Billie Eilish scoops the Grammys
Self-made sensation Billie Eilish is the antidote to plastic pop, writes
Billie Eilish is something special. And if you hadn’t noticed before, well, there’s no getting away from her now. Last week at the Grammy Awards, the green-haired, angst-ridden, goth-styled teenage singer-songwriter scooped all the big prizes. Having turned 18 in December, Eilish is the youngest person ever to win five major Grammy awards in one fell swoop, including the prestigious Album of the Year. All of this came just over a week after it was announced that Eilish is the youngest person set to write and sing a James Bond theme. Pop is a youth-oriented business but Eilish is young enough to make even 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 her brother’s bedroom.
Eilish is a pop avatar for Generation Z, making music that blurs genre boundaries and carries moody messages of sensitive disaffection. Yet what’s really striking is not her youth, but her talent. There’s nothing gamine or cute about her. She’s not some hyperactive, sugar-coated, machinetooled, show-business creation being hyped beyond her station by a backroom music biz cabal. Eilish comes across as the real deal — an organic, original, actually eccentric artist.
Her songs mix up genres with a disregard for boundaries, blending hip-hop, R&B and synth pop with elements of folk, jazz and show tunes. It’s music that sounds as timeless as it is modern. Her lyrics are darkly witty, simultaneously serious and playful, swinging from nihilism to joy as she grapples with the anxieties of this fretful age we live in. Her vocal style can shift from coquettish to aggressive, ironic to sincere in a breath, with a quality of understatement that makes her sound wise beyond her years.
And yet Eilish is not quite the preternaturally gifted prodigy she appears, either. She is effectively the product of two talents, both raised in a hothouse creative atmosphere and working as one.
Her given name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell.
Her parents are actors and musicians who scraped along in the lower reaches of their professions with minor credits in TV shows and movies. Home was a small bungalow in a gentrifying district of LA. Her brother is Finneas O’Connell, four years her senior.
“We were a very crunchy sort of hippy-dippy family,” according to Finneas. The siblings were homeschooled, with no formal curriculum, regularly visiting museums and galleries and being encouraged to pursue creative endeavours. “Our stance was, general knowledge is all,” Patrick O’Connell told Rolling Stone magazine. “You need to know why the sky is blue, but you don’t need to memorise a bunch of esoterica you’ll never use.” Eilish passed her high school equivalency exam and graduated at 15.
Music was a lifelong hobby. She wrote her first song on the ukulele aged four, and joined the LA Children’s Chorus aged eight. But it was Finneas who actively pursued a career in music. As a teen actor, he appeared in four episodes of the final season of Glee (as Alistair) while leading local band The Slightlys. A multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, in 2014 Finneas produced a bedroom laptop recording of his younger sister singing one of his band’s songs, Ocean Eyes. When they posted the song on Soundcloud, it notched up tens of thousands of hits within weeks. Finneas was 18, Eilish 14.
Finneas brought in a manager he knew and started talking to record companies. And here, it all might have gone horribly wrong, or at least followed a more predictable path. In the modern music business, the formulaic approach to new artists involves putting them in recording studios with established teams of writers and producers.
“I hated it so much,” according to Eilish. “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.”
Instead, the siblings retreated back to their home, with Finneas nurturing his sister’s lyrical and melodic gifts.
Their insular approach has helped craft something unique, drawing on Eilish’s distinctive voice and personality. “Most people need to stand and open their diaphragms, but Billie sounds amazing just slumped on the bed,” says Finneas.
Eilish has some unusual quirks, a mild version of Tourette syndrome and she also experiences synaesthesia, a neurosensory condition that mixes up senses. Asked to describe her Grammy-winning song Bad Guy, she said: “It’s yellow, but also red, and the number seven. It’s not hot, but warm, like an oven. And it smells like cookies.”
There’s a boldness to Eilish’s persona that reflects the environment in which her talent has been nurtured. Though pretty, she’s avoided the sexualised way most young female pop stars are presented. Her unique style tends towards flamboyantly baggy sportswear and vivid goth makeup, everything oversized, overloud and impishly androgynous. For a social media selfie generation, Eilish’s refusal to play the glamour game has become defiantly inspirational.
In common with many teenagers, Eilish has grappled with depression and anxiety. These are the subjects and emotions her songs explore, rather than diverting towards romantic pop clichés. Yet her sassy brand of provocative pop is leagues ahead of her contemporaries. Young, smart and really rather wonderful, Billie Eilish is the pop star the world needs right now.