billie eilish biography english

Billie Eilish

Musician Billie Eilish became a pop superstar by way of her distinctive musical and fashion sensibilities and songs like “Ocean Eyes,” “Bad Guy,” and “Therefore I Am.”

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2001-present

Latest News: Billie Eilish Makes History with Oscar Win

Billie Eilish made Academy Award history on March 10 with her win for Best Original Song for “What Was I Made For?”

Eilish and O’Connell performed the song live during the ceremony, drawing a standing ovation from the audience. “What Was I Made For?” also won Song of the Year earlier in 2024 at the Grammy Awards .

Listen to “What Was I Made For?” on Amazon Music , Apple Music , or Spotify .

Quick Facts

Early life and family, brother finneas o‘connell, albums and songs, clothes and style, tours and documentary, personal and social issues, who is billie eilish.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Billie Eilish was barely a teenager when her song “Ocean Eyes” became a viral hit. She teamed with her brother, Finneas O’Connell, to create the tracks for the breakout EP Don’t Smile at Me and the smash album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? , establishing the artist as a global sensation and seven-time Grammy winner before the age of 20. To date, she has won nine Grammy Awards and is known for the songs “Bad Guy,” “Everything I Wanted,” and “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie movie soundtrack.

FULL NAME: Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell BORN: December 18, 2001 BIRTHPLACE: Los Angeles, California ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius

Billie Eilish was born on December 18, 2001, in Los Angeles. Her full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell. Her first name is in honor of her maternal grandfather, William; the second was inspired by a conjoined twin her parents saw in a documentary; and the third came from the insistence of her older brother, Finneas.

Billie’s parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, were longtime actors before joining their teenage daughter’s professional team. Raised in a two-bedroom house in Highland Park, where she and her brother were homeschooled, Eilish was encouraged to pursue her interests in dance, gymnastics, horseback riding and especially music. She learned to play the Beatles' "I Will" on the ukulele at age 6; joined Los Angeles Children's Chorus at age 8; and began writing songs in earnest by age 11, her talents nurtured through her mother's songwriting class. Eilish has said her first "real" song, "Fingers Crossed," was penned around that time after watching an episode of The Walking Dead.

The elder sibling by four-and-a-half years, Finneas became his sister's indispensable collaborator, co-writer and producer, the pair continuing to compose and record together from a bedroom in their Highland Park home even after Eilish's emergence as a global phenomenon.

"Probably 75-80 percent of the songs are written with us sitting next to each other at a piano or with a guitar, singing a melody together," he told Variety in 2019. "It's like a relay race — we really feel like we both have to kill our portion of it to get to the finish line."

Finneas, who released the solo EP Blood Harmony in October 2019, has also co-written and produced tracks for other popular artists like Justin Bieber , Selena Gomez and Camila Cabello.

“Ocean Eyes”

Originally written for Finneas' band, "Ocean Eyes" sprung to life when infused with a 13-year-old Eilish's ethereal vocals and became a viral sensation upon being uploaded to SoundCloud in November 2015. A second SoundCloud offering, "Six Feet Under," was followed by her summer 2016 signing with Darkroom Records, which re-released both tracks as singles later in the year.

Don’t Smile at Me

Eilish's popularity surged with the steady unveiling of singles from her August 2017 EP, Don't Smile at Me , with tracks like "Bellyache," "Copycat" and "My Boy" showcasing her willingness to explore dark and prickly terrain amid a stream of shifting but danceable electronic beats. Don't Smile at Me peaked at an impressive No. 14 on the Billboard 200 in January 2019, around which time Eilish became the youngest artist to top 1 billion streams on Spotify.

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and “Bad Guy”

The March 2019 arrival of Eilish's full-length album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? came with the simultaneous release of "Bad Guy," the song that became the first megahit of her career. Still, the chart-topping album retained the early hallmarks of her unique style, from the whispered ruminations on drug use in "Xanny" to the jarring imagery of "Bury a Friend." Eilish also displayed her theatrical sensibilities in the riveting videos for those and other tracks; "When the Party's Over" shows the artist singing through the black liquid pouring from her eyes, while "You Should See Me in a Crown" features a spider crawling from her mouth.

James Bond Soundtrack: “No Time to Die”

In January 2020, it was announced that the 18-year-old Eilish had become the youngest artist to write and record the title track for a James Bond movie. The ominous ballad "No Time to Die" landed the following month, before the film of the same name was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and became her first single to reach the top spot in the U.K. The song would eventually win the Oscar for Best Original song in 2022.

Eilish has also contributed to the soundtracks of other projects; "Bored" and "Lovely" appeared on the controversial Netflix teen series 13 Reasons Why , and "When I Was Older" was among the musical selections that accompanied Alfonso Cuarón's 2018 drama Roma .

“What Was I Made For?”

A collaboration with her brother, Finneas O’Connell, “What Was I Made For?” is Eilish’s latest hit. The song, written for the 2023 Barbie movie, reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the siblings earned Golden Globe, Grammy, and Academy Award nominations for their work.

Eilish began earning her first major accolades in 2019 when she claimed wins at the MTV Video Awards and American Music Awards and was named Billboard ’s Woman of the Year . But her big moment came at the January 2020 Grammys , when she became the first woman and the second artist overall to sweep the big four categories of Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist, adding Best Pop Vocal Album for good measure.

Eilish won two awards at the 2021 Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year for “Everything I Wanted.”

In January 2024, Eilish took home her second Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song - Motion Picture for “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie (2023). At the 2024 Grammy Awards, the song earned Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, two trophies for Song of the Year and Best Song Written For Visual Media. “What Was I Made For?” was also nominated and won at the 2024 Academy Awards for Best Original Song.

Eilish became known for wearing oversized clothing, a style born from discomfort with her body that bolstered her appeal as the antithesis of the polished pop starlet. She met the demand for her signature apparel with the early 2018 launch of her online shop, Blohsh, and established her own niche in the fashion world by signing with Next Models later that year.

The artist embarked on her first headlining tour to back Don't Smile at Me in fall 2017 and returned to the road for much of the next two years, though her 2020 Where Do We Go? Tour was cut short and eventually canceled by the Covid-19 pandemic. Eilish has also drawn attention for performances at some of the industry's biggest festivals, including Coachella and Glastonbury in 2019.

Her whirlwind schedule and life inside the eye of the storm became the focal point of the February 2021 documentary Billie Eilish: The World's A Little Blurry , which also features childhood footage, interviews with family members and the singer putting together her debut album.

A life-long vegetarian, Eilish made the transition to a vegan diet in 2014.

Eilish has been open about her struggles with mental health, telling Gayle King in early 2020 that she considered suicide even as she was being fêted the next big thing in pop music. The singer also revealed in November 2018 that she was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome as a child.

Outspoken in her concern for environmental issues, Eilish joined actor Woody Harrelson in 2019 for a video that highlighted the dangers of climate change. She has also urged her fan base to become active voters, notably pairing with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on an initiative to register high school students in 2018.

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Billie Eilish, the neo-goth, chart-topping teenage pop star, explained

From SoundCloud to Coachella, Eilish has paved her own path to become a generational icon.

by Charlie Harding

In 2016, 14-year-old Billie Eilish, a Los Angeles-based dancer and musician, uploaded her first song, “ Ocean Eyes ,” to SoundCloud late one night. She had only intended for one person to listen to it: her dance teacher. When she woke up the next day, the song had gone viral on the streaming platform.

It inspired myriad, unofficial remixes, some of which caught the ear of the recording industry. The teen who had recorded a song for fun in her bedroom had suddenly signed with Darkroom and Interscope Records. From there, things took off. In the spring of 2017, her song “ Bored ” was featured in the first season of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why , and in August, she dropped her critically acclaimed EP, Don’t Smile At Me .

Now, a mere three years since that fateful SoundCloud upload, she has just released her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and dominated a night at Coachella with a performance critics called “ a triumph .” Now 17, Eilish has already crafted one of 2019’s most critically and commercially successful releases. Even months after its release, her song “Bad Guy” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 , displacing Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” from the top slot after a 19 week run at the top of the charts. Eilish is a certified teenage pop star — a part she has had zero interest in playing by the rules since day one.

Billie Eilish is the first artist born in the 21st century to top the Billboard 200 — and she’s reinventing what chart success looks like

Eilish is full of contradictions. Her music is both brooding (“ When the Party’s Over ”) and bitingly satirical (“ Wish You Were Gay ”). It blends disparate styles: pop, EDM, industrial, trap, and even jazz. Its eclectic palette is surprising, yet cohesive, held together by her distinctively quiet vocals and irreverent delivery. Even without fitting neatly into any category, her debut album broke multiple records in just one week: Most notably, 12 of the 13 songs from the album are charting on the Billboard Hot 100, the most ever for a female musician . And she has the second-highest first-week album sales of 2019 — behind industry titan Ariana Grande .

That Eilish is hot on Grande’s heels reads as ironic. Unlike Grande and other millennial pop stars — Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez — Eilish was never a child actor backed by a television network. Instead, she relied on the independence of user-generated platforms, which have offered new trajectories into pop stardom for the first generation of kids to grow up in the digital age.

Take YouTube, for example: Justin Bieber, Alessia Cara, and Charlie Puth all amassed early, dedicated fandoms by posting covers to their personal channels, gaining viral traction through their sheer, unadorned musical talent — and these digital fanbases minted each of them a record deal. Eilish got her start on SoundCloud, a platform primarily known for giving rise to DIY hip-hop artists , like Lil Peep and Juice WRLD . It is atypical for a pop act to find overnight success on SoundCloud. But Eilish isn’t a typical pop star.

Pop artists signed to a major label usually work with teams of songwriters and producers. Eilish, who was born Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, instead co-writes and produces music with her 21-year-old brother, Finneas O’Connell. O’Connell, who was homeschooled with his sister throughout childhood, thinks their brother-sister connection helps their music stand out.

“We come from a place as outsiders because we’re still in our childhood bedrooms making music,” O’Connell said of their dynamic in a recent episode of Vox’s podcast Switched on Pop , which I co-host. He described their process as “extremely blunt”; as siblings, they can speak directly to each other about without having to step around an outside producer.

For Eilish, this creative freedom is essential. “What the hell would the point be if I was just creating something that somebody else wanted me to create that I had no say in?” she told Vanity Fair in a 2018 video interview.  

Eilish’s music subverts genre, musical form, narrative perspective, and even gender roles

In an extremely nonscientific poll we conducted on Switched on Pop , three Billie Eilish fans, ages 9, 12, and 16, all had the same thing to say about her: “I love her, she’s so different .” That’s the perfect word to use for her, O’Connell said; the siblings actively cultivate that sensibility through omnivorous music consumption, drawing inspiration from countless artists.

“We’re listening to everything — all genres, new music, old music, and it all just gets sort of synthesized and boiled down into a broth that we make,” he said. “Rather than try to imitate any individual sound, O’Connell describes their songwriting process as a sort of alchemy, saying, “If you are inspired by something, and you try to do a little bit of it, and it sounds like a mistake, and you double down on your mistake and do something different, that stuff’s really exciting.”

The result does sound “different,” but understanding how requires engaging with Eilish’s music.

The most striking characteristic of Eilish’s music is her voice. She often sings in a muted whisper, with a quiet confidence that has the confessional quality of a teenage LiveJournal. At other times, she croons verses or belts her chorus, her voice always filled with melancholy. O’Connell explains that he produces their music to emphasize Billie’s unique sound: “It’s all low end, with no instruments overlapping with her voice.” Letting her voice ring out is key to her appeal.

Eilish’s voice is always shapeshifting, as are her songs. She frequently sings from changing points of view. “ Bad Guy ” finds her mocking toxic masculinity — “So you’re a tough guy [...] chest-always-so-puffed-up guy” — and then reverses roles by contorting into a villainous baritone.

And in “ Bury A Friend ,” she sings from the perspective of the monster under her bed: “Why aren’t you scared of me? Why do you care for me? / When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” The unsettling lyrics are set against a broken song form with strange alternate verses and a bridge placed untraditionally after a verse, rather than immediately following a penultimate chorus. The effect is destabilizing, and yet still accessible to the average listener — the song has been streamed more than 300 million times between YouTube and Spotify.

But Eilish’s music contains more than caricatures. Part of her appeal is that she speaks to the common anxieties of her generation. In a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair , Eilish gave her assessment of the present: “It’s been pretty dark lately — the world, I mean.” Her album addresses the existential fear of climate change (“hills burn in California”); the scourge of teen suicide (“The friends I’ve had to bury / They keep me up at night”); and the teen sobriety trend , which she rejects in the song “Xanny”: “I’m in their secondhand smoke / Still just drinking canned Coke / I don’t need a Xanny to feel better.”

She challenges normative expectations of what a female pop star can sound like, look like, and publicly say

What truly solidifies Eilish’s status as a sneering generational icon, her music aside, is made clear by her social media feed. Her Instagram captions can be sinister (“every inch of my tar black soul), flippant (“buy this shirt or die”), and nonsensical (“i feel like half a pistachio shell”). Eilish doesn’t care to impress, instead sharing her thoughts as if on impulse, no matter how crass or controversial. (She doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook much — though perhaps that’s fitting for a teen these days .)

In an interview with Galore , she described her philosophy toward social media as, “do whatever the fuck you want; don’t care, I mean care a little bit, but don’t; post whatever you want … bad looks good; [and] as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, do whatever the fuck you want.” And it’s working: Her Instagram following has grown from 250,000 to more than 15 million followers in just over a year. She (devilishly) follows exactly 666 people, using the medium itself as a canvas for a cheeky in-joke.  

Eilish’s personal style is what is most disorienting and subversive for a Billboard chart-topper: ever-changing shades of blue hai r paired with a skater streetwear-meets-haute couture tomboy look, which she describes as “super-cheap meets fancy.” Wearing baggy pants, spiked necklaces, and neon Louis Vuitton tracksuits, she rejects the sexy selfie cliché that can dominate Instagram feeds. Eilish is her own, disaffected-punk stylist, combining fashions to complement her genre-bending music — another label she rejects, even telling Billboard , “I hate the idea of genres.”

Her peculiar look and sound have garnered far-reaching attention beyond that of music fans. She’s collaborated with Japanese artist and tastemaker Takashi Murakami on apparel and music videos, including her latest: a haunting, slightly grotesque CG-animated interpretation of “You Should See Me in a Crown;” and Spotify worked with her to curate the Billie Eilish Experience , an interactive pop-up art event that coincided with the launch of her album. This physical manifestation of her music was curated, fittingly, by Billie Eilish herself.

But her highbrow collaborations are balanced with teen-friendly pop culture references. The song “ My Strange Addiction ” is composed of multiple sound clips from The Office , beloved by the Netflix generation . “ You Should See Me In A Crown ,” which boasts about taking the pop throne while subverting the male gaze, lifted its title from a line in the BBC show and Tumblr phenom Sherlock . One of her earliest songs, 2015’s “ Fingers Crossed ,” is about a zombie apocalypse, inspired by The Walking Dead . Horrific sound effects are major elements of her music: slashing knives, buzzing drills, and the somehow haunting sound of a child’s Easy Bake Oven bell.

She brings these horrifying and pop references to life in her video for “When The Party’s Over,” her most-streamed song on Spotify. The video, inspired by a piece of fan art, is set in an all white-white psychiatric ward, like the sterile hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . Eilish is seated in a metal chair, also wearing white, draped in blue hair and silver chains that hang from her neck. She sings quietly along to a delicate piano waltz, mourning the loss of her relationship with grim metaphors: “Tore my shirt to stop you bleedin’ / But nothin’ ever stops you leavin’.”

And then, the video shifts from discomforting to outright shocking: Eilish picks up a glass, full of black ink, and gulps it down. She begins to cry, as black tears roll down her face. They begin to form a river that runs down her neck, staining her shirt with Rorschach-like inkblots. We now have only more questions about Eilish: Did she really drink down that ink? Is she okay? Did she ruin her vision?

Eilish doesn’t care about following trends, but they still play a part in her rise to fame

Any subject is game for Eilish. Love and depression, high fashion and fast fashion, pop and hip-hop; Eilish blends all of these into her music and image to reflect a postmodern society, which her generation remakes on the daily. As much as she comments on contemporary life, she is also a product of it. Only in the last decade could a teenager have a home studio with the capacity to make radio-ready recordings, distribute songs for free online, and even interact directly with her fans through her phone (she responds directly to covers of her songs on YouTube ).

There are countless aspiring teenage musicians producing remixes on SoundCloud or uploading YouTube videos in their bedrooms, but Eilish’s disregard for conventions in music and fashion is exactly what has captured the attention of Generation Z. There is plenty of spectacle to her art, but it’s tempered by her self-conscious lyrics and young, intimate vocals. Eilish comes across as an honest manifestation of the candid, sometimes twisted, interior life of a teenager in 2019, not a subversive lifestyle brand produced by a marketing team.

When the New York Times asked her, on the heels of her first album release, what kind of music she wants to make going forward, she was blunt: “Billie Eilish music, the other kind of music.” What comes next for that genre? We’ll just have to see when the party’s over.

Charlie Harding is the co-host of Switched on Pop , Vox’s podcast about the making and meaning of popular music. It’s available on all podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Listen to Switched on Pop break down Billie Eilish’s album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and speak with Finneas O’Connell about the making of her latest single, “Bad Guy,” here .

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Hey dudes: ian hunter and mott the hoople’s golden age of rock’n’roll, ‘what becomes of the brokenhearted’: jimmy ruffin’s lovelorn classic, ‘sweet sweetback’s baadasssss song’: how melvin van peebles lit the blaxploitation fire, ‘mental train’: all aboard for mott the hoople’s island years, ‘hello mary lou’: the ricky nelson hit cut by creedence, led zeppelin & queen, ‘fm (no static at all)’: steely dan’s soundtrack single rides the airwaves, master p to release two 90s lps on vinyl, vengaboys announce ‘the greatest hits collection (we like to party)’, two classic 1990s snoop dogg albums are getting vinyl reissues, eminem interpolates steve miller band on new song, ‘houdini’, beastie boys announce 30th anniversary edition of ‘ill communication’, snow patrol announce new album ‘the forest is the path’, disney unveils new teaser trailer for ‘moana 2’, how billie eilish went from bedroom musician to global icon in 8 steps.

Billie Eilish has gone from tinkering in her bedroom to racking up billions of streams worldwide, setting a new path to fame in a post-genre landscape.

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Pop wunderkind Billie Eilish has already passed the litmus test of being the next big thing: young people hang on her every word and their parents have no clue who she is. But all of that changed in 2019.  Since releasing her viral hit ‘Ocean Eyes’ in 2015, Billie Eilish has become one of the biggest pop stars in the world following her debut album  WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?.  After becoming the voice of her generation, Eilish has been embraced by the old guard as well, as her numerous Grammy wins can attest to. Eilish has signalled a new path to fame in a post-genre landscape.

So how does one go from tinkering in your bedroom to racking up billions upon billions of music streams and over 45 million fans on Instagram? To celebrate her 18th birthday, we look back on Billie Eilish’s eight steps to fame…

Listen to the best of Billie Eilish on Apple Music and Spotify .

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Red hot chili peppers add rare early music videos to youtube, do it yourself.

‘Ocean Eyes’ was a game-changer for Eilish, but it wasn’t the only song the sibling duo self-released before signing to the UK-based A&R company Platoon, and, later, Interscope in 2016. Even with major-label backing, however, Eilish continues to write and record with her brother in his bedroom studio, where they create her debut album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? She’s involved in all aspects of her career, from tour visuals to album cover and merch design, and maintaining her massive social-media presence.

Defy labels

Billie Eilish’s success is very much predicated on how streaming has influenced music tastes. It’s the reason she’s able to notch over a billon streams before even releasing her first album. From her first single to her 2017 EP Don’t Smile at Me, Eilish continues to defy convention and genre. She’s been painted a pop star, but what is pop nowadays and do her fans even care? From the macabre dance hit ‘bury a friend’ to the cowboy twang of ‘bellyache’ and the fragile ballad ‘lovely’, featuring R&B star Khalid, Eilish has found success delivering a new sound with each release while avoiding being pigeonholed. The beauty of Eilish is there is no Svengali-type manager or label executive trying to mould her image or sound to fit some preconceived idea of what a pop star should look or sound like.

Be an open book

Social media and a 24/7 news cycle have required all musicians to be more transparent with their lives than ever before. As Cardi B and Ariana Grande have proven, fans connect to an artist’s personality just as much as their musical output. In Eilish’s case, this is especially true due to her age. Her teenage fans see her more as a peer than an enigmatic idol. She talks about her struggles with Tourette syndrome, her increasing fame and losing friends like the late rapper XXXTentacion. Eilish has the aloofness and self-assurance of a SoundCloud rapper more than a groomed pop starlet. She often talks about letting her music speak for itself and allowing art to be open to interpretation. “One of my favourite parts about making music is that people take it in the way that they take it, and I have no control over that,” she told Hot Ones host Sean Evans.

Stay grounded

Even with the gruelling schedule of a global pop star and living under the constant scrutiny of the press, Billie maintains the silliness of being a teenager. From talking about her orthodontics to singing along in the car with her friends to Panic! At The Disco, Eilish retains some semblance of teenage life. That’s also allowed her to tap into her unbridled imagination and write songs about experiences she’s never had. “When you’re little, songwriting is the same thing as playing a game. You can be whatever you want,” she told Fader .

Be original

Citing influences like Tyler, The Creator, PARTYNEXTDOOR and 21 Savage, it’s clear that Billie Eilish aspires to carve out a singular career as a musician and creative at large. She’s extremely fashion-conscious in the sense that she’s aware of trends – and then does the opposite. Her expressive style reflects her love of Japanese anime, streetwear and 90s rave culture. Both visually and musically, Eilish stands apart from her peers. What other 18 year olds are singing about napalm skies and burying their friends? Inspired by her love of horror and actual nightmares, Eilish’s melancholic pop blurs the lines between reality and a dream state.

Absorb everything

From a young age the home-schooled Eilish had a lot of freedom to explore every creative impulse and was encouraged to consume all kinds of art. Her father would make her mixtapes featuring everything from Green Day to The Beatles, and, aged nine, Eilish would later perform ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ at her home-school talent show. As she grew up and developed her own musical tastes, she fell in love with hip-hop and other genre-defying artists like Earl Sweatshirt and Childish Gambino.

Keep creating

Like many of her peers, Eilish is of the generation who finds her voice in real time. Instead of keeping everything confined to a journal, her artistic progression is chronicled online. Eilish is very much a product of the internet, both in what she has been exposed to and how she interacts with fans. In an era when artists are expected to be multi-hyphenate, Eilish is poised to conquer more than just the music world. She talks about starting her own fashion line and even directing her own music videos in the near future. Her collaboration with famed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for the animated video ‘you should see me in a crown’ reveals an artist who likes to push buttons and has a whole career ahead of her to do so.

Billie Eilish’s WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?    can bought here .

February 14, 2020 at 6:52 am

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Billie Eilish

• Born December 18 , 2001 · Los Angeles, California, USA
• Birth name Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell
• Height 5′ 3½″ (1.61 m)
• Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell is an American musician, singer and actress from Los Angeles. She performed hit songs such as "Bad Guy" and "No Time to Die," which was used in the James Bond film of the same name. She provided ADR for Ramona and Beezus, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules and X-Men: Apocalypse. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian Frates
• Children No Children
• Parents Maggie Baird Patrick O'Connell
• Relatives Finneas O'Connell (Sibling) Brian Baird (Aunt or Uncle)
• Baggy clothing and chains
• On February 9, 2020, she performed at the Academy Awards during the In Memoriam sequence with a song "Yesterday" along with her elder brother Finneas O'Connell .
• Became the youngest artist in history to write and perform a James Bond theme, which she did for No Time to Die (2021) .
• She won five Grammy Awards in 2020 becoming the second person (after Christopher Cross in 1981), first woman and the youngest person ever to win the four main Grammy categories, Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year in the same year.
• She began singing at a young age and began writing songs at age 11, taking after her elder brother Finneas O'Connell , who was already writing, performing, and producing his own songs with his band.
• Billie was named after her maternal grandfather, Bill Baird who died before she was born. Her middle name, Eilish is the Irish form of Elizabeth. Pirate came from Finneas because he really wanted her to be named that, Baird is her mother's maiden name and O'Connell is her paternal family surname. Originally, she was going to be named Eilish Pirate O'Connell.
• I've always done whatever I want and always been exactly who I am.
• In the public eye, girls and women with strong perspectives are hated. If you're a girl with an opinion, people just hate you. There are still people who are afraid of successful women, and that's so lame.
• I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I've always been like that; I don't smile in any pictures.
• Me and my brother get along super well. We're, like, best friends. So we'll stay up until, like, five just talking because we get along and, you know, it's cool. And he respects my opinions, and I respect his, even if we don't have the same opinions, but a lot of the time we do.
• In real life, I'm a really smiley person. I smile when I talk and I laugh.

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Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter who blends ethereal indie electro-pop with dark thematic tones.

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The Billie Eilish Divide

‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ reveals a truth about the 22-year-old musician: that despite her dyed hair and streetwear style, Eilish’s brand of pop stardom is actually rather traditional

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You’ve probably seen a lot of Billie Eilish lately. Maybe you raised your eyebrows at her, um, intimate Rolling Stone cover story from last month. (“I should have a PhD in masturbation,” went one of her viral quotes from the interview.) If you’re a Swiftie (or a Taylor Swift hater), surely you saw her March Billboard interview in which she criticized artists who make multiple vinyl variants of the same record. (“I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is,” she said, never mentioning Swift by name but still ending up on the receiving end of some Swiftie blowback . If the shoe fits!) Or maybe earlier this year you felt like you were seeing her perform her Barbie soundtrack contribution, “What Was I Made For?,” on an award show every other time you turned on the TV. And even if you didn’t watch, maybe you at least heard about how Eilish won awards at all those shows.

At 22 years old, Eilish is already a pop music veteran. That’s partially because of how young she was when she started (Eilish posted her breakthrough single, “Ocean Eyes,” on SoundCloud in 2015, when she was 14), but also because she’s carved out a piece of cultural capital that few artists in recent years have achieved. Your parents have probably heard of her, while the same maybe couldn’t be said for someone such as, say, Dua Lipa . Apple Music just called her debut record, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? , the 30th-best album of all time , beating out the likes of Ready to Die , London Calling , and The Velvet Underground & Nico . On paper, the success she’s settled into even feels old-fashioned: an awards darling who swept the Grammys one year and became the youngest two-time Oscar winner another year, often making signature songs for blockbuster movies and seen on TV and in print media.

But when Eilish first rose to fame in the late 2010s, you might not have foreseen that she’d become one of modern pop music’s most decorated and enduring stars in the conventional sense. She emerged as kind of a cultural curiosity—who was this teenage girl in oversized streetwear hanging out with XXXTentacion and whispering on all of her songs? Her fashion in particular was subject to way more attention than her music was at the time, and often with the icky underlying sentiment of: “Why would a pretty girl choose to dress like this?” (So, of course, everyone was extremely normal about it when Eilish adopted a more classic Hollywood glam look around the time of her second album, Happier Than Ever .) At the beginning of her ascendance, she put out macabre music videos and sometimes competed in “alternative” genre categories at award shows . Eilish was dubbed “pop’s biggest weirdo,” a “triumph of the weird,” a “neo-goth ” (in a frankly unneeded Eilish explainer), and, most importantly, “the voice of Gen Z.” All of this seemed to suggest that she was an artist who wouldn’t fit so neatly into the old guard of pop’s mainstream, who wouldn’t end up with a music career most resembling that of Adele .

Compare Eilish to her peer Olivia Rodrigo, whose music is pretty blatantly the type of nostalgia play that the Recording Academy would typically eat up. Both have some post-Lorde and post–Lana Del Rey writerly flourishes in their songwriting, and both have been subject to the “voice of a generation” rhetoric, yet even when Rodrigo was favored to sweep the Grammys the same way Eilish had, she came away with just one general-field win for Best New Artist. Because Eilish had such a complete aesthetic as soon as she came on the scene, she felt like more of a capital-A Artist from the get-go; the Academy hasn’t quite connected with Rodrigo in the same way.

Last Friday, Eilish released her third record, Hit Me Hard and Soft , which begs the question, where does the actual music fit into all of this? Of course, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Even with all of the hand-wringing over her bold aesthetic choices, the music itself was never actually experimental, nor does it seem like she or her producer and brother, Finneas, intended it to be. Take that first single, “Ocean Eyes”: a dream-pop ballad that sounds of a piece with the kinds of tracks that were getting big on Tumblr at the time and ended up on the soundtrack of a YA novel adaptation . Or the lauded “What Was I Made For?,” another ballad that soundtracks the reflective scene in Barbie ’s final act. On her biggest hit to date, the inescapable 2019 jam “Bad Guy,” she pushed the envelope with a bass-heavy beat and lyrics such as “bruises on both my knees for you,” but the result was still tame enough to be used to promote a children’s movie . There was some media attention regarding the use of a dental drill and staple gun on “Bury a Friend,” which is probably her most technically “weird” song, but it’s still all in service of a catchy pop track that could also serve as the theme for the newest season of True Detective . There’s only so much experimentation you can expect in a mainstream pop record, and even so, Eilish’s voice does a lot of the heavy lifting in setting her apart. Your mileage may vary on her warbled whisper, but there really is no one else in pop who sings like that.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything else interesting going on in Eilish’s music. On Hit Me Hard and Soft , there are some of the trappings of a “her most personal album yet” –type record, but it doesn’t necessarily feel unearned. Eilish’s songwriting took a leap into more confessional fare from When We All Fall Asleep to Happier Than Ever , and that growth continues with some moments of real catharsis on her third record, which leads her to use her voice in new ways. She yearns deeply for long-lasting love on “Birds of a Feather,” making declarations such as, “If I’m turning blue, please don’t save me / Nothing left to lose without my baby,” which leads to a rare full-voiced chorus. Her voice peaks on “The Greatest,” where Eilish sings of trying to do all the right things in a relationship only for it to still not work out. She full-on belts the chorus, establishing it as one of the biggest songs she’s ever made: “I made it all look painless / Man, am I the greatest.” Even while working within familiar sounds, it’s cool to hear her broaden the range of her voice.

Elsewhere, on songs like “Lunch” and “Wildflower,” she sings candidly of her queer sexuality (she recently told Variety that she was attracted to women and men, another thing people were extremely normal about ). “I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah, she dances on my tongue / … It’s a craving, not a crush,” she sings on the seductive “Lunch,” a bass-driven, pulsating tune that seems destined to be her next big hit. Elsewhere, there’s no shortage of her signature confessional ballads. The acoustic “Wildflower” cleverly spins a love triangle narrative wherein Eilish was comforting someone after a breakup and maybe developed feelings for her but then ended up in a relationship with that person’s ex. “I see her in the back of my mind all the time / Like a fever, like I’m burning alive, like a sign / Did I cross the line?” she wonders as her voice crescendos. Eilish is also still grappling with coming of age in the limelight, as she was on Happier Than Ever . She reckons with those comments on her appearance and persona on album opener “Skinny” and sings from the perspective of an obsessed stalker on “The Diner.”

That said, outside of some of the vocal performances, there’s not a ton going on here musically that we haven’t heard before. There are still many of Finneas’s production flairs, like atmospheric reverb and quirky percussion, and a number of songs evoke Eilish’s past work. (“Lunch” resembles “Bad Guy,” while the spare outro of “Wildflower” recalls “When the Party’s Over.”) Eilish’s music remains technically impressive, and there’s clearly always care and craft put into everything she and Finneas make, but there hasn’t been much built upon the sound that was already pretty fleshed out by the time her first album came out. Anyone who wasn’t already on board probably won’t be converted, and there are enough loose gestures toward artistic growth to keep anyone who was on board, like the Recording Academy, from being dissuaded.

But while Eilish has been a compelling figure in pop culture for half a decade now, the music itself has never felt quite aligned with the persona behind it. Of course, even with her relative longevity in modern pop, at 22, she’s still in the early stages of her career. And with how futile the Grammys can be, who knows how long her standing with the Recording Academy will last? (While she took home Song of the Year for “What Was I Made For?” this past February, Happier Than Ever failed to bring home any hardware in 2022.) Plus, it’s not surprising that being under the pressure of fame since her teenage years hasn’t exactly encouraged her to take a ton of risks musically. “The way that the world has treated me into feeling extremely anxious about everything that I say. It’s really exhausting,” she told Rolling Stone in April. “This album, to me, feels like a way to restart.” With Eilish seemingly everywhere lately, surely the next phase of her career will garner attention one way or another. But until she starts really evolving her sound, only so much of that attention will be about the actual music.

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