![]() ![]() “My whole job is being looked at,” she remarks with a sad little laugh, between sips of hot chocolate, when we meet for lunch in Highland Park the morning after the photoshoot. “I wrote it about myself, but I always thought it would sound better with a girl singer.” Eilish recorded her vocals over two weeks, re-working the same parts for hours the duo posted the track to SoundCloud with the intention of sending it to Billie’s dance teacher for potential choreography. “If you’re using ancient standard gender roles, it’s kind of a feminine song,” Finneas tells me later over coffee. Billie heard it from across the narrow hall dividing their rooms and knew she could make the song her own conveniently, she was nursing a crush on a blue-eyed boy. In the final months of 2015, Finneas had been workshopping the song with his band the Slightlys, but it wasn’t sounding right. “Ocean Eyes” was a game-changer for Eilish’s career, even if she didn’t know it at the time. She is notoriously hard on her own work, but also, she was literally 12. ![]() That was the first song I wrote,” Billie tells me dismissively. There had been “Fingers Crossed” before it: a cinematic little number about love in the time of zombie apocalypse that racked up maybe a couple thousand plays, an achievement that felt, back then, pretty mind-boggling. ![]() And if you do know who Billie Eilish is, you probably feel old anyway, because what were you even doing with your time while then-13-year-old Billie and her then-17-year-old brother, Finneas, were writing “Ocean Eyes” in their bedroom? That song, now platinum in a couple countries, wasn’t the first one the siblings had written together and uploaded to SoundCloud without much expectation. If you still don’t know who Billie Eilish is, there’s a good chance you are old. Because this is Billie Eilish’s life, and this is how it goes, and what else are you going to do? And for now, if things aren’t fine, they appear to be. It’s a nightmare, but it’s being dealt with. Just an hour ago she’d been hunched over her DMs, brow furrowed, having been informed by a well-meaning fan that there’d been a leak of Billie’s personal information, including her home address. Paak - I guess I need to hold on to (dang!) the people that know me best, it goes - in a pair of comically oversized Dsquared2 sneakers, shoes you can picture Goofy wearing were he a hypebeast. In between sitting for photos for this story, Billie props her phone against a tree and films herself dancing to a song by Mac Miller and Anderson. ![]() “And then I had Takis, and I wanted to eat them so bad, but I couldn’t. You can tell she is alive by the cloud of condensation where her mouth would be it is a similar surface-texture to the pair of foggy Invisaligns plunked onto the kitchen table, with which you will become intimately acquainted if you spend enough time with Billie, and which she will later attempt to locate, calling: “Mom! Where’s my teeth?” (“Dude, the day I got my Invisaligns I had a Chanel fitting,” she tells me later. Quietly because her head is fully inside of a ziploc bag, which I am told by the styling team is designer, because apparently a designer ziploc bag is a thing. Billie Eilish - Eilish being one of her middle names, the other one being, yes, Pirate - is sitting quietly in the corner of it all. ![]()
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