Billie Eilish
‘Everyone’s guilty of looking at celebrities and not processing that they’re just a person’
Billie Eilish is making me nervous. She has called, as arranged, bang on time – 11pm in Los Angeles – but, she admits, she is not quite ready to speak: “This is a mess, I’m so sorry!” Her pale face and platinum hair loom from her phone screen, surrounded by darkness. Her head is at a funny angle and … oh God, she’s driving, her mobile apparently balanced on the car’s dashboard. Help! I don’t want to inadvertently cause the death of one of the world’s most gifted and valuable pop stars; to watch as a generation-defining musician at the top of her game crashes her car.
“Girl, crashing is not me! I am not that person,” Eilish says, half-laughing, half-stressed. “I went to my brother’s house for a swim and to check on his dogs, because he’s away, and now I’m driving to my parents’ house, I promise it’s really close.”
OK, I say, still jumpy. But what’s that beeping sound? “It’s my dog – he’s sleeping on the other seat and he’s 70 lbs, so he’s making the car beep because he doesn’t have a seatbelt on. I have mine on, look,” she says. “The beeping is really perfect for this call, isn’t it? And now the car wants to Bluetooth my phone. This is great,” she says, almost to herself, her sarcasm instantly familiar to any parent of a teenager.
Such bombastic attitude is forgivable, because Eilish a teenager, albeit one of the most famous in the world. She’s 19 now, a music veteran of six years, ever since she made a track, Ocean Eyes, with her songwriter elder brother, Finneas O’Connell, known professionally as Finneas, for her dance class. She uploaded it on to SoundCloud, where it gained a couple of thousand listens and almost instantaneously landed her a management deal. At her early gigs she had to sit outside on the pavement before shows, not allowed in because she was underage. But within a few months, something happened: in 2017, her
