Billie Eilish Is Not Your Typical 17-Year-Old Pop Star. Get Used to Her. (original) (raw)

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Billie Eilish was 13 when she recorded her first viral hit, “Ocean Eyes,” at home with her brother. At 17, with a billion streams, she’s finally ready for the mainstream.Credit...Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times

A teenager with more than a billion plays already, Eilish will release her angsty debut album, and may very well become a household name.

March 28, 2019

LOS ANGELES — Even before she turned 17 in December, the singer Billie Eilish had accomplished nearly all of the modern prerequisites for pop stardom and then some: Her homemade songs, written only with her older brother, had been streamed more than a billion times on digital platforms; she’d played increasingly large sold-out concerts to delirious fans (and their patient parents); appeared with Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon; and collected some 15 million followers on Instagram.

Among those legions, many had already started to adopt the musician’s striking visual aesthetic: performatively dead eyes (bored, at best), hair dyed in shades of electric blue and pale purple, an all-baggy anti-silhouette — a collective middle finger to the strictures of teen-pop sex appeal. While still drawing befuddled stares from those outside of her demographic, Eilish’s mere presence has been known to get a certain subset of teenager hyperventilating — and spending hundreds of dollars on merchandise Eilish designed herself.

What the musician didn’t have along the way — and, to her credit, didn’t need — was the lightning strike of a memeable moment or a megahit, the most surefire ways to get noticed (and, potentially, soon forgotten) in today’s avalanche of content. In fact, only now, three years after the music industry caught a whiff of Eilish’s extremely fresh blood, was she even getting around to releasing her debut album.

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How Billie Eilish Is Redefining Teen-Pop Stardom

The fastest-rising pop star of the moment is 17 and writes off-kilter hits with her older brother from their parents’ house. Breaking down Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Friend,” we show a new model for making it big.

“Oh my God.” “Hey.” “Hello.” “What’s up?” “What’s up?” “Wait, I lost you for a second. You froze.” “[Singing] What do you want from me? Why don’t you run from me? What are you wondering? What do you know?” “When did you first start making music?” “Like, when I was like 11.” “How old are you?” “I’m 17 now. I feel like I’ve been 16 for, like, my whole life. So I’m 17 now. And then my brother, he started around 12. Me and him were both doing the same thing in the same house. And we just were like, we live three feet away from each other, why don’t we do this together? [Singing] “The creative production writing crew of Billie’s debut album’s two people. It’s just her and me. We wrote “Bury a Friend” on my 21st birthday. And we were playing Lollapalooza.” Singing: “I’ve never fallen from quite this high. Falling into your ocean eyes.” “I was, like, away from all my friends. I couldn’t have a birthday party or anything. And so I was like, well, I love making music, so let’s rent a studio.” “And I do remember having a feeling of, like, if we spend all day of my birthday, we better make something that, like, comes out.” “Finneas just started making this shuffle beat.” “So it’s [beat boxing]” [beat playing] “And I thought it was sick.” “It feels kind of like a football chant. It’s a really body- friendly rhythm, if you play it at the right tempo.” “Lyrically, where did you start?” “I really wanted to kind of do, like, a bunch of Ws in a row, like a bunch of questions. [Singing] What do you want from me? Why don’t you run from me? What are you wondering? What do you know? “And it was like, who is this character? And what the hell are they? And I think just, automatically, it was so clear that it was like the monster under your bed.” “And then I was like, that’d be great to write a song from that perspective.” “Why aren’t you scared of me? Why do you care for me? When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” “What was it about Billie’s voice that, even from an early age, you knew you wanted to work with her.” “Her emotionality. Every time she sang a lyric, I believed it. Billie would, like, sing a ‘Hotline Bling’ cover by Drake.” Singing: “You used to call me on my cellphone late night when you need my love.” “And I was just like, did you write this? And she was like, no, it’s ‘Hotline Bling.’ I was like, oh, wow. When you sing it, it feels like you wrote it, to me.” “Where do you normally write and record?” “We’ve written and recorded, like, 90 percent of everything we’ve ever made in my bedroom in my parents’ house. It’s really small, but it’s really cozy. Billie will sit on my bed. And I have, like, a lot of big Murakami pillows on my bed. She gets inspired. Like, we’ll track something. And I’ll sit, and I’ll work on production. Then we’ll work on lyrics together. I have a piano in there. We tend to work pretty long days. Mom will just, like, bring in food, because we’ll just keep going.” “Since he moved out, he’s lost, like, 15 pounds.” “Because you don’t bring snacks?” “He doesn’t eat enough.” “He doesn’t know how to cook.” “What was it like for you and your husband when your kids first started making music together?” “I mean, Billie was already singing all the time. And she had this beautiful voice.” Singing: “I don’t want to live in a world without you.” “And, like, every year she’d sing in the home school talent show.” Singing: “And I should know.” “Finneas had a band. And it was very all-consuming.” [Singing] And so, you know, it just was kind of this perfectly natural thing when Finneas suddenly was, like, hey, let me record you doing this song.” “Ready?” “Yeah. Are you?” “Maybe.” “We knew they were amazing. But nobody in their wildest dreams thought anyone would hear it except, you know, 20 friends.” [Cheering] [All singing] [Cheering] “All right, so you have the, like, sort of nursery rhyme hook melody. And you had some verses. When did you first start incorporating the spooky noises?” “I was in the dentist’s chair. And they were shaving off my Invisalign attachments. And it was this loud, like, [drill sound] [bleep]. And I thought it was so dope. And I pull out my phone immediately and pressed record.” [Drilling] “O.K. Rinse out and let’s take a peek.” “I found it very horrible to listen to. But it worked great in the song.” Singing: “Calling security. Keeping my head held down.” “As soon as there was a line about stepping on glass, I wanted to hear someone stepping on glass. And as soon as there was a line about a staple, I was, like, smacking a staple gun.” Singing: “Step on the glass. Staple your tongue.” “There is also one called nightmare horse.” [Sound effect playing] “Another one I like is Easy Bake Oven.” “Yeah. Singing: “Bury a friend.” That [bleep] yeah, it’s literally an Easy Bake Oven.” “And then I processed a ton of her going, like, ah! And then it ends up sounding like — [Sound effect] — I put that all over the song.” Singing: “Cleaning you out. Am I satisfactory?” “The song is so weird. It’s so weird. And we were, like, can you understand it and actually sing along? And so I remember, like, we tried a billion different things. And then we were, like, you know what, this needs a bridge.” “So how did it end up sounding? Can you do a little bit of it?” “Like — The debt I owe. Got to sell my soul. I can’t say no. No, I can’t say no.” Singing: “Then my limbs all froze. And my eyes won’t close. And I can’t say no. I can’t say no.” “I like it because it sounds like a Kurt Weill song almost, to me. Do you know what I mean?” “The structure is super weird. It’s like, hook —” “A verse. A pre-chorus.” “Drop.” “A hook.” “Verse two. Alternate verse two.” “Bridge.” “Pre-chorus. Drop.” “And then the hook.” “Normally songs are like, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Like, that’s pretty much the way that they are. There was, like, a point right at the end of working on the song where it was suddenly, like, much more traditional song structure. We were like, all right, well, now, we’re making, like, a pop record here. So I’m really glad it ended up being the weirder version of the song.” Singing: “Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now. Calling security, keeping my head held down.” “I don’t want to be in the pop world. I don’t want to be in the alternative world, or the hip-hop world, or the R&B world, or whatever [expletive], you know? I want it to be, like, what kind of music you listen to? Billie Eilish kind of music, you know? Like —” “Yeah.” “The other kind.” “I’m telling you all now. This is going to be the biggest artist, 2019.” “When the song came out, I said to Billie, I was, like, ‘I think we just get to do whatever we want, now.’ ” Singing: “I want to end me.” “They don’t remember this. But this is what happened. One of the other things I do in life is a lot of aerial, like, circus trapeze. So I was, like, can you guys write a song that has the perfect beat for my warm-up? And Finneas goes, oh, shuffle beat. Yeah, I’ve always wanted to make something with a shuffle beat. They don’t remember this story.” “That’s not how it happened.” “If she feels like she was part of the impetus for ‘Bury a Friend,’ like, more power to her. I don’t personally remember that being a part of the genesis of the song.” “But it happened.”

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The fastest-rising pop star of the moment is 17 and writes off-kilter hits with her older brother from their parents’ house. Breaking down Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Friend,” we show a new model for making it big.

To speak to her business team and label bosses is to hear the phrase “the biggest artist in the world” repeatedly, and in earnest, as a near-term goal. Dave Grohl, whose daughters are obsessed with Eilish, could only compare her to his old band: “The same thing is happening with her that happened with Nirvana in 1991,” he told a music business conference recently, holding up Eilish’s tough-to-categorize music as proof that “rock ’n’ roll is not even close to being dead.” The hip-hop producer Timbaland called this year, and next, hers for the taking.

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