I think opened my mind up for having an open mind in the future.” “I hated the way I looked before – I don’t love it now, but I feel a little more confident in myself and I’ve gotten a lot more proud of who I am and more open to things. You’re allowed to wear anything and say anything and do anything and be anything.” The shoot had a big effect on her: it made her feel more comfortable in her skin, she says. That was a fun thing to put out there in the world. “I’m just playing around! You know, I’m allowed to wear anything I want at any time and so is everyone else. She found it funny when some people responded to the shoot by saying she had become a different person, she continues. “It was playing dress-up, you know? Because” – her voice hardens against the haters – “ that’s what a fucking photoshoot is.” “It was so much fun, that shoot,” Eilish says today. “Proof that money can make you change your values and sell out!” railed a Daily Mail headline. It got a million likes in less than six minutes, her second record-breaking feat on the platform. You loved it.’ I think that we should all love our art the way that we loved it when we first made it, you know.”Įilish posted her Marilyn-styled UK Vogue cover on Instagram in May. “I said, ‘Don’t forget what you felt when you first made this. Why? “The bigger you get, the more people hate your guts.” She felt this too when Finneas released his debut solo album, Optimist, in October. The second album, however, made Eilish “super-worried”. “Normal shit! Not necessarily fun, but it’s exciting, isn’t it, just being a human.” I’m not invincible, but I try my best to help the world, because, jeez, why not? Doing things for the first time like getting gas and doing laundry and calling your doctor on your own.” She laughs. “And honestly, I have almost only found, besides a few hiccups, that I’ve been enjoying just having a little adulthood. “I was always very scared of getting older – I dreaded it,” she says, crunching ice between her teeth as she twists her thoughts around. Given that her career began at 13, when Eilish uploaded her first single, Ocean Eyes, to SoundCloud (by February this year, that track had hit 700m streams on Spotify), it’s fair to say she’s not had the typical adolescence. Written in Covid lockdowns, Happier Than Ever is a difficult but beautifully dreamy second album, largely about growing up, as songs such as Getting Older, My Future and Everybody Dies attest. I was also being proud of myself and also pitying myself and also being kind of envious of that girl, the 16-year-old me who was just so fearless and carefree.” She catches herself. ![]() Why? “To see how young I was then and how much was going on and what I dealt with and coped with. When Eilish saw it she “literally sobbed all the way through it”. Then there was her emotional return to live music at a run of festival gigs from the summer (“to see how the fans reacted in real life to my new songs was amazing and surreal… thousands of kids singing at the top of their lungs”) and a warts-and-all documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, documenting her early years, which came out in February. The British Vogue cover interview that preceded it also exploded the internet, largely because of the Eilish-directed photoshoot – the green-and-black-haired, shorts-wearing punk everyone knew had suddenly turned into a blond, pink-corseted, Marilyn Monroe-esque bombshell. Photograph: Craig McDean/Vogue/Conde Nastīillie’s second album, Happier Than Ever, released in July, was a huge, global hit, expanding her trademark glitchy-moody pop into new territories of torch song and bossa nova. But the Bond theme is old news, given everything else that has happened this past year.Įilish on the cover of Vogue, June 2021. It premiered at the pre-Covid 2020 Brit awards and was finally unleashed in the cinemas just over two months ago (“We saw the whole movie in December 2019… we’ve had to keep all the secrets for two years… that was hard!”). ![]() When I met her at the Bond premiere, I was trying not to blow smoke up her ass the entire night.” Eilish would be a standout figure of 2021 for her Grammy-winning title music for No Time to Die alone, written, as always, with her big brother, Finneas. ![]() Andrew Scott is my favourite actor in the world! And Phoebe is so fucking good, I can’t stress it enough. I’ve literally just paused it, again, to do this interview. ![]() We’re speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. It’s a measure of what Billie Eilish’s life has been like in 2021 that she woke up one morning last month, rolled over to check her phone and found out she’d got seven Grammy award nominations.
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