FEATURE:
you should see me in a crown
Billie Eilish’s Phenomenal Debut Album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, at Five
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I am excited to look ahead…
PHOTO CREDIT: Rachael Wright for ELLE
to the fifth anniversary of a major debut album. One of the world’s best songwriters and most celebrated young artists, Billie Eilish released WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? on 29th March, 2019. Produced by her brother Finneas O’Connell and released through Darkroom and Interscope, Eilish (Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell) was aged seventeen at the time of her debut album’s release. WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? was written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, who produced it at his small bedroom studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Reaching number one in the U.K. and U.S. and hugely critically acclaimed upon its release, this wonderful album made a claim, pretty late on, as being among the best and most important of the last decade. Ahead of the fifth anniversary of a major debut from a genius modern artist, I wanted to source a couple of reviews and interviews around it. I am starting out with ELLE and their interview from 29th March, 2019. I have recently looked at WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?. As it is five soon, I felt it necessary to come back to it again. As there is talk of a third Billie Eilish album coming soon – following 2021’s Happier Than Ever -, it is interesting looking back at her debut:
“Billie Eilish has to watch The Office while she does everything. “When I wake up, I put on The Office. If I’m making a burrito, I turn on The Office,” she says. The only scenario in which the 17-year-old singer-songwriter might not be streaming an episode is while working. “I need the distraction so I don’t think,” she says. “It’s like therapy for me. I have way too much to think about and people [I don’t want] to disappoint.” When asked whom, specifically, she is worried about letting down, she says, “Myself, mainly…and the whole world.”
She’s being hyperbolic, of course, but not by much. Eilish has 14.1 million followers (and counting) on Instagram. Her songs, including those from her 2017 debut EP, Don’t Smile at Me, have been streamed more than 5 billion times. As of this writing, the video for “Bury a Friend,” the third single off her first studio album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, has been out just over a week and viewed more than 35 million times—one million more than it was an hour ago. Eilish wasn’t exaggerating about The Office, either: She’s watched every episode of every season, 11 times over.
We’re sitting at the dining room table of the Los Angeles home where Eilish (full name: Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell) was raised. Her hair is blue, and her outfit—baggy knit pants and an oversize turtleneck—is white. Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird, and father, Patrick O’Connell, pop in and out, corralling the dog—who growls a lot but is harmless—and checking to make sure we have water. This is the house where Billie was homeschooled, and where she still records with her older brother, Finneas O’Connell.
“Here’s the thing with homeschooling,” Eilish says, twiddling a tube of Aquaphor in her fingers, her Invisalign on the table next to her cell phone. “It gave me time to actually realize what I wanted to do early on. Music was never a hobby. It was always there.” It became a career when she and Finneas uploaded a haunting pop song called “Ocean Eyes” to SoundCloud. Within 24 hours, it went viral. Eilish was just 13 at the time, and she’s been on a high-speed trajectory ever since, this year especially. Just a few days into 2019, her name found its way onto the Coachella lineup flyer—in the second-largest font size. In March, she released her first full-length album. This summer, she’ll embark on her fourth sold-out North American tour.
It’s a lot, and Eilish is handling it…okay. “Honestly, I feel myself losing it a little, but I have my brother—we write everything together; he produces my stuff—and my mom and dad tour with me. When I’m away from home, at least I have my home with me, in a way.” Finneas has since moved out of the house, but they still make music in his old bedroom. “This is where we recorded every single thing we’ve done,” she says, holding the door open so I can take a peek. The room is just barely big enough to fit a bed, a keyboard, and a desk. Suddenly, the intimacy of her new album makes perfect sense. It opens with the siblings laughing about Eilish’s pre-recording ritual—“I have taken out my Invisalign!” she says. Song nine, “My Strange Addiction,” is laced with clips from her favorite TV show (The Office, in case anyone forgot).
When she’s not touring, Eilish still sleeps right across the hall. “You want to see?” she asks, opening the door. She climbs onto her bed and pulls back a Louis Vuitton scarf tacked to the wall. Behind it are words, phrases, drawings, and other scribblings. She points to a few markers taped nearby for easy access. “I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just find a place to write,” she says. It’s still light outside now, but her room is dark due to shoe racks obscuring the windows. Her closet would make Marie Kondo proud—the top row is a neon rainbow organized by color, and the bottom is black and white—but there are piles on the floor. “Where am I supposed to put any of this?” she says.
Her room might be full of pricey designer goods, but her prized possession is her notebook, which she keeps hidden. “There’s a lot of personal stuff in here that I don’t even want my parents to read,” she says, pulling the slim volume out from its secret location. “This is my brainchild, the weird monsters I’ve dreamed about.” She flips through the pages, pausing on a poetry fragment near the front. “This is from years ago,” she says. A few pages later: “This is really hormonal 13-year-old Billie. Really sad, really heartbroken.
Oh my God!” She laughs—she’s landed on a page that says, in large letters illustrated in pencil, “I’m sad.” Sketches fill some of the pages, including one of a yellow outfit similar to the one she wore in her “Bellyache” video. “I always dress like this, and I always have,” she says of her style, a high-low hybrid of shiny accessories and oversize athletic wear, often monochromatic or highlighter-hued. “I want to be looked at. I want to be remembered. Even before I was an artist, I wanted to go out and see people’s heads look up.”
These days people look, sometimes too much. “I can’t really go anywhere, because I will get mobbed,” Eilish says. “I can’t get mad, though—if I decide to go out in public, I have to expect that to happen. But when people show up at my house or drop things off on my porch, that’s not okay.” She shrugs. She could go on, but such talk is “a waste of everyone’s time,” she says. Her fan base might be growing exponentially, but her family keeps her grounded. Eilish catches me taking one last peek inside Finneas’s room before heading out. “People always ask, ‘How does it feel to have started out in your brother’s tiny room, and now you’re in the big studio?’ ” she says. “But I’m not. I’m still in the same room”.
There was a lot of press attention around Billie Eilish in March 2019. This was not her first release. She has put out E.P.s prior to the arrival of WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?. Her debut E.P., dont smile at me, came out in 2017. Not just an American artist popular in her own country, Eilish already had a large fanbase around the world before her debut album came out. The Guardian spoke with her at the end of 2019. They named her their artist of the year:
“Billie Eilish was a star long before 2019. For a lot of 13- and 14-year-olds she was a game-changer the moment her song Ocean Eyes appeared on Soundcloud in 2015: an artist who spoke directly to her audience because she was her audience, a teenage girl who had co-written the song as a piece of homework and uploaded it for her teacher to access. But 2019 was the year that Eilish’s impact on pop became unavoidable: a show-stealing performance at Coachella; the youngest person to be nominated for all four biggest Grammy categories; the loud praise of fellow musicians from Tyler, the Creator to Thom Yorke; and a raft of younger artists operating under her influence.
Most importantly, the release of her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, confirmed her as the most exciting pop artist of her age: a dark, adventurous, eclectic set of songs, that appeared blithely unconcerned with chasing trends. Recorded at home by Eilish and her elder brother Finneas, without co-writers or big-name producers, it showed that, in a world of pop stars desperate to be seen as auteurs, Eilish genuinely is one – a fact underlined by her directing the impressively disturbing video for single Xanny. She turned 18 yesterday.
Billie, you’re the Guardian’s artist of the year and 2019 looks like when your career went crazy. Does it feel that way?
It was pretty steep, but it still felt gradual to me, even if it didn’t seem that way to the public. Everyone suddenly thinks I’m famous, but, you know, I was 13 when Ocean Eyes came out. Then again, that’s a lot faster than some people. They spend 20 years and for me it happened in three. But every moment this year has made me feel – “What the fuck is going on?” – in good ways and bad.
You’ve been very open about struggling with depression at the start of the year. Was there a moment where you thought you might give up making music, or was that what kept you going?
I don’t know. People talk about how making music is healing; I think listening to music is healing, but I don’t think making music is. It doesn’t heal to make music for me, but there are so many other things that do. The main thing is thinking about what I do for a living, having that be the thing that makes me remember what I have.
The fandom you inspire is intense. Is it difficult to deal with?
It’s crazy. Fandoms are a really insane thing. It’s strange growing up as a fan, wishing my favourite artist would do this or that, and now being on the other side. Now I understand why my favourite artist couldn’t do this, or couldn’t be this way when I wanted them to be. And it’s a big responsibility, but the fans are the reason that you’re anywhere, pretty much, and they actually have my back most of the time. So yeah, I love them. It’s a lot of responsibility, but I just live with it, you know?
You clearly don’t have a standard teenage life. How do you find space to live a “normal” one?
A normal life – I never wanted that. It’s not like this life is what I was dreaming of growing up, but all the things that were considered normal growing up I never liked doing … I can’t explain it without sounding so annoying! I’m pretty OK with the way things are. I wouldn’t want anything else. Even when parts of what I have now aren’t what I want, I don’t really care – it all goes into having this other thing that I literally couldn’t have dreamed of having.
Your brother was saying your next album is going to be more experimental …
It’s funny, he actually called me right after that article came out: “Billie, I did not say you are making experimental music, I literally just said we’d been experimenting on new stuff.” We’re just, like, seeing what we can and can’t do; we’re making the same Billie Eilish shit, it’s just growing.
He’s been working with other artists – Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello. Do you see a point where you could work with someone else, or is your relationship too close?
I don’t enjoy working with other people. Finneas is really good at writing music, really fast, so he can sit down with anyone and write something. For me, it’s never been a comfortable thing, so it can’t be someone random I work with. I’m not opposed to it, I just don’t see the need right now. You know, he’s not working with other people because he hates me.
Plans to celebrate your birthday?
I’ve wanted to be 18 my entire life, and a couple of months ago I realised how much I like being 17. And I’m worried at the same time that people who like me, like me because I was young. And now I’m not going to be, they’ll all be like “meh”. So I don’t know. I’m confused. It’s like when somebody turns 18, the whole world’s against them”.
I want to come to a couple of positive reviews for WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?. One of the most acclaimed albums of 2019, I still think that it hits hard in 2024. A magnificent and fully-realised debut album from Billie Eilish. She went on to become Glastonbury’s youngest-ever headliner in 2022. This remarkable young artist demonstrating such astonishing talent. This is what Rolling Stone had to say about WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?. They were deeply impressed and stunned:
“Billie Eilish is a 17 year-old homeschooled choir singer turned pop music prodigy. And she’s every bit as awesomely messed up as that pedigree implies: She’s the demon spawn of Lana Del Rey’s California dreams, who first compared a sweetheart’s gaze to napalm skies on her arresting 2016 single gone viral, “Ocean Eyes.” She later entertained fantasies of killing her friends on the guitar n’B song “Bellyache,” and warded off new ones throughout the rest of her 2017 EP, Don’t Smile at Me.
Yet, the smirking candor of her music sucks you in anyway: at the onset of her noirish major label debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? she offers a generous, audible slurp; “I’ve taken out my Invisalign,” she says. alluding to a specific brand of braces. “And this is the album!” Dental guard: off. Fangs: out.
Recorded with the help of her older brother Finneas in their family home in Los Angeles, it’s an album full of dressed-down avant-pop with D.I.Y. immediacy and intimacy that can still hold its own amid Top 40 maximalists like Ariana Grande and Halsey. Eilish’s sound is hyper-modern, but still feels classic; evoking another Billie in history, she sets the jazz-aware swing in her vocals over skittering trap beats and doo-wop piano asides. Yet for reasons that are unclear — perhaps her taste for the macabre, or her aesthetic as a tomboy par excellence — Eilish’s roguish pop has lead to a double life on the male-heavy rock and alternative charts.
Eilish claims she endured recurring night terrors while recording the album — recalling visions, some real and some imagined, of abductions, severed heads, school shootings and Los Angeles in flames. When she poses the question, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? it’s a personal one: to make peace with the twisted, dystopian Gotham that’s become her reality, where there is no Batman to save her, Eilish writes herself into characters who toe the line between good-bad and cartoonishly evil. She recalls DC Comics ass-kicker Harley Quinn in the slinky track “Bad Guy,” playing a comic book villain in a voice that suggests Lorde’s rascal kid sister: “I’m a make-your-momma-sad type, make-your-girlfriend-mad type, might-seduce-your-dad type,” she boasts — and with a single, sardonic “Duh,” she just narrowly gets away with it. (“That’s what I’ve been doing recently,” she told Rolling Stone last month: “Honing in on people’s fears.”)
More formidable is the sawing dubstep crawl of “You Should See Me In a Crown,” inspired by the villain Moriarty in the BBC show Sherlock. The song is matched in menace by the Takashi Murakami-animated video, in which Eilish sprouts eight legs and chomps a city to smithereens. Yet she turns that nightmarish girl monster against herself in “Bury A Friend,” adopting a skittish iambic pentameter as she repeats “I wanna end me” over a muted goth-R&B throb. In the 20 years since its inception, never has a teen pop star so gone dark — closely paralleling the anti-pop Boogeyman of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar.
In spite of her most dastardly intentions, Eilish can’t help but draw back the curtain at times and let you in. Take the glimmer of sincerity in the high-drama ballad “When the Party’s Over,” where she painstakingly wishes to be more than a party of one; or her latest single, “Wish You Were Gay.” Lest the queer-baiting title steer you off track, Eilish means to profess her love for a boy whose lack of reciprocity she finds suspect. (One is always free to choose their own adventure, of course.) But in lieu of accepting that he’s just not that into her, Eilish resorts to a conclusion that’s easier on the ego: “To spare my pride,” she sings, “To give your lack of interest an explanation/I’m not your type/Maybe I’m not your preferred sexual orientation.”
Yet for every time she lets her guard down, she bounds back coolly, with a strategically distancing, impish snark. In “Xanny” she says a hard no to drugs, if only out of respect for friends she’s lost to them: “I can’t afford to love someone who isn’t dying by mistake/In Silverlake,” she sings with the kind of wry, eye-rolling detachment most strongly fermented in adolescence. It’s moments like these when Eilish isn’t at all someone you want to fear; she’s someone you want to root for”.
I am going to get to a review from NME. I have perhaps not done full justice to the impact and scope of WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?. As its fifth anniversary occurs on 29th March, it is important to recognise this major work from a truly special artist. Someone whose voice and songwriting style is so strong and distinct:
“Some artists defy descriptions. Or, at least, their inspirations, methods and expressions are often so astounding, it’s futile to try and label what they actually sound like. This line of thought, among many, is something that is becoming routine when the name Billie Eilish is mentioned. There’s plenty of talk about her “vibe” and “aura”, but little in the way of nailing down what the hell a Billie Eilish’s song is all about.
There are plenty of reasons for that. One being that the 17-year-old’s releases have been intermittent – an EP and a smattering of singles – and the other, more importantly, is that once you try to describe why something is so good, it immediately becomes an impossible task that does justice to nobody. If the previous three years had meant that people knew the name, and not the sound, then the US teen’s debut album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ will go someway to defining it.
This album is, thankfully, a remarkable effort from an artist whose sound has become in danger of being camouflaged by hype. Her debut EP, 2017’s ‘Don’t Smile At Me’ remains a strong effort, built around her viral and breakout single of the previous year, ‘Ocean Eyes’; that record contains moments of real charm, like the bubblegum-pop ‘Bellyache’ or the brooding, bolshy ‘COPYCAT’ – though a cohesive and extensive collection it is not.
Scarcity has had little impact on her success. Since ‘Don’t Smile At Me’ was released, it has been lingering in the charts both sides of the Atlantic for the best part of a year, and she’s become both an Instagram icon (15.1 million followers at the the time of writing) as well a key spokesperson amongst her generation. Now, in March 2019, she’s undoubtedly the most-talked about teen on the planet – everyone’s got a take on, be it about her styling or attitude.
Rest-assured: ‘When We All Fall Asleep…’ is worth the wait and exceeds the hype, but the sense of occasion hasn’t quite filtered down to Billie. On the 12-second opening track ‘!!!!!!!’ she jokes about taking out her retainer, and announces that “this is the album”, before she and Finneas O’Connell – co-writer, producer and older brother – descend into laughter.
The sense of their bedroom studio is all over this album. When there’s a hint of bombast, it’s soon disregarded in favour of the playful and DIY atmosphere that’s been cultivated in her and Finneas’ lab. Second half highlight ‘My Strange Addiction’, the closest thing Billie has ever come to writing a pop song that could have been sung by someone else, is interspersed with audio from a cult episode of The Office (the American version is one of her favourite shows). Likewise, on the thrilling, thumping opening track ‘Bad Guy’, where Billie’s vocals playfully joust with the looped bassline for her heaviest and club-ready track yet, there’s a moment after the chorus where the hubbub halts and an assured “duh!” from Billie hits you around the chops. And hen the bass kicks in again. Of course it was going to be this good. Of course they’re going to have a ball making it.
As the 14 tracks whittle along, that elusive and definable ‘sound’ starts to show itself. It’s remarkably agile; ‘Xanny’, a three-part soundclash, is perhaps the best example of the sonic palette that’s dipped into. The layered falsetto vocal trickery opens the song, while a wicked bassy onslaught warps the vocals into a slithering beast. By the end, the two coalesce into a surprisingly schmaltzy finale. The same formula is revisited and recalibrated on the previously released ‘You Should See Me In A Crown’ and ‘Ilomilo’, and the G-Funk nodding ‘All Good Girls Go To Hell’.
One aspect that needed no further development: her astute lyrical skills. Each track is laden with Blilie-isms that’ll make for plenty of Instagram-caption barbs – from the profound to the playful. On ‘Xanny’, she laments the prescription medication’s impact and the ensuing crisis on youth culture: “In the second-hand smoke, still just drinking canned coke, I don’t need a Xanny to feel better”. The chorus to ‘All The Good Girls Go To Hell’, meanwhile, proves itself a sparkling gem with jaunty piano and stuttering beats: “All the good girls go to hell / Because even God herself has enemies”.
There’s little to plausibly fault on the record. Previous singles are included sparingly (2018’s ‘When The Party’s Over’ and ‘You Should See Me In A Crown’), and there’s a real level of intrigue waiting on every song, partly as only two new songs (‘Bury A Friend’, ‘Wish You Were Gay’) got a pre-release. It’s an album that moves with purpose and knows when to hold the listener tight, or grab them by the scruff of the neck and drag them into her world. That said, one nitpick is the pacing towards the end, with the final three songs – ‘Listen Before I Go’, ‘I Love You’ and ‘Goodbye’ – providing an melancholy end close to an otherwise thrilling album.
‘When We All Fall Asleep…’, then, ticks all the boxes for a memorable and game-changing debut album. It’s enjoyable and familiar, but retains Billie’s disruptive streak. It’s a brave and resounding first step for an artist with bags of potential and over the next decade, you’ll no doubt see popular music scrabbling to try and replicate what this album does on every level. There’ll always be copycats, as Billie noted on her 2017 song of the same name, but none will be able to reach these heights any time soon”.
A global superstar and one of the most inspiring artists of her generation, there are eyes on Billie Eilish this year. After contributing the song, What Was I Made For?, to the Barbie soundtrack, she has won awards for that track. A magnificent songwriter, singer and director, we are going to see her progress and continue to make amazing music for decades more. The hugely eclectic and fascinating WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? is an album that you need to hear. Truly announcing a biblical talent, I absolutely love Billie Eilish’s debut album. I think that it is one of the finest debut albums…
OF the past couple of decades.