Eilish great company in new documentary
New River Gorge in West Virginia a destination for adventure sports
It was April 2019, and singer/ songwriter Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell (you know her as Billie Eilish) was making her Coachella debut. At the age of 17. The week after her first album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. And as she prepared to launch “When the Party’s Over” into the welcoming arms of tens of thousands of festival fans, one of the biggest stars on the pop planet had one small request.
“I just want us all to be in the moment with this song,” she said. “This is happening right now, and this is crazy.”
In addition to summing up that wild moment in what would become an even wilder year, that stunned sentence is also a pretty good synopsis of the new Apple TV+ documentary “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry.”
Director R.J. Cutler gives us a fly-on-the-wall look at the two action-packed years that started with Eilish and her collaborator brother, Finneas O’Connell, pushing to finish the album and ended with the sibling duo sweeping the 2020 Grammy Awards.
From the big professional triumphs (world tours, TV appearances, zillions of Spotify streams) to the personal milestones (getting her driver’s license, breaking up with her boyfriend, meeting Justin Bieber), Cutler and his cameras are there for all of the big moments as they are happening. And yes, it’s all a little crazy.
At 140 minutes, the film has a few too many moments of all sizes. But Eilish is such great company that she helps Cutler pull it off. Even if your high school journal did not contain the raw materials for a millionselling album, this film about a pop prodigy who is also a smart, moody, goofy and passionate teenager will send you right back to that time when everything matters, nothing makes sense and no one understands you but your friends.
The film opens with a brief clip from 2015, when Eilish’s recording of O’Connell’s dreamy ballad “Ocean Eyes” was released on the SoundCloud music-sharing platform and became an immediate streaming hit. Fast-forward three years, and the siblings are toggling between performing before increasingly passionate crowds and grinding out songs with a record company deadline breathing down their necks.
When she is performing for the fans who already know many of the songs that will be on the album, Eilish is a ball of rock-star energy who can be as vulnerable as your best friend on her worst day. It is a real gift.
“I don’t think of them as fans, ever,” she says. “They’re not my fans. They’re like a part of me.”
And when she is working on songs with O’Connell (who is four years older), Eilish is one half of a mind-melding team capable of turning keyboard noodlings and cellphone notes into songs that strike a universal chord while still sounding like no one else.
Watching them kick around the half-formed song that will become the Grammy-winning “Bad Guy” or perform an early version of “My Strange Addiction” to a few visiting record company dudes is pure musicnerd gold. These moments are also a great glimpse into the duo’s creative chemistry and sibling dynamic. Eilish frets about deadlines and struggles with self-doubt (“I can’t sound good because I’m not good”), while O’Connell stays calm and encouraging while carrying on with the business of writing songs with someone who says she hates writing songs.
“I feel like I’ve been told to write a hit,” he says wearily at one point. “But I’ve been told to not tell Billie that we have to write a hit.”
But they do write a hit. In fact, they write several. And before we know it, Interscope Records is celebrating the completion of the “When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” album by giving Eilish her dream car (a matte black Dodge Charger), even though she can’t drive it on her own yet.
Then the siblings and their band are off on an exhausting world tour that will find the singer communing with deliriously happy fans (Eilish is a hugger) and singing songs about death and heartbreak and dangerous love in a smoky croon that lands like a comforting weighted blanket on the people who most need to hear it.
In keeping with the insular spirit of an artist who recorded her Grammy-sweeping album with her brother in his childhood bedroom, Cutler rarely strays outside of Billie’s bubble and the tight family circle of Eilish, O’Connell and their supportive parents. The lack of outside voices and big-picture perspective makes the film feel claustrophobic at times, but Eilish is such a relatable bundle of raw nerves and high spirits, you won’t mind the confined quarters.
And thanks to Cutler’s access, we are there for the highs and the lows and everything in between.
We are there when Eilish and O’Connell write the theme for the next James Bond movie and when she sprains her ankle onstage. We are there when the physical demands of the tour aggravate Eilish’s Tourette’s syndrome tics and her aggressive onstage dancing gives her shin splints. We are there when her dubious but resigned dad watches her take the Charger out for her first solo drive and when her mom wakes her up with news that she has been nominated for a slew of Grammys.
Perhaps best of all, we are there as a young artist begins to come into her own.
After watching Britney Spears get swallowed up by fame in the recent FX documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” it is heartening to see Eilish stick up for herself when an after-show meet and greet goes awry. We see her directing her own videos and refining the style (baggy hip-hop clothes, sneakers, major jewelry) that is very much hers. We see her flipping slowly through the painful entries in an old journal and recognizing how far she’s come.
And on the day of the Grammy nominations, we see Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell going for a drive and reveling in her blessings. The big, the small and the crazy.
“I’m nominated for six Grammys. I have my dream car. I had doughnuts last night,” she says. “Life is good.”
As Americans continue to weather the pandemic, the
$2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and spending bill passed by the federal government in December brought an unexpected and lasting gift: a new national park.
The 5,593-page spending package included a raft of provisions authorizing little-known projects — the construction of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, for one — and giving lawmakers a chance to advance a variety of long-delayed initiatives. Among them was the elevation of the New River Gorge, in southern West Virginia, to the status of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the country’s other most renowned outdoor spaces. The designation of the area — roughly 72,000 acres of land flanking 53 miles of the gorge — as a national park and preserve creates the 63rd national park in the United States and completes a multigenerational effort, started in the mid-20th century, to transform a tired industrial area into a national landmark.
The gorge and its surroundings have been prized for decades as one of southern West Virginia’s more spectacular natural places.
In 1963, the West Virginia House of Delegates passed a resolution seeking to designate the New River Gorge as a “national playground,” preparing to send the proposal to President John F. Kennedy, whose primary campaign was lifted substantially through support from West Virginia voters. But momentum to create a national recreation area stalled after Kennedy’s assassination later that year.
Although the gorge remained a curiosity among rafters and outdoor enthusiasts, the area only received federal protection from the Interior Department in 1978, when it was designated a national river.
Now, the outdoor offerings in the gorge have come to define the area as a premier destination for adventure sports in the East.
The New River plunges 750 feet over 66 miles, resulting in long stretches of violent rapids that can reach a class five level, generally considered the most difficult that can be navigated by white-water boaters. (Licensed outfitters operate in several towns near the river, providing rentals and tours for rafting and kayaking.)
The canyon walls, which soar as high as 1,600 feet, offer miles of cliffs that rank among the best in the East Coast for rock climbing. Sheer faces in the gorge made of robust Nuttall sandstone provide both traditional and sport-climbing routes across the difficulty spectrum.
Bike routes are scattered throughout the park on both sides of the river, with options for both technical mountain biking and more casual pedaling along former railroad beds.
According to the National Park Service, geologists believe the New River — its name a misnomer used by early American explorers who often assigned the same name to any river they came upon for the first time — was a segment of the preglacial Teays River. This larger river, which traversed much of the current Ohio River watershed, was later diverted and broken up by glaciers. The age of the Teays is uncertain, but fossil evidence suggests it could be as much as 320 million years old, leaving its remnant, the New River, as quite possibly the second-oldest river in the world.
Beyond the millions of years of geological history on display, the gorge is also filled with signs of the region’s heritage as a major coal production hub.
Miners once capitalized on the easy access to rich deposits of high-quality bituminous coal in the canyon, where the river had already shorn through hundreds of feet of rock. Especially after the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway linked the New River coal fields to markets in 1873, dozens of boom towns popped up along the river’s edge.
The park contains the remnants of communities such as Nuttallburg and Kaymoor, which still stand near the riverbank and are accessible from points higher up. Seams of exposed coal are visible along some trails leading into the gorge and its towns, where abandoned mine portals remain.
Despite the environmental degradation and pollution that industry unleashed, some unique ecological features make the gorge well-suited to a diverse combination of wildlife, which has slowly reappeared as time has passed.
The river lies at the center of a migration corridor where plants and animals that typically range farther north or south come together, including several federally endangered and threatened species, such as the Virginia big-eared bat and the Allegheny wood rat.
According to Lizzie Watts, the park’s superintendent, the river itself is also notably warmer than surrounding areas, making it a popular warm-water fishing destination with more than a dozen public access points. The river is one of the premier spots for smallmouth bass fishing on the East Coast, and muskellunge and walleye are common in the park today.
“The next generation will have the opportunity to see what, in the last 150 years, it looks like when an area goes from being logged and mined to left alone,” Watts said. “The ecosystem has come back to full trees and mature forests.”
The New River Gorge does not match the scale of many national parks in the western United States, where Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone sprawl over more than 1 million acres each.
Nevertheless, officials expect the new designation to bring a substantial influx of travelers, boosted in part by a dedicated set of enthusiasts who strive to visit every national park.
In typical years, around 1.3 million travelers visit the gorge, according to the Park Service’s tourism data.
When legislation was first introduced to designate the area as a national park, pushback came from some locals. Hunters have long enjoyed access to secluded sections of woods around the gorge, and with hunting prohibited in federal parks, some protested the potential loss of hunting grounds.
In a compromise, more than 65,000 acres of the total area were designated as a nature preserve where hunting can continue as before, and only roughly 7,000 acres directly within the canyon are officially off limits as national parkland. A provision was included to empower the park to acquire more than 3,000 acres of private land around its current boundaries as well, to expand the size of the preserve and add public hunting grounds.