THE REAL DEAL
Billie Eilish built her pop empire from her own bedroom, Neil Mccormick writes.
Billie Eilish is special. And if you hadn’t noticed before, well, there’s no getting away from her now. On Sunday night at the Grammy Awards, the greenhaired, angst-ridden, goth-styled teenage singer-songwriter scooped all the big prizes.
Having just turned 18 in December, Eilish is the youngest person to win five major Grammy Awards in one fell swoop, and the youngest winner of the prestigious album of the year.
All of this came just over a week after it was announced Eilish is set to be the youngest-ever person to write and sing a James Bond theme.
Pop is a youth-oriented business, but Eilish is young enough to make millennials feel old.
She only got her driving licence last year and still lives with her parents in the small Los Angeles house where she was raised. Her Grammy-winning debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, was entirely written and recorded in the place where her pop empire was built — her bedroom.
Eilish is a talisman for Generation Z, making genre-blurring music with moody messages of sensitive disaffection. Eilish comes across as the real deal: an organic, original and eccentric artist.
Her songs meld hip-hop, R&B and synth pop with folk, jazz and show tunes; the lyrics are darkly witty, simultaneously serious and playful, swinging from nihilistic to joyous. Her vocal style can shift from coquettish to aggressive, ironic to sincere in a breath.
And yet Eilish is not quite the preternaturally gifted prodigy she appears, either. Because she is effectively the product of two talents, raised in a hothouse creative atmosphere.
Her parents are both actors and musicians, Maggie Baird and
Patrick O’connell, who scraped along in the lower reaches of their professions (“mostly unemployed” according to her father), with minor credits in TV shows and movies including The X-files, Six Feet Under and The West Wing. Home was a two-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles. Eilish shared her bedroom with brother Finneas, four years her senior.
The siblings were homeschooled, with no formal curriculum, regularly visiting museums and galleries and being encouraged to pursue creative endeavours. Eilish graduated at 15.
“Our whole stance was, general knowledge is all,” Patrick told Rolling Stone magazine.
“You need to know why the sky is blue, but you don’t need to memorize a bunch of esoterica you’ll never use.”
Music was a lifelong hobby. She wrote her first song on the ukulele at age four, joined the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus at age eight and trained to be a dancer before suffering a hip injury at 14. But it was Finneas who pursued a career in music, appearing in four episodes of Glee and fronting a local band.
A multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, in 2014 Finneas produced a bedroom laptop recording of his sister singing one of his band’s songs, Ocean Eyes: intended as a project for her dance class, it started out as “a big, soaring electric guitar and drum thing” but was gradually stripped back to a dreamy, ethereal ballad. When they posted the song on Soundcloud, a music site, it notched up tens of thousands of hits within weeks. Finneas was 18, Billie just 14. Finneas brought in a manager and started talking to record companies. Here, it all might have followed a more predictable path. In the music business, the formulaic approach to new artists involves putting them in recording studios with teams of writers and producers.
“I hated it so much,” Eilish told Rolling Stone. “It was always these 50-year-old men who’d written these ‘big hit songs!’ and then they’re horrible at it ... No one listened to me, because I was 14 and a girl.”
So the siblings retreated to their bedroom. “It’s crazy,” Finneas said. “Most people need to stand and open their diaphragms, but Billie sounds amazing just slumped on the bed.”
Eilish has some unusual quirks. As a child, she was diagnosed with a mild version of Tourette syndrome, which manifests as small tics when she is stressed, including bulging eyes and head twitches.
She also experiences synesthesia, a neurosensory condition that conflates senses.
Eilish has grappled with depression and anxiety. These are the subjects and emotions her songs explore. Yet her lyrics are not morose or self-indulgent but full of wit and empathy, catapulting her sassy brand of provocative pop several leagues ahead of her contemporaries.
Most people need to stand and open their diaphragms, but Billie sounds amazing just slumped on the bed.