She’s also set an intention to stay offline when she feels that all-too-common itch to fall into a bottomless pit of portable despair. Eilish deleted social media apps from her phone at the beginning of the summer and replaced them with games. She still posts sometimes, but no longer has access to her account on her phone, which sometimes leaves her blissfully ignorant, including about her own record-breaking hits. She will receive a message informing her that the album has gone platinum or that she is the most listened to artist in the world on Spotify. “That’s it everything music,— she says, as if she still can’t believe it. “That’s literally the entire song in the world.(And over 105 million monthly listeners on Spotify, to be precise.)
The key, she says, is the balance between the desired intimacy of your private life and the enormity of your public persona. “Over time, I think I’ve made a really good mix,” she says, “making sure I feel like myself and I’m not satisfied with just external validation.” For many years, public reaction was the only thing 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 weren’t.” The strongest criticism tended to focus on her physical presentation: when she posted a photograph of herself wearing a bathing suit on vacation, the backlash reached Fox News; when she tried on more traditionally feminine attire for photo shoots or the Met Gala, she had to publish her own version of a press release. (“I spent the first five years of my career being absolutely obliterated by you idiots for being childish and dressing like me and constantly being told that I would 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 appropriate, I’ve changed and I’m exhausted.”) “I’ve learned not to base my life around it,” she says now. She is not entirely offline, of course, nor is she in any way immune to outside opinion. (Find a 22-year-old who does.) But she’s a little removed from that; an investment in the parts of her life that you can’t necessarily see within the enormous structure of her fame, a playfulness and a sense that she doesn’t need to take herself so seriously.
“I’m excited to see her enjoying,” Baird told me later, “that she’s doing things like going to a restaurant…. There are many levels of fame and many different moments of fame. There are times when you can’t leave the house, and there are times when you just have a little grace, and enjoying those moments is really wonderful.” In the weeks following our meeting, Eilish is seen in the audience at a Clairo show at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles, wearing a basketball jersey that says “EILISH” on the back. She feels an ease in public that feels new, an adult embrace of the world rather than viewing it from a protective position.
Speaking of seizing the moment: “Guess” came about after Charli XCX and her manager suggested the collaboration that would eventually end up in the second remixed edition of Charli XCX’s Brat. “I was so inspired,” says Eilish. The result, a seductive whisper verse over a bawdy club banger, was a clear departure from Eilish’s typical warble and croon, and quickly took over the internet (and the charts) during what had previously been dubbed “brat summer.” It’s fun, sweaty, provocative, unapologetically exciting and deeply ironic music. In the music video, Eilish happily drives a bulldozer through a wall and, with her strutting co-star, reaches the top of a
mountain of underwear.
It feels like a continuation of something Eilish started with her previous summer hit, “Lunch” (sample lyric: “I could eat that girl for lunch… It’s a desire, not a passion”). While his previous albums used his instrument to plumb the depths of the human experience, this one seems happy to glide sonically closer to the surface, playing with pop structures and his own psychology in equal measure. It just seems lighter, even if the actual message is not; it also seems like she’s no longer playing a character. “You know, the big challenge when you’re on your third full-length album is trying not to repeat yourself,” Finneas told me, noting that it took him a year to write Hit me hard and soft. “What was really important for me was pushing Billie to be honest,” he says. As a result, the upbeat tracks are accompanied by songs like “The Greatest” (“And you don’t want to know / How alone I’ve been / Let you come and go / Whatever state I’m in”) and “Wildflower” (“Things Fall Apart and time breaks your heart / I wasn’t there, but I know / She was your girl, you showed her the world / You fell in love and you both let yourself go”). These songs, Finneas tells me, “are like confessions.”
#Billie #Eilish #grown