She’s in an oversize black T-shirt emblazoned with the rapper Duckwrth’s face. “I have to wash them now.” She makes a show of it, finishing with a little ta-da! move, as though she should be wearing a top hat. Her hands smell like garlic and onions, she says. “I just made a magnificent breakfast,” Eilish tells me as she props her phone against a mirror in the little blue bathroom.
She’s wending her way through her family’s home in Highland Park, Los Angeles, where she’s filmed so many clips for Instagram and conducted almost all of her interviews over the last four years. And she isn’t yet 19.īecause of all this preconditioning-to profile a celebrity is to dip a toe into the waters of extreme fandom-it is both thrilling and banal to see Eilish pop up on Zoom. In October, when we first speak, her music video for the deliciously delinquent pop-trap tune “Bad Guy” hits a billion views a couple weeks later, she drops “Therefore I Am,” a single from her forthcoming album, and it’s watched 12 million times in the first 24 hours. In the four short years since she signed with Darkroom/Interscope Records, she has risen to mind-boggling stardom: Her 49-show Where Do We Go? arena tour, which had just kicked off in March and would have run through September had it not been for the pandemic, sold out days after tickets went on sale. She’s trending on Twitter, her emotive face shows up in a group text, her beautiful voice Dopplers out of a passing car. There is the Baader-Meinhof effect too once you are aware of Eilish, she really is everywhere. The muchness of Eilish’s online presence is overwhelming and kaleidoscopic, her own posts and performances spawning fan accounts and compilation videos and ecstatic reaction videos and memes, so many memes, refractions of Billie Eilish ad infinitum. I have listened to her perform at the Democratic National Convention, the Academy Awards, the Grammys (where her 2019 debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, racked up a total of 11 wins), Coachella, SNL, Howard Stern, NPR’s Tiny Desk, Ellen, The Tonight Show, and in a car with James Corden. Here she is a few years later, singing at a talent show.
Here, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary about her life, is blond-haired toddler Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell perched on a piano bench. I know what a Billie Eilish burp sounds like, and also a sneeze. I have already watched her ride a pinto across a New Zealand beach, get her sprained ankle wrapped, grind on a bag of bagels, blow a slobbery raspberry into her brother Finneas’s face, mimic her mother, expound on the seriousness of the coronavirus, shoot water out one nostril while using a neti pot, and fit much of an Oscar Schmidt Aloha ukulele headstock into her mouth. B efore I ever meet Billie Eilish, I feel like I know her.
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