearing an all-black outfit consisting of a Playboy Sad Bunny hoodie, a demonic-skull T-shirt, and zip-embellished pants, with a crystal face mask and spiky shoes adding to the scary effect. Some said it was punk, and some claimed it was goth, but it was pure Billie.
Some said it was punk, and some claimed it was goth, but it was pure Billie.
It was no secret that Billie and Finneas had been working on new material before and since the album’s release. They had become comfortable with recording in hotel rooms while touring, and Finneas had talked of how they had songs “percolating.
” It did put pressure on them, though, and Billie responded to desperate fans’ questions in early November on Instagram, saying, “Yes, I have two unreleased songs that are coming that you haven’t heard any of . . . Be patient, damn!”
On November 13, 2019, the first of these dropped. Titled “everything i wanted,” it is connected to the album by its first line, which cites a nightmare in which Billie kills herself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and discovers that no one really cares. Billie and Finneas had even called the song “Nightmare” when they began working on it a year earlier. It’s a song that’s loaded with meaning, and reflects on fame, self-esteem, expectations, fulfillment, and love.
The instrumental track drives the song with a brisk but soft padded beat interspersed with piano parts, handclapping, and synth chords. It teeters on the edge of melancholia, but an uplifting melody always saves it. Billie’s vocals transition from breathy intonation to sweet singing, with carefully placed echoes to the ends of her lines adding depth and emotion. For the first time ever (as Billie notes in a “making of” video) there is an outro to one of her songs. What is clear is that Billie and Finneas really apply themselves to the process of songwriting, and every note and word of the song is so deliberate and considered.
Every note and word of the song is so deliberate and considered.
Billie had talked about fame before. Anyone who had risen so quickly in the public eye would find it difficult. She had said that media intrusions, the impossibility of going out without being mobbed, and online criticism were difficult to live with, but that she consoled herself with the connection with fans and the buzz of live shows. “Everything i wanted” dealt head-on with the idea of fame not being everything it seemed, and with the complications and contradictions it presents. This was balanced with the chorus, which celebrates her relationship with Finneas, whose love and care is permanent and unchanging. He remains her anchor as she negotiates the stormy waters of fame.
“Everything i wanted” entered the Top 10 all around the world (reaching Number 8 in the US, Number 3 in the UK, and Number 1 in Ireland, Norway, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia). It was also made available (in the US) as a flexi disc, a superthin vinyl record. Billie’s EP and album had been released in vinyl format (and on cassette tape too), and her next release would appear only in the retro format.
Billie traveled to Third Man Records in Nashville, owned by Jack White, to perform an acoustic set in front of 250 family and friends. She and Finneas played a forty-minute set that was immediately put on to acetate for a vinyl pressing. “Do you see that?” Billie reportedly said, pointing out the white-coated technicians in the adjacent glass-fronted booth. “They’re like making my voice onto a thing. Like right now! That’s crazy.” There was no official video of the show (in which Billie wore rock-and-roll black leather pants), but there was one of Billie in yellow fisherman’s hat, personally splatter painting the record sleeves of the limited-edition release.
November was also to bring the novel experience of the awards season—and Billie was expected to be among the leading contenders. She had received an incredible six nominations for each of the two big ceremonies: the American Music Awards (AMAs) and the GRAMMYs. While the latter was the most prestigious, many artists favor the AMAs, especially because their awards are decided through fan votes.
She had received an incredible six nominations for each of the two big ceremonies: the American Music Awards (AMAs) and the GRAMMYs.
The 2019 AMAs, broadcast live across the US on November 24, was Billie’s first-ever awards show. She began by owning the red carpet as she posed in head-to-toe retro Burberry plaid, including a custom-made white bonnet with a glittery mesh veil (which some compared to a beekeeper’s headgear). In this outfit—without the hat, but sucking a lollipop and visibly shaking—she picked up her first-ever award, for Alternative Artist. She then hit the stage. The Microsoft Theater in LA was turned into a hellish, flame-filled room as she belted out “all the good girls go to hell,” and she even approached the camera to sing right into the living rooms of America. She was rocking the black T-shirt with red jewels that spelled out No Music on a Dead Planet (the slogan of the Music Declares Emergency climate-change awareness campaign) when she collected her second award, for New Artist of the Year.
In all her vivid dreams, Billie could never have conceived of a year like 2019.
At the AMAs Billie had introduced the band Green Day, saying that “growing up, there was no band more important to me or my brother.” A few days earlier, Rolling Stone magazine had got her together with the band’s singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, and it was incredible how much the two artists, from different generations and with totally different audiences, had in common. Billie Joe especially admired Billie’s music for being “earnest” and sounding like “freedom,” but if he passed on one lesson from his own experience, it was that she should stop and appreciate the moment as “the feeling of when you first get popular as a musician, that never happens twice.”
This was that moment. In all her wildest dreams, Billie could never have conceived of a year like 2019. In just twelve months she played at Coachella and Glastonbury and to massive sold-out crowds around the world, posed for iconic magazine cover shoots, recorded a Number 1 single and the biggest-selling album of the year, impressed with TV appearances, won major awards, and heard uber celebrities from Elton John to Dave Grohl and from Julia Roberts to Shawn Mendes declare their love for her. However, in her last Vanity Fair interview Billie had defined success not as how many people knew you, but how people felt about you. Even as she said it, she knew she was now loved by millions, who saw her as an inspiration. She was a phenomenal success.
Chapter Sixteen
Grammys, Oscars, and James Bond
When I first heard Billie sing, I kinda stopped breathing for a sec.
It was so emotional and so deep—it stopped me . . . I think you’re magical—and this is just the beginning.” Many around the world had had similar thoughts over the past few years, but it was groundbreaking singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper who found the words as she presented Billie with the Billboard 2019 Woman of the Year Award in December 2019.
Billie was receiving praise from many of the artists she had looked up to all her life. Alicia Keys was another of them. Billie was a guest when she hosted The Late Late Show, and it became a mutual-appreciation session. For her part, Billie enthused over a cover of “ocean eyes” Alicia had posted on Instagram and then showed a clip of her as a twelve-year-old singing the Alicia Keys hit “Fallin’” at a talent show. To cap it all they then performed “ocean eyes” as a duet with Alicia at the piano.
Amidst the awards shows, parties, and interviews, Billie was due to celebrate her eighteenth birthday at the end of that month, but she still managed to achieve another landmark before reaching adulthood: she directed her first official video. With a love of film-making, Billie had been pushing to direct her videos since the very beginning, but only with the release of the video for “xanny” had she been trusted to call the shots behind the camera.
The video, a single shot with no edits, shows Billie sitting on a white bench in a white-tiled room. She wears a cream turtleneck sweater and ski pants; her hair is a natural brown and it’s matched by her long fingernails. Her art as director is to captivate the viewer for the four and a half minutes of the video through the movement of the camera, her own listless and tortured performance and the shock factor as arms emerge from off-camera to push cigarette butts into her face. That it was an assured directorial debut was confirmed by the ten million views it earned over twenty-four hours.
Her art as director is to captivate the viewer for the four and a half minutes of the video.
That said, Billie could give an engrossing performance strapped into the passenger seat of a car. She’d done just that in her appearance in “Carpool Karaoke,” a feature of The Late Late Show with James Corden where a guest is driven aroun
d by the affable host as they both join in, singing to their (or sometimes others’) hits on the car stereo. Some forty-five million people have seen the fifteen-minute clip on YouTube, in which the pair enjoy a sing-along. Billie also gets out her ukulele in the car and plays songs from her childhood. They also visit her family home. There, James Corden gets to sit in the room where they made the album (the filled-in whiteboard track list still on the wall), and to see for himself how close Billie and her mom are, and to be freaked out by Billie’s pet spider (a blue tarantula who had sadly died by the end of the year).
Only close friends were invited to Billie’s eighteenth birthday party, where, like so many others, she danced, smashed a piñata, and blew the candles out on her cake, a vegan chocolate cake with vegan cream cheese frosting and peppermint candies, baked, at Billie’s request, by her mother. Billie didn’t forget her fans, though. They received their own present in the form of a previously unseen video of a four-year-old Billie cleverly intercut with clips of her performing to thousands.
Billie said the best thing about being eighteen was that (in California) she could now drive after 11 p.m. This was possibly the inspiration behind the video for “everything i wanted,” which was uploaded on January 23 and was the second video she had directed. This was more ambitious, as it followed Billie driving Finneas through the city to the coast and into the ocean. The siblings seem disengaged and lost in their own worlds until the car begins to sink to the seabed. Only then do they exchange a glance and a smile as they join hands. It is so dark and disturbing, and yet there is a warmth that shines through and echoes the video’s opening statement: that Billie and her brother will always be there for each other.
Billie Eilish, the Unofficial Biography Page 13