FLIGHT OF FANTASY
As Billie Eilish continues to navigate the perils of coming of age on social media, her public and private personas, and the delicate give-and-take relationship with her fans, she enjoys a moment of release and rises above the noise. Depicted here as supernatural and strong, with her feet never quite touching the ground, Eilish imagines a world where she can simply float.
By Brodie Lancaster. Styled by Dena Giannini. Photographed by Emma Summerton.
Billie Eilish might hate this interview soon. For the better part of the last six years, the 19-year-old artist has been speaking publicly about her life and music. And now that she’s got a little distance, she’s able to look back and reflect – and she doesn’t always love what she sees. “I said so many things then that I totally don’t agree with now, or think the opposite thing,” she says. “The weirdest thing is how nothing ever goes away once it’s on the internet. Every interview I did when I was 15 is still out there, and I think about it constantly.”
What did she say in the past that she’d like to rewind and retract now? “I did an interview where somebody said: ‘What are you doing when you’re not making music?’ And I said: ‘Even when I’m not making music, I’m making music.’ And actually – she starts laughing, a devilish cackle in her deep, treacly voice, – Lil Wayne said that in an interview and I just saw it and said it, too. And it’s not even true!”
She thought it sounded cool, and what does a 15-year-old want more – when they’re in front of a microphone and an interviewer or audience – than that? “When you’re a fucking teenager, you don’t really know yourself, so you’re trying to figure yourself out. That was the hardest thing for me: I didn’t actually know how I really felt.
So I just came up with this facade that I stuck to.”
Billie Eilish’s life has blurred the lines of public and private since before she was old enough to drive. The fact we can watch her reach that milestone – in director RJ Cutler’s documentary The World’s a Little Blurry – is proof of that. Images or even references to the Highland Park bungalow in Los Angeles where she and brother, Finneas O’Connell, were raised and recorded her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, conjure comparisons to Dolly Parton’s Tennessee mountain home, the two-room cabin that was so integral to her mythology that visitors to Dollywood can tour a replica of it.
We’ve watched Eilish injure herself and perform through pain; indulge in her most self-critical urges as she and O’Connell made the record in his bedroom; and go on stage in Europe full of sullen teen angst because her friends back home are going on vacation. We’ve watched her dreams come true and seen how all the success in the world can’t satisfy all a person needs.
When Eilish speaks to Vogue Australia over Zoom following her cover shoot in LA, she is savouring a moment of downtime, eating chipotle and drinking coffee on the couch, where she’s been watching The Boys. “It’s the two seconds I have off.”
Lost Cause, the woozy and playful fourth single from her hotly anticipated second album, Happier Than Ever, has just come out and she’s feeling torn. She’s had a little distance from her phone lately, and it’s felt good. But she’s also keen to share some sweet behindthe-scenes shots of herself and the bevy of women who co-starred in the video – which Eilish directed – on Instagram.
“You can’t really just not go on your phone for a week because you’re having fun and you want to be in the moment, because if you do the internet is like: ‘Where did she go? She’s on hiatus.’ I’m like: ‘Dang, I’m just trying to have fun.’”
It might sound like an overreaction, but coming of age online and participating in fan culture (she was – and remains – a Justin Bieber diehard) means Eilish is an artist uniquely placed to understand the consequences of her every like and follow.
She was right to be wary – days after our interview, she posted a gallery of those images with the caption “i love girls”. With that post came speculation that Eilish was coming out, as well as accusations of queerbaiting her fans. In an early 2020 interview, Eilish remarked the comments on her Instagram were “way worse than [they’ve] ever been right now”, and that she’d stopped reading the comments altogether in an effort to preserve her mental health. She’s understandably guarded as we speak, often turning a mention of what she’s doing into how she thinks it will be received.
The intimacy that fuels fandom – that draws people in, makes them feel a singular kinship to an artist, and validates both the art and the maker – is a delicate tightrope. A give and take, it can be threatened when one side doesn’t want to give everything anymore, or the other feels like they’re under appreciated.
“You know exactly how it feels to be him in that situation,” O’Connell told his sister, after she first met Bieber and they hugged one another tightly in mutual appreciation born from wildly different contexts. As a fan, Eilish can name the hospital Bieber was born in (as well as the time and date). But as someone with a fan army of her own? She’s not sure she wants to give others all of herself. “It’s really weird how the world can see every aspect of your life and reminisce about [it]. It’s so weird.
“The internet brings up things from everybody’s past and I’m like: ‘Don’t you guys understand that everybody is incredibly embarrassed and ashamed about their past? Like, do you not think about the fact that maybe you’re embarrassed of your past, so maybe everybody else is embarrassed, too?’”
It’s a question many of us have been asking ourselves for decades – since long before Eilish was born – what does fame do to a person? Especially when it comes during their precious teen years, when they’re at their boldest and cleverest, so sure of everything except just how vulnerable they are to outside forces primed to steer them one way or another.
For teen pop singers, the warning signs and cautionary tales are many. Despite their sound and style being a world apart, in many ways Eilish is walking in the footsteps of Britney Spears: a teenager who rose to an unknowable stratosphere of celebrity on the strength of her melismatic singing voice and highly marketable image, whose sexuality was invariably a promotional tool, shield and – eventually – weapon used to destroy her.
THE INTERNET BRINGS UP THINGS FROM EVERYBODY’S PAST AND I’M LIKE: ‘DON’T YOU GUYS UNDERSTAND THAT EVERYBODY IS INCREDIBLY EMBARRASSED AND ASHAMED ABOUT THEIR PAST? … MAYBE YOU’RE EMBARRASSED OF YOUR PAST?”
Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird, emerges as a kind of hero in The World’s a Little Blurry. In one scene, she’s tenderly rubbing muscle cream into her daughter’s strained neck as she viciously advocates for Eilish’s right to represent herself truly, without putting too much stock in how people will respond or how her current views might change as she gets older. The conversation is about drugs – specifically Xanax, which Eilish takes a gentle stance on in the album track Xanny – but it takes Baird somewhere bigger, into the fears of all parents: “You’ve got a whole army of people trying to help you not decide to destroy your life like people in your shoes have done before,” she reminds her daughter.
“It’s really, really horrible what a lot of young women have gone through – I mean, to this day,” Eilish says as we discuss the treatment of Spears, who is on the receiving end of a wave of retroactive goodwill since the release of the 2021 documentary Framing Britney Spears.
“I didn’t have a team that wanted to fuck me over – which is really kind of rare, which [itself] is pretty fucked up. All I have to be is just grateful that I happened to have a good group of people around me that … didn’t want to just take advantage of me and do what people have done in the past.”
“I just want to protect her. I don’t want her to go through anything I went through,” Bieber said, through tears, when discussing Eilish with Apple Music host Zane Lowe in early 2020. He is among the many adult celebrities who see in Eilish a mirror to their past lives. The likes of Katy Perry and Spice Girls’ Mel C have taken their moment to hold Eilish by the shoulders – literally or metaphorically – and tell her now what they wish they’d known then.
“I feel like when something like that happens, your body kind of goes into shock and you can’t really actually look at it,” Eilish says of the advice she’s been given from these stars. She wishes she was able to “take it in more”, but compares it to the experience of receiving a compliment about how she looks: rather than being able to accept the gesture, she is instead fixated on the fact that someone is perceiving her and her appearance or existence in any way. Eilish doesn’t say it, but it’s likely these nuggets of advice are less about her and more about those offering them.
“I think about it all the time because people that are like global idols say these things to me and about me that are the most crazy shit I’ve ever heard!” she says. “I don’t know how to process it or believe it, you know, it doesn’t feel real to me. When people say, ‘Live in the moment’, it’s really hard … I feel like whenever I have tried to make it a point to be in the moment, all I’m thinking about is if I’m in the moment or not.”
“Her childhood went somewhere a long time ago,” her father, Patrick O’Connell, mused aloud – more to himself, than to Cutler’s camera – as a newly
permitted Eilish pulled out of the driveway of the family home in her new car, on her own, for the first time. That she frequently talks about what she did or thought or said “as a teenager” as if it was far in the past is reflective of how antithetical living in the moment is to someone whose life involves her career highlights being catalogued as ‘eras’, and whose work requires them to interrogate their immediate past and comment on it for interviews like this one.
On the opening night of Eilish’s 2020 world tour, she debuted a short film. Over footage of her emerging from darkness, slowly disrobing and then sinking into viscous, gurgling sludge, she says in a voiceover: “Some people hate what I wear Some people praise it Some people use it to shame others Some people use it to shame me.” For years, Eilish disguised her body in oversized layers. Designed to ensure her music – not her body – was the focus, the baggy hoodies and shorts had an unwanted effect, as some used it to hold Eilish up as the more virtuous version of the teen pop star we’ve come to know and expect. (Never mind that she was singing about being the ‘make your girlfriend mad tight/might-seduce-your-dad type’ at the time.) Since appearing on the cover of British Vogue recently in flesh-coloured silk, corsetry and latex, the snake has well and truly been eating its own tail, as the ‘new Billie’ has been placed in opposition to her old, streetwear-clad self. ‘… If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers I’m a slut. Though you’ve never seen my body, you still judge it and judge me for it.’ No matter what she’s wearing, Eilish wants it known that she has been in control all along.
Just as she did with her British Vogue editorial, Eilish collaborated with stylist Dena Giannini on her Vogue Australia cover. The pair was in dialogue together, this time round translating Eilish’s appreciation for the wind – its inherent poetry and movement, the way it bends and suspends time – into bold visuals. Wearing structural and tailored pieces that reference ‘the old Billie’, the shoot captures Eilish elevated, in between states, hovering – quite literally – until she finds a spot to land her feet. “It’s difficult for Billie to go anywhere without being approached by paparazzi and throngs of people,” Giannini explains, “so we created a dream world in the studio where she could float and fly in different scenes and environments. No matter the setting, or how the seasons or the conditions around her may change, Billie is supernatural and strong.”
“It really sucks for me to have the image be important,” Eilish tells me. “I wish I could just be like: ‘Oh, I don’t care. You guys do it.’ You know? But the thing is that I’ve done that before and it doesn’t make me feel good. It doesn’t satisfy me. So it’s a ton of work to try to control the image and you can only do it so much, because people are gonna think whatever they think. But it has been so vitally important to have the image that I want, and try to be seen how I want to be seen.”
“Of course, it didn’t really work,” she says resignedly and with a laugh, knowing now that wearing oversized streetwear and couture lingerie will elicit the same waves of analysis and critique, that whether she directs her work or cedes control to other people it’ll be picked apart all the same. “It’s really hard to control the narrative in a position like mine, right?” Eilish says. “You can’t really control it that much, but you can try.”
The desire to tell her story in her own words – and present only the image of herself she wants us to see – were motivating forces behind By- Billie Eilish. The photo book, published by Grand Central Publishing/Hachette this year, is an archive of memories and select anecdotes from Eilish’s life, from before her birth right up to early 2020, when Covid forced the cancellation of that world tour.
While actual words on the page are few, the story By- Billie Eilish tells is striking. ‘Back when I could use public transportation without being mobbed’, Eilish captions a photograph of herself, pillow pressed against her cheek and hoodie pulled over her silvery purple hair, as she sleeps on a train. A few pages earlier, a photo of her putting pen to paper is given the following context: ‘Signing my record deal! This was after a year of a million boring meetings with adults who had no idea how to talk to a 14-year-old.’ The book paints a vivid picture of a prodigious, era-defining musical talent, who is enjoying the spoils of fame while remaining wholly sceptical about the price of admission she had to pay to reach it.
At the Grammys in 2020, somewhere between winning her first and fifth award, Eilish was spotted in the crowd mouthing: “Please don’t let it be me.”
“I was very insecure about fame,” she said in a recent radio interview. “I didn’t want any of it, I wanted a normal life. All I did was complain.” That ceremony wasn’t all that long ago – she won a further two Grammys at this year’s ceremony – but in the life of a teenager and the context of a pandemic year, a little hindsight has welcomed a lot of growth.
“I’ve just been self-reflecting for a while – I feel like that’s all I was doing for the last year,” she says.
Her songs always sounded like they were burrowing deep into your brain and trying to dig their way out, but on Happier Than Ever that selfreflection has invited in a new kind of intimacy. No longer just looking into her own past, she’s now got her eyes on the horizon ahead, singing on My Future:
‘I’m in love
With my future
Can’t wait to meet her.’
“I’ve just been so much more comfortable in my own skin and confident with my writing and voice,” Eilish says of what the past year – and the process of making a record without deadlines or pressure or being 16 years old getting in her way. “I just have loved growing up and loved changing and getting older. It’s just been the best thing ever to grow up.”
“IT’S REALLY HARD TO CONTROL THE NARRATIVE IN A POSITION LIKE MINE, RIGHT? YOU CAN’T REALLY CONTROL IT THAT MUCH, BUT YOU CAN TRY”