Childhood
Billie grew up in Highland Park, an LA neighborhood. When not on the road, she still lives there with her older brother Finneas, who co-writes and produces Billie’s material and has had acting roles in TV shows such as Glee in the past. Her parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, also both actors, follow Billie on tour as much as they can.
“Highland Park has become popular now but growing up there, it was not like that at all,” she says of her upbringing. “There were gunshots and shit, y’know – it was really sketchy. People just have a different vision of how I was raised and that’s not correct. They think I’m just a little rich girl from LA.”
Billie Eilish
She loved acting in homemade films and also sang and danced whenever she found the chance.When she turned 8 years old, she joined a choir and sang with them for three years. By the time she was 11 years old, she was already writing and composing songs of her own. She also made several short films. She shot them on a camera and edited them on ‘iMovie,’ ‘Apple’s video-editing app. Other than acting and music, dance was another passion of hers. She took dance classes in her early teenage years. With a plethora of kills, she aimed at making a big career in the show business.
That family home is where Billie records with her older brother in a makeshift studio in his bedroom, something they’ve done for as long as she can remember. “When people ask, ‘When did you start singing?’, I think that’s a dumb question. I was always singing and making up melodies and that was normal for our family to do that. I’d meet families who didn’t do that and I’d think ‘what the hell?’”
Family
RELATIONSHIP WITH HER BROTHER
Eilish and her brother Finneas, who produces her music, collaborate on songwriting. She said Finneas, who also performs with her on live shows, is her partner in making music. Eilish and her brother “like to completely make up things and become characters” and “have songs that are really fictional”.
“We come from a place as outsiders because we’re still in our childhood bedrooms making music”
Finneas O’Connell
“ We try to write what everyone is thinking, but no one says. We try to say stuff that doesn’t have to be that deep: it could be something random, like “I feel sad,” but you say something way deeper in a certain way that makes sense, but you haven’t really thought about. […] We try to be really interesting with the lyrics and really conversational. ”
Billie Eilish
RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS FATHER
Billie Eilish has been interested in music since she was 8. Although the teen sensation didn’t plan to become professional, she got great training as a musician – mostly due to her father, who is a big fan of music. Patrick listened to recordings of various genres – starting from Beatles and ending with Avril Lavigne. He taught his son Finneas and daughter Billie to love music and in addition let them become homeschooled, so they had enough time to make their music experiments.
RELATIONSHIP WITH HER MOTHER
Billie’s father taught her to understand music, while her mother inspired her to create it. Maggie is a unique personality, who develops her own creativity – and helps her daughter and son create theirs.
Maggie can be proud of what she’s doing, but she is even more proud of the family she created. Each member of their family is a busy person, who visits auditions, takes part in new projects, but if they have some free evening, surely they gather around a dinner table and enjoy the meal in the circle of closest people.
Maggie and her husband made up a difficult decision to let her kids study at home. She explained, that such a kind of getting education helped her kids to hear themselves and to understand, what their calling was.
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