Billie Eilish: At 17, she conquers the music world
It is quite possible that your children have heard of Billie Eilish (17). And in the truest sense of the word: the 17-year-old US-American is with her album "When we all fall asleep, where do we go?" just landed on number 1 of the US album charts.
With 313,000 units sold, Eilish has made it the second most successful sales launch of the year - only superstar Ariana Grande (25, "Sweetener") started in 2019 with 360,000 units sold by "Thank U, Next" even more successful. The 17-year-old singer-songwriter is known to her diehard fans a bit longer, over 17 million follow her on Instagram. Now she has arrived in the mainstream.
It did not take long to get there. She released her debut single "Ocean Eyes" at the end of 2015 on the platform Soundcloud. Billie was just 13 years old. Three and a half years later, she will perform at the Coachella Festival and perform a world tour - with stops at the Glastonbury Festival in the UK, the Lollapalooza in Stockholm and the Frequency in Austria. Deeper, or higher, you can hardly penetrate into the music cosmos.
The girl with the bedroom look
Almost 17 million times "Ocean Eyes" on Soundcloud has been clicked on, on Youtube come again almost 100 million clicks. And "Ocean Eyes" is not even the most clicked of her songs. "Lovely," a duo with singer-songwriter Khalid (21), has 289 million views. But who is this highly successful girl with the bedroom view and the colorful oversize wardrobe?
On December 18, 2001, Billie Eilish's Pirate Baird O'Connell is born in Los Angeles, California. Her parents are Maggie Baird and Patrick O'Connell. She also has a brother, Finneas O'Connell, who actually wrote "Ocean Eyes" for his band. She still writes her songs with him today, he's on stage with her, plays guitar and drum machine. She speaks of him as her partner in making music. The mother accompanies Billie to interview appointments and performances.
The parents have worked as actors teaching children at home and teaching siblings to pursue their artistic passion. At eight, Billie sings at Los Angeles Children's Chorus, and at eleven she writes her first songs. At 13 she is famous - or at least viral with "Ocean Eyes". A few weeks later, the phone rings and the 13-year-old is under contract with the music giant Interscope.
Their music is difficult to describe, but the word "dark" is quite good. The melancholic song is often breathy, backed by heavy minimal beats. Soft synthesizer, piano or violin sound in the background. The lyrics are about love and fear, death and depression.
The inspiration to draw Billie and her brother from self-living and their own imagination. "We're trying to write what everyone thinks, but nobody says," Billie explains her lyrics in 2017. "We want to be really interesting with the lyrics and at the same time make a conversation."
Her influences include Billie Eilish grunge bands like Flyleaf and Nirvana, the post-hardcore group Hawthorne Heights, but also pop greats like Lana Del Rey (33, "Lust for Life") and hip-hop giants like Childish Gambino (35, "Awaken, My Love!)". Her style expresses the mix perfectly: she wears her blue hair like Kurt Cobain once did, the squeaky-oversized wardrobe could hang in the closet with various rap musicians.
Visual language between Marilyn Manson and "Saw"
In her videos, the 17-year-old plays with different images, often characterized by a certain morbidity: In "When The Party's Over" runs their black color from the eyes, in "You Should See Me In A Crown" crawl black-wise spiders her around while she sings almost motionless. In "Bury a friend" Billie has her hands clasped in black gloves until she hunts half a dozen syringes to the lyrics "I wanna end me" ("I want to kill myself").
She transforms fears into art, says the 17-year-old recently in an interview with "Spiegel Online", describing her artistic work aptly in a few words. Whether she meets the fate of many teenage stars, from the meteoric rise to the limelight into the dark offside, can be difficult to predict. Their music, lyrics and videos definitely speak their own language, somewhere between Marilyn Manson videos and the "Saw" horror movies. And they could not only want to hear young fans for a long time.
