Who is Billie Eilish?
She’s a teen – Billie has an endearing ‘fuck you’ attitude that only a handful of people can carry off. Want proof? After a long day of shooting, she’s been asked by US TV network NBC to film a spritely ‘Happy New Year’ message to be shown on their New Year’s Eve coverage. She tries and fails several times to nail the happy-go-lucky attitude the network wants. On the seventh try, she looks like she’s about to nail it. She reaches the end of the clip and blows a kiss to the camera to sign off, then immediately flips the bird directly to the camera. Her mum, Maggie Baird, who’s been with us all day, is exasperated – the clip is useless.
A couple of months after her first and only EP to date, ‘Don’t Smile At Me’, was released. Things were a little different then – she was polite and entertaining, but still settling into the touring mentality and adjusting to being in a new city every other night. When we travel to her hometown of LA to meet her again in December, there’s an unspoken acknowledgment that a seismic shift has taken place in her life and career.
Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.
In late 2015, Billie recorded dreamy ballad ‘Ocean Eyes’, a song that had originally been written by Finneas for his then-band The Slightly. The song was uploaded to Soundcloud and she sent it to her dance teacher, who helped choreograph a routine for a video. The track went viral, landed her a manager and was re-released by Interscope a year later in November 2016. To date, it has had 132 million streams on Spotify, and the video a further 55 million on YouTube.
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