Billie Eilish with her record-breaking Grammys haul. Photo / AP
Billie Eilish is something special. And if you hadn't noticed before, well, there's no getting away from her now. On Sunday night at the Grammy Awards, the green-haired, angst-ridden, goth-styled teenage singer-songwriter scooped all the big prizes.
Having just turned 18 in December, Eilish is the youngest person ever to win five major Grammy awards in one fell swoop (including Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best New Artist and Best Pop Solo Performance), and the youngest winner of the prestigious Album of the Year. All of this came just over a week after it was announced Eilish is set to be the youngest ever person to write and sing a James Bond theme.
Pop is a youth-oriented business but Eilish is young enough to even make millennials feel old. She only got her driving licence last year and still lives with her parents in the small Los Angeles house where she was raised. Her Grammy winning debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, was entirely written and recorded in her bedroom.
Eilish is a pop avatar for Generation Z, making music that blurs genre boundaries and carries moody messages of sensitive disaffection. Yet what is really striking is not her youth, but her talent. There is nothing gamine or cute about her. She is not some hyperactive, sugar-coated, machine-tooled showbusiness creation being hyped beyond her station by a backroom music biz cabal. Eilish comes across as the real deal – an organic, original and actually quite eccentric artist.
Her songs mix up genres with a disregard for boundaries, blending hip-hop, R'n'B and synth pop with elements of folk, jazz and showtunes. It is music that sounds as timeless as it is modern. Her lyrics are darkly witty, simultaneously serious and playful, swinging from nihilism to joy as she grapples with the anxieties of this fretful age we live in. Her vocal style can shift from coquettish to aggressive, ironic to sincere in a breath, with a quality of understatement that makes her sound wise beyond her years.
And yet Eilish is not quite the preternaturally gifted prodigy she appears, either. Because she is effectively the product of two talents, both raised in a hothouse creative atmosphere and working as one.
Her given name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell. She dropped her surname because "it sounds like if a goat was a person, Billie Goat O'Connell." Her parents are both actors and musicians, Maggie Baird and Patrick O'Connell, who scraped along in the lower reaches of their professions ("mostly unemployed" according to her father), with minor credits in TV shows and movies including The X Files, Six Feet Under and The West Wing.
Home was a two-bedroom bungalow in LA's slowly gentrifying Highlands district. Eilish shared her bedroom with brother Finneas O'Connell, four years her senior. "We were a very crunchy sort of hippy-dippy family," according to Finneas. The siblings were home schooled, with no formal curriculum, regularly visiting museums and galleries and being encouraged to pursue creative endeavours. "Our whole stance was, general knowledge is all," Patrick O'Connell told Rolling Stone magazine. "You need to know why the sky is blue, but you don't need to memorize a bunch of esoterica you'll never use." Eilish passed her high school equivalency exam and graduated at 15.
Music was a lifelong hobby. She wrote her first song on the ukulele aged 4, and joined the LA Children's Chorus aged 8. She trained to be a dancer before suffering a debilitating hip injury at 14. But it was her brother Finneas who actively pursued a career in music.
As a teen actor, he appeared in four episodes of the final season of Glee (as Alistair) whilst leading local band The Slightlys. A multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, in 2014 Finneas produced a bedroom laptop recording of his younger sister singing one of his band's songs, Ocean Eyes. Intended as a project for Eilish's dance class, it started out as "a big, soaring electric guitar and drum thing" but was gradually stripped back to a dreamy, ethereal ballad of quiet power. When they posted the song on Soundcloud, an internet music site, it quickly began gathering attention, notching up tens of thousands of hits within weeks. Finneas was 18, Eilish just 14. But at that point, the siblings appear to have decided that Eilish was the potential star in the family.
Finneas brought in a manager he knew and started talking to record companies. And here, it all might have gone horribly wrong, or at least followed a more predictable path. In the modern music business, the formulaic approach to new artists involves putting them in recording studios with established teams of writers and producers. "I hated it so much," according to Eilish. "It was always these 50-year-old men who'd written these 'big hit songs!' and then they're horrible at it. I'm like, 'You did this a hundred years ago. Ugh.' No one listened to me, because I was 14 and a girl. And we made Ocean Eyes without anyone involved – so why are we doing this?" Instead, the siblings retreated back to their bedroom, with Finneas nurturing his sister's lyrical and melodic gifts.
Their insular approach has helped craft something unique, drawing on Eilish's distinctive voice and personality. "It's crazy," according to Finneas. "Most people need to stand and open their diaphragms, but Billie sounds amazing just slumped on the bed." Picking up over a billion streams on Spotify before their debut album was even released, the siblings were empowered to make pop on their own terms.
Eilish has some unusual quirks. As a child, she was diagnosed with a mild version of Tourette syndrome, which manifests as small tics when she is stressed, including bulging eyes and head twitches. She also experiences synaesthesia, a neurosensory condition that mixes up senses. Asked to describe her Grammy-winning song Bad Guy, Eilish once said it "is yellow, but also red, and the number seven. It's not hot, but warm, like an oven. And it smells like cookies."
There is a boldness to Eilish's persona that reflects the environment in which her talent has been nurtured. Although very pretty, she has avoided the sexualised way most young female pop stars are presented. Not for her acres of flesh and body-hugging clothes, or borderline pornographic videos. Her unique style tends towards flamboyantly baggy sportswear and vivid goth makeup, everything oversized, overloud and impishly androgynous. She has called fashion "a defence mechanism" that allows her to avoid "body shaming." For a social media selfie generation where such body dysmorphia issues are a growing concern, Eilish's refusal to play the glamour game has become defiantly inspirational. "Nobody can be, like, 'she's got a flat ass', 'she's got a fat ass'," she has remarked. "Nobody can say any of that, because they don't know."
In common with many teenagers, Eilish has grappled with depression and anxiety. These are the subjects and emotions her songs explore, rather than diverting towards romantic pop clichés. Yet her lyrics are not morose or self-indulgent but full of wit and empathy, with a strong streak of irreverent black humour. On album track All The Good Girls Go To Hell, Eilish takes the role of "God herself" pondering the fate of mankind. "Your cover-up is caving in/ Man is such a fool, why are we saving him?/ Poisoning themselves now/ Begging for our help, wow/ Hills burn in California / My time to ignore ya/ Don't say I didn't warn ya." Her sassy brand of provocative pop is leagues ahead of her contemporaries. Young, smart and really rather wonderful, Billie Eilish is the pop star the world needs right now.
