It was late summer in Los Angeles, the air thick with dry heat and burnished sunlight. Billie Eilish, in a darkened room, was wrestling with a creative dilemma. Halfway through editing the music video for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest hit, a song boasting nearly a billion streams, she realized she wasn’t happy with it. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says. A few days later, sitting in the cool darkness of her rehearsal space, Eilish tells the story of the music video that wasn’t. Her gray rescue pit bull, Shark, snores gently beside us. She’s clad in the oversized streetwear she’s become known for: khaki cargo shorts, black and white FTP high-tops, an orange Air Jordan tee. It’s an outfit perfectly suited for writing the next chapter of her life.
Eilish has directed her own music videos for the past five years. But this time, faced with a video that wasn’t working, she made a decision – she handed the reins to Aidan Zamiri, a friend who also directed the Eilish-featuring remix of Charli XCX’s “Guess.” She discovered she enjoyed letting go of control. “I’ve kind of proven myself as a director,” she shrugs. This sentiment embodies where Eilish is in 2024: a nine-time Grammy winner, a 22-year-old navigating the dizzying heights of superstardom. She’s learning how she wants to exist in the world, and it feels like a turning point, a moment of graduation, a coming of age.
We meet in her rehearsal space, a place few know about, a haven for Eilish, who has been relentlessly pursued by fans and unwanted attention for years. The stale air of the windowless space is masked by the scent of a lit candle. Eilish, reclining under an electric heating pad for period cramps, seems a bit drained. Her Oreos are in the freezer, a testament to her unique preference for frozen cookies. It’s been a whirlwind since the release of her album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” in May, including a rather unusual Olympic handover ceremony featuring Tom Cruise parachuting to the Hollywood sign. The sounds of her band practicing next door fill the air, and Shark lets out a sigh, hinting that Eilish might be ready to move on from introspection and dive into the next stage of her life.
Eilish’s origins are well-known: raised in Highland Park, East Los Angeles, by working actor parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell. The couple homeschooled their children, encouraging them to explore all their creative impulses. It’s no surprise that both Eilish and her older brother, Finneas, her musical collaborator, grew up to be musicians. “Finneas was obsessed with drumming—from when he was three years old,” Baird says, “and Billie was much the same with singing; she sang before she talked.” But Eilish didn’t initially intend to be a singer. She studied music theory with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus but had a deep passion for dance. A growth plate injury in her hip at age 13 forced her to turn to music. In 2015, she and Finneas uploaded “Ocean Eyes,” a hauntingly intimate song Finneas wrote about “burning cities and napalm skies,” to SoundCloud. Eilish’s authenticity resonated with a devoted teenage fanbase: relatable, real, and approachable. Her ethereal beauty, oversized T-shirts, goth imagery, and defiance of expectations made her stand out in the pop music landscape.
Amidst the whirlwind of attention that followed, Eilish didn’t have the time to dedicate herself to the craft of singing. “I never felt like a singer. I’ve never had that as my identity,” she admits. But things have changed. In the past two years, she has started taking vocal lessons. “The truth is that literally the love of my life is singing. And I didn’t realize that you can train that instrument and have even more fun with it.” She smiles, aware of the sentiment’s potential corniness, but genuine in her passion. “It’s fucking awesome to learn.”
Eilish has been learning a lot lately. As this story is published, her “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour is kicking off its North American leg, with Australian and European dates to follow. This will be her first tour without Finneas backing her on guitar, as he is launching his own solo album in October. It will also be the first without her parents. Baird, who typically serves as the tour’s de facto everything – a “mom on tour” – explains her duties: “I will get your tampons and cook you a burrito on a moment’s notice, even if I have to use an iron to do it.” This time, however, Baird and Finneas will be taking a step back. “It’s sort of our ‘going off to college year,’ I guess,” Baird says. Finneas, who left the nest first, uses the same analogy: “You want your family to come visit often, you don’t want your family to, like, be the dean of the college, or in your dorm room.” Eilish offers a different metaphor: “You ever see those videos of the big muscular dog with the harness on and it gets on the treadmill and they hook it up and it’s barking and squealing to start running?” The image is clear. “That’s me, I’m the dog.”
On stage, she jumps, thrashes, struts, and skips. At the “Hit Me Hard and Soft” listening party in Brooklyn in May, she darted around the smoke-filled arena, breaking into a gallop when the beat picked up. At the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, she roamed the room with Shark on a leash. Later, I watch her dance in the sound booth to “Chihiro,” lifting Shark into the air before running to the window to energize the musicians, hips swaying, fists raised. “I am literally sprinting all over the stage” when performing, she says. As a result, her tour prioritizes flexibility over fashion. Her most important piece of clothing is the sports bra, her go-to being the Ultimate by Shefit, which she describes as a bulletproof vest. “There were many years where I sort of felt like I would never miss a show because, you know, Billie was 16 or 17 and I really had this feeling of needing to be there for every minute,” Finneas reflects. “And the truth is, over the last few years of touring she’s really become an adult.” He describes days where his first glimpse of Eilish was a fist bump on her way to the stage. “She has a really disciplined way of existing on tour. She sleeps through the day to make sure that she’s rested for the show. She does hours of physical therapy. She does hours of vocal warm-ups.” This will also be her first time touring with her own live band, joined by indie-rock duo Nat and Alex Wolff, the Marías, and Towa Bird, along with childhood friends.
I ask Eilish what she’s most looking forward to: “I mean, hopefully it’s going to be the fucking fun.” Fun would be good. Ever since she was a preteen performer, Eilish has been determined to be taken seriously. The price of being a professional child is that you don’t truly experience childhood. You might have paychecks, assistants, and magazine profiles, but you haven’t had a real life. Without that context, it’s difficult to understand the depths of your own unhappiness.
In 2019, Eilish revealed her struggles with debilitating panic attacks and the depression that led to self-harm and suicidal thoughts during her teens. “I was so unhappy, and so joyless…. I genuinely didn’t think I’d make it to 17,” she told Gayle King in 2020, shortly before becoming the youngest artist to win all four major Grammy categories. What’s most remarkable about Eilish is that she’s still here. (Think of her childhood idol and friend, Justin Bieber, who’s had a similar career trajectory and has largely withdrawn from the public eye.)
Eilish details the physical injuries she’s sustained while performing, some stemming from her hypermobility, her joints bending beyond the typical range of motion. “I’ve basically been in pain since I was nine.” She has said that for years she felt at war with her own body. “Growing up, I’d always hear people be like, ‘Just wait until you’re older! You’re going to have so much pain!’ And I remember being so furious.” There’s also the unique isolation of being at the center of a stadium, surrounded by thousands. “I’ve had some really dark times on tour,” Eilish confides. “For a long time I was kind of living like it was temporary. Like, yeah, I’m touring for now and it’s kind of unpleasant, and whatever. It’ll be over,” she says. “And the truth is, it’s the rest of my life.”
It’s not resignation; it’s optimism born from experience and learning. “I didn’t realize that I could make touring enjoyable. I just was very lonely for many years, and I’m not interested in that anymore. I want to enjoy the show as well as my days.” What that means exactly is anyone’s guess. “She’s one of those people,” Nat Wolff, Eilish’s friend, tells me, “where almost everything she does, she does better than everyone else. She’s like, ‘Come see me ride my horse,’ and the teacher says, ‘You know, if she put all her energy into it, she could go to the Olympics.’ ” Wolff first met Eilish at the Academy Museum Gala, bonding over their shared experience with Tourette syndrome. Eilish was diagnosed at 11 and went public at 16 after fans compiled videos of her tics. “You just have to kind of submit to the fact that she’s going to be better than everyone else at everything,” says Wolff.
Eilish has been embracing this well-roundedness, exploring pursuits overshadowed by her early success. (Maybe acting, she suggests: “I really secretly love it.”) “I got famous at 13 and suddenly had to live a really weird life, and I never went to school,” she says. She’s learning how to nurture and sustain herself: working out regularly with her trainer, reading books, seeing a therapist, cooking her own food. “My mom is an amazing cook and I thought I was a bad cook, but now people are like, ‘You can cook!’ ” Eilish says. “It’s just that I don’t really know a lot of recipes.” Like many women, she’s struggled with body image and “eating issues,” and cooking has been a helpful tool. “I definitely am like, Oh my God, I deserve this meal.”
She’s also made a conscious effort to limit her time online. Eilish deleted social media apps from her phone early this summer, replacing them with games. She still posts occasionally, but she no longer has access to her accounts on her phone, which has left her blissfully oblivious, even to her own record-breaking successes. She’ll get a text that her album has gone platinum, or that she’s the most-streamed artist in the world on Spotify. “That’s all of music,” she says, still seemingly in disbelief. “That’s literally all of the music in the world.” (She has over 105 million monthly listeners on Spotify, to be exact.)
The key, she says, is finding the balance between her private life and her public persona. “Over time, I think I’ve made a really good mixture,” she says, “making sure I feel like myself, and I’m not only being satisfied by the external validation.” For years, audience approval was all that mattered. “If I was happy in my life, it was because people loved me on the internet. And if I was upset in my life, it was usually because people didn’t.” The loudest criticisms often centered around her appearance: When she posted a photo in a swimsuit, it caused a stir on Fox News; when she experimented with more traditionally feminine attire, she felt the need to issue a statement. (“I spent the first five years of my career getting absolutely obliterated by you fools for being boyish and dressing how I did & constantly being told I’d be hotter if I acted like a woman,” Eilish wrote on Instagram in May 2023. “Now when I feel comfortable enough to wear anything remotely feminine or fitting, I changed and am a sellout.”) “I’ve learned to not base my life around that,” she says.
She’s not completely offline, of course, and still susceptible to outside opinions, but she’s gained some distance. She’s investing in the unseen aspects of her life, embracing playfulness and letting go of the need to take herself too seriously. “I’m excited to see her enjoying it,” Baird says, “that she’s doing things like going out to a restaurant…. There are many levels of fame, and many different times in fame. There are periods where you can’t step outside your door, and then there are periods where you just have a little bit of grace, and taking advantage of those moments is really wonderful.”
In the weeks after we meet, Eilish is spotted in the audience at a Clairo concert in LA wearing a basketball jersey that says “EILISH” on the back. She has an ease in public that feels new, a mature acceptance of the world, rather than viewing it with guardedness. “Guess” was a collaboration sparked by Charli XCX and her manager, a seductive whisper verse on a bawdy club banger, a departure from Eilish’s usual sound that took the internet and charts by storm. It feels like an extension of what Eilish started with her earlier summer hit, “Lunch” (sample lyric: “I could eat that girl for lunch…. It’s a craving, not a crush”). While her previous albums explored the depths of the human experience, this one seems content to skim the surface, playing with pop structures and her own psychology in equal measure. It’s lighter, even if the messaging isn’t. It appears she’s no longer playing a character.
“You know, the big challenge when you’re on your third full-length record is trying not to repeat yourself,” Finneas says, noting it took a year to write “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” “The thing that was really important to me was really pushing Billie to be honest,” he says. The bouncy tracks are met with songs like “The Greatest” and “Wildflower,” songs Finneas calls “confessions.” These songs, alongside the carefree raunch of “Guess,” offer a more complete, human portrait of a young woman embracing her sexuality, an evolution that wasn’t always certain for Eilish.
During the press cycle for “What Was I Made For?”, the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning song Eilish and Finneas wrote for Barbie, Eilish, who had recently broken up with Jesse Rutherford, opened up about her attraction to women to a Variety reporter. “I love them so much. I love them as people. I’m attracted to them as people.” Shortly after, another reporter asked if she had intended to come out. “No, I didn’t,” Eilish responded. “But I kind of thought, Wasn’t it obvious?” Today, she wishes she had been less flippant. “I wish no one knew anything about my sexuality or anything about my dating life. Ever, ever, ever,” she declares, clearly frustrated. “And I hope that they never will again. And I’m never talking about my sexuality ever again. And I’m never talking about who I’m dating ever again.” She says she has a history of being too open, too honest, and it’s often come back to haunt her. In the spring, Rolling Stone quoted her at length on her thoughts about sex, which sparked a frenzy in tabloid news cycles. “I guess I also underestimate that things I say will be blown up into the biggest news of the whole world,” she sighs. It’s an extraordinary situation, when most people her age are making private mistakes, while Eilish’s every word plays out across headlines. “That’s so unnatural,” she says. She will make decisions that evolve, that don’t always align perfectly. “We’re all babies. We’re all little kids growing up and learning ourselves.”
The night after the “Guess” video was released, Charli XCX hosted her 32nd birthday party in Los Angeles. Celebrities turned up in their best “brat summer” attire. Eilish was there, dancing and singing along to their remix. To an outsider, the throngs of people and flashing cameras might seem overwhelming, even intimidating. Eilish loved it. “I need small doses of that. I’ll have one of those experiences maybe once a month. That many people and that many cameras on you can be a lot,” she admits. “But that night I was so happy. It was really fun.”
Adulthood, as it turns out, isn’t always fun! From the ashes of “brat summer” rises a new season, focused on making a difference. “I mean, this is the most important election of our time, maybe,” Eilish says, “and it’s so easy to be like, I don’t want to think about it…. I have that same kind of feeling: I’m one person, I can’t make any change. But the truth is, we can all make change. And I have this platform and I’m going to use it.”
What issues are important to her this time around? She gestures with open palms. “Really big fan of human rights. Really big fan of women’s rights and women’s reproductive rights and social justice and gun laws.” To that end, she encourages her fans to register to vote and work with Power the Polls, a group that trains poll workers. “A lot of my fans are going to be able to vote for the first time. So I’m like, Do you like freedom?” She pauses to consider the candidates. “First female president? Would be really amazing. I would love to feel safe as a woman in my country.” A few weeks later, she would officially endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in an Instagram video urging her followers to register and vote.
But before her endorsement, and a couple of weeks before Eilish and her team hit the road, I got a backstage glimpse of the “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour during a private rehearsal. In the lobby of the practice space, things are running behind. But, hey, “Birds of a Feather” officially surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify today. Eilish, wearing a vintage Knicks tee and red-and-white basketball shorts, has been in meetings and vocal warm-ups all afternoon, meticulously planning the lighting, cues, lasers, and pyrotechnics, all for the perfect audience experience. (As she said earlier, “Pre-tour is just rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals like a motherfucker.”)
Onstage, she confidently directs the technicians with the air of a stadium-touring star. “Just so you know, I’m marking this, I’m not fully singing,” she tells the mic after a near-perfect rendition of “Wildflower.” Later, she hams it up, coaxing the crew to laugh with an intentionally off-key verse from “When the Party’s Over.” The stage is shaped like a figure eight, allowing her to move around her band, who stand in the wells. Performing in the round is something Eilish has always wanted to do. There’s a central platform with hydraulics, lifting her up and down, and video screens that project pre-recorded images and live footage. She grabs the handheld camera, selfie-mode, for a few bars, flirting with the lens before joining the band, zooming in on the instruments, hands, and smiles. Just kids, fooling around, about to perform to tens of thousands of screaming fans.
Watching her enjoy herself, fully in her element, reminds me of something she told me earlier, about playing music just for fun. “I’m a musician and you’d think I would’ve done that. But things blew up for me at an age when I would’ve been jamming with buddies. And because it was my career, I was not interested,” she said. “So for the first time ever, I’m jamming, and it’s amazing. It’s so nice to not have pressure of like, Is this going to be the next single? It’s like, No, we’re just here. And it’s just right in the moment.”
That’s exactly where you hope she’ll stay.
