The Billie beneath the dark facade
Archetypal bored tough chic or terrifying ‘It girl’, Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell doesn’t really fit either stereotype, writes Grant Smithies.
Billie Eilish is ‘‘tired as balls’’, she tells me. ‘‘Like, just totally exhausted, you know?’’ I don’t. But I imagine being America’s musical ‘‘It girl’’ du jour must really take it out of a person, especially when they’re only 17.
The inescapable cameras. The shrieking fans. Long days in the studio. Long nights dutifully putting your face about at other people’s parties and shows.
I’m knackered just thinking about it, but not as knackered as Eilish who just got back home to California after a big fashion show in New York. Front row?
‘‘Yeah, man! Front row. It was tight!’’ she says, in a soft husky drawl.
‘‘But to be honest with you, I still can’t get over how weird that is. I was laying in bed in New York last night, and at 3am I suddenly said to myself, right out loud – ‘Wow! I had no clue any of this would happen’ .’’ Eilish lay in the dark and let the weirdness permeate.
‘‘It just suddenly struck me how strange it all is, and how I still have no f…ing clue what I’m doing, really. I mean – who knows how to do this shit? You make it up as you go along, right?’’
Right. Fake it until you make it, and all that jazz. And Eilish has most definitely made it.
Earlier this year, she was proclaimed the ‘‘top emerging artist in the US’’ by Billboard magazine, based on sales, streams, chart placement and social media activity.
Released last August, her debut EP Don’t Smile At Me has been streamed more than a billion times worldwide.
She works hard and tours relentlessly.
And she was going to be down our way for the Laneway Festival at Auckland’s Albert Park last month, but pulled out saying she needed ‘‘more time to finish something very important’’. Now she has announced she’ll be here in April for one show. She has been to New Zealand before. A showcase gig at Auckland’s Tuning Fork in November 2017 sold out in under three minutes. The joint thronged with teenagers holding homemade ‘‘We Love You, Billie!’’ signs and singing along to every line.
‘‘You know, I didn’t expect anything like this to ever happen to me. I grew up in love with music, like an obsessed fan, so it’s very weird that I’m on this side of that divide now. But at least I understand that fan mentality. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t know you exist.’’ She also understands what it means to create and maintain a public persona, a larger-than-life version of yourself who can be out there in the world, taking up space, commanding authority, intimidating naysayers, while the real you sits
‘‘In real life I’m kind of a smiley person but smiling in photographs just feels dumb to me. And what’s the point? Nobody made a joke.’’ Billie Eilish
somewhere behind, smaller and more thoughtful, figuring out what to do next.
In Eilish’s case, that public persona is your archetypal bored tough girl whose principal response to the world is the eye-roll, the frown, the middle finger.
She appears in her videos as an intimidating hardass who has only ever heard rumours of a smile.
She is, professionally, jaded, radiating disdain, awash with ennui, her eyes half-lidded as if the sedatives are kicking in. In person, she’s warm, goofy, charming.
‘‘Yeah. People think I’m mean, right? They’re terrified of me. It’s weird, because in real life I’m kind of a smiley person but smiling in photographs just feels dumb to me. And what’s the point? Nobody made a joke. A genuine smile, a genuine laugh – these are good things. But grinning like a fool in every photo? Yo, c’mon. That ain’t for me. And I’d rather have people afraid of me, so they don’t get up in my face all the time . . . ’’.
Written and produced by her brother Finneas, and delivered in an airy falsetto, Eilish’s breakthrough song
Ocean Eyes was uploaded free to Soundcloud in 2016, when she was just 14.
The song was packed with clunky lyrics about ‘‘napalm skies’’ and falling off cliffs, but that didn’t stop it being streamed more than 130 million times. Further attention followed covers of Drake’s Hotline
Bling and Michael Jackson’s Bad, the former light and poppy over a campfire ukulele, the latter delivered in a sluggish breathy slur that suggested a post-syringe Billie Holiday.
Eilish signed to Interscope, home of U2, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar. And interesting hook-ups followed. She recorded with rapper Vince Staples, and supplied songs for controversial Netflix series 13 Reasons Why.
A collaboration with Texan RnB singer Khalid saw her draped in chains beneath a digital storm-cloud, the video having been watched more than 115 million times.
Somewhere along the way, it was decided that Eilish should become a little darker and weirder. She sings with spiders crawling all over her in You
Should See Me In A Crown, looking blank-eyed and drug-damaged, a monster bassline grinding under her like a road drill. At one point a tarantula exits her mouth.
She torches someone’s car in Watch; steals someone’s soul in Hostage. The metaphorical mouldering corpse of a dead love affair is lowered into the grave in Six Feet Under.
The video for Bellyache finds Eilish in a sunflower yellow jumpsuit, dragging a trolley full of cash down a desert highway, a dyspeptic psychopath wondering ‘‘where is my mind?’’ and contemplating a future behind bars.
She admits the bodies of her friends are lying in the back of her car. The cops arrive to scoop her up at the final fade.
‘‘Yeah, well, when you’re young, there’s only so much you can write about what you’ve really done, so it’s fun to write in character. Why not pretend to be a murderer for a few minutes? I wasn’t really gonna murder my friends in my car.’’
Yeah, no harm done, right? There’s no mess on the upholstery this way. And Eilish designs a lot of her own clothes. You wouldn’t want to get blood all over some favourite outfit you made yourself.
‘‘Oh, my God, you’re SO right! That’s the No 1 reason I don’t kill people. I can’t afford the dry-cleaning bills!’’
Some critics have taken issue with the darkness at the heart of these songs and suggested this is a fairly exploitative way to present a 17-year-old singer. They need to lighten up, Eilish says. This is showbiz. ‘‘Really, a good song’s a good song. It doesn’t matter if it’s a genre you never usually listen to, or an edgy theme. People shouldn’t reject good art just because it doesn’t fit their usual box. You gotta open your mind, dive on in, see what’s there.’’
This sense of adventure was something Eilish learned early. The vegan daughter of actor-musicianscreenwriter parents, Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell was home-schooled.
Lateral thinking was encouraged. She and her brother – who had a recurring part on the TV show
Glee – were encouraged to follow their creativity in whatever direction it might take them.
‘‘It was strange to have friends that weren’t always, like, singing and listening to music, and dancing and horse-riding and creating s..., because that’s what me and Finneas did all day long. Any other way of living just seemed super weird to us.’’
A former Los Angeles Children’s Choir member, Eilish cannot remember a time she didn’t make music.
‘‘I’ve been singing since I popped out the womb. Nobody could shut me up, ever. My older brother always wrote songs and our mom did, too. She taught us both, and I’m so glad. I had all this s... piled up in my head, and it seemed a good way to get some of it out.’’
When writing songs, she found it helped to get high . . . really high.
‘‘I’ve never told anyone this before, but I would go into my treehouse and then go up through the roof and keep climbing up to the top of the tree in our yard.
‘‘I built this little seat up there and I would take this notebook, and just write and sing up there for hours, way up above the ground.’’ Sometimes she took a ukulele up there, too.
‘‘I would play chords and look out over the rooftops around the neighbourhood and write about what I was looking at. Sometimes I’d sit up there every day for weeks on end, but I didn’t even think of it as songwriting, really.
‘‘I was just thinking and feeling, and being up so high somehow helped me to do those things. It was amazing to me. Suddenly, my ideas got clearer, then showed up on a piece of paper.’’
More amazing still: some of those songs are now being heard and streamed and bought and shared by millions of people around the world.
‘‘Yeah, that’s great, but also super-weird. There are so many people looking my way now, but pretty much everything anyone writes about me is wrong. People like to suggest I’m this, like, spoilt rich kid whose parents bought her a record deal. No! People assume I grew up super-privileged because I’m a white girl from LA, but that honestly is just not true.’’
Eilish is at pains to point out that she didn’t grow up in grinding poverty. At no point was she not fed, unloved or living in the streets. But times were hard.
‘‘We grew up in a sh .... -ass neighbourhood. I had one pair of shoes and one shirt, and I was cool with that. I had an amazing family and great friends, and I was always happy with what I had, which wasn’t much.
‘‘My parents were actors and it was hard finding steady work, so we grew up broke as hell and couldn’t afford s .... I couldn’t buy anything, dude! I got where I am now by writing good songs with my brother, and working hard. No-one ever handed anything to me.’’
That includes her wardrobe, which has until recently relied more on a good eye and cunning salebin scavenging than high-end couture cash and a squadron of stylists.
But now, besides her music, Eilish is a rising street fashion star, pioneering a distinctive DIY style she describes as ‘‘wonky’’.
Her look is often blissfully independent of climate or season. She’s been known to wear huge puffer jackets and padded ski pants in the brutal California heat.
‘‘Oh, yeah! It’s rough, man! I’ve overheated many times. Overdressing with way too many layers was my thing for, like, the whole of last year. This year, it’s more shorts and T-shirts because it really affects your mood if you’re too hot, and it was making me mean to everyone.
‘‘Eventually I thought – I better take off some layers
. . . and become a nicer person!’’