The first thing Billie Eilish does when she walks into the room is challenge me to a game of Ping-Pong. I accept, despite knowing none of the rules and having the coordination of a hallucinating puppy. We are in a studio space in LA, not too far from her current home and the house she grew up in. Her mother flits through the space briefly before departing, and soon enough I’m being taught the rules of Ping-Pong as Billie politely demolishes me, serve after serve, finding my weak spots (I have many) and delighting in the surprise of a return serve that earns me one point. I am not totally humiliated, which is kind of an accomplishment when you face a 21-year-old who has as many Grammys as there are days in the week.
When we sit down to chat, Billie pulls her freshly dyed hair — a halo of bright red at the scalp that morphs to black ends — into a ponytail. It’s a return to a previous look. She’s gone through many hair moments that have been replicated, riffed on, referenced by her fans: the slime-green ombré, the blond bob, the Marilyn homage, the pastel Tumblrcore teal, the space buns, the list goes on. Her hair moments are so surveilled, she’s worn wigs of old styles to hide her upcoming looks, buying Halloween-costume versions of herself to keep her secrets. Today’s version of Billie is, on the outside, familiar enough to fans, but the person inside is someone new even to herself. She’s spent time, serious time, wading out of the rough waters she used to surf.
Let her explain: “I do this thing where it seems like it’s good to find out all the things that are going to hurt you the most,” she says, “because when you know all of it, then you can have a sense of control about it. And once you know, you can heal from that. Then I’m invincible! But what I’ve learned...is that time goes by, and I’m still scarred. You don’t have to push into pain to get out of pain. I’ve done that, and I don’t want to do it again.” She’s in motion the whole time she contemplates this, her own self-sabotage, moving from sitting cross-legged to holding her feet to twirling her hair and redoing it. The room transforms from a studio space to something like a confessional.
As Billie toys with the perfume bottles on the table between us, I sense her longing to return to Ping-Pong. Maybe it’s one of the ways she comforts herself after she’s been vulnerable. I ask what she does to get back into her body when she feels overexposed.
She picks up the bottles, which are miniature busts of herself in profile. It’s possible that the assembly before us, and her interest in fragrance more broadly, which she’s said has been a constant in her life, could be part of the answer. Eilish No. 3 is on the table, the latest in a line of successful scents, sculptural like its predecessors, just in red now. Eilish No. 1 launched in 2021, and Eilish says this third scent (limited edition and out in November) will be the last in this collection.
The red bottle before us holds only water, as it’s still in production. The real perfume is in the sample bottle next to it. She cradles it and sprays the scent in the air. We both smile and wait for the fragrance to diffuse in the room. The scent is sweet but metallic.
“I love that it reminds me of metal,” says Billie. “If you combined Eilish No. 1 and No. 2, you’d have this sweeter, more romantic version,” she explains, before considering my earlier question on returning to herself.
“I watch things that bring me comfort” — she’s known to be a big fan of The Office — “swim in my pool, but I feel best right out of the shower, with my lotions and my smells and I’m in a clean environment. When you’re in a shitty spot emotionally, when you change the things in front of you, it can help so much. I’m trying to prioritize. I wrote in a song years ago...” she says, mentally sifting through her back catalog, fingers flipping through the air until she talk-sings, “‘to keep myself together and prioritize my pleasure,’” a lyric from “Getting Older,” a song on the album Happier Than Ever. “I said that three years ago, and then I didn’t do it!” She waves her hands in the air. “So I’m doing it now. And I’ve made enough people feel good that I deserve to feel good too.”
Speaking of songs, I bring up her latest megahit, “What Was I Made For?” Shortly after our interview, it already had over 200,000,000 streams on Spotify alone. By any measure, a blazing success. For Billie, it seemed to emerge from within. “It was as if this song was a tiny creature inside of me for years, scratching the inside of me,” she says, staring into space. “As soon as we got that prompt, the creature was like, ‘Okay, I’m out,’ and we [meaning Billie and her brother-collaborator, Finneas O’Connell] wrote that song in an hour or two.” It seems prophetic.
She leans back, remembering the moment vividly: “We wrote it in a period of time where we couldn’t have been less inspired and less creative. That day we were making stuff, and were like, ‘We’ve lost it. Why are we even doing this?’ And then those first chords happened, and ‘I used to float / now I just fall down’ came out and the song wrote itself. I have the whole video of us writing the song, and the first thing we wrote were those lines in the first 10 minutes.” She smiles a little at the memory. “We wrote most of the song without thinking about ourselves and our own lives, but thinking about this character we were inspired by. A couple of days went by, and I realized it was about me. It’s everything I feel. And it’s not just me — everyone feels like that, eventually.”
“The way the song has been heard and seen by women is so special to me,” Billie says. “All the videos are devastating. I go on TikTok, and it’s video after video of how hard it is to be a woman, with that song playing.” Her eyes are wide with emphasis.
It must be overwhelming, I say, to be the doorway to all those experiences. I’ve seen the videos — they’re the life story of the patriarchy over and over again, and the rebellion against it. They’re love stories, tragedies, victories, and hard-won battles, escapes from abusive marriages, celebrations of lives fought for and well lived. And Billie’s voice is the connective tissue through them all.
“It’s wild,” she says. Does she ever want to hide from the exposure, the weight of all that fandom? She stills, then shakes off the question, or the troubles it leads to. “All the time. But I can do that. That’s the thing about diving into the hurt — I don’t need to do that. I’m starting to do better, but I’ve not been doing so great, to be honest. For a while. I have impending-doom feelings most of the day. When I think too much about it, how I can never have privacy again, it’s enough to make you want to do all sorts of crazy things. But you have to let it go.”
Letting things go is a hard lesson to learn for anybody, but a brutal one to learn when your every move is in the news, every relationship hyper analyzed. (I don’t ask her about her relationship status.) But it is clear she’s done some letting go herself, shaped by epiphanies she had on the road during her world tour. “There was this moment when I was in Paris, we were driving around, and I was in a bad place. It was not a good time for ol’ Bill. I was not getting better, and didn’t know when I would. And this motorcycle pulled up next to the car, and this guy’s helmet had a sticker on it that said in all caps, ‘Move on.’ I was sitting there like, Oh. Message received. I have a really big problem with control,” she adds, “so I’ve been trying to teach myself that there are things out of your control and you have to move on.” That means keeping things moving even when it might hurt. Her focus now is refusing to settle. “I have settled many times with things and people and life. I’ve settled for less than I deserved, and I’m not going to do that anymore.” She shifts again in her seat, and I consider whether we should get back to Ping-Pong so she can hit something and watch it sail through the air.
It's the closest thing to closure I can offer, really. By now she’s been in the music industry for seven years and counting, and she’s on her third perfume. There’s no sophomore slump for her in either industry — her songs sell well, her perfumes do too. But in either space, beauty or music, she’s still likely to be one of the youngest in the room, surrounded by people who think they know better than she does. Both are industries that defer to older experts. She smiles, wickedly now, revealing the mischievous nature you see in her music videos. “I have to give credit to the person I’ve always been — I did not give a fuck at all. Between being a 14-year-old girl, and Finneas being a 17-year-old boy, and us making these little songs — we had to be very clear we weren’t going to just do what anybody said. People could have done crazy shit, and I didn’t let them. It was many, many years of having to convince a room full of people that I was going to do what I knew was right for me. I had ideas; I had plans.”
She stops and nods to herself. “But the thing is, people should know — women should know — you don’t have to be exceptional. You can just be a person, and you should get awards for just being. Sometimes artists don’t have plans, and that’s fine, but I did, and I wasn’t going to waste them.” She has been headstrong and sure of herself from the start, somehow managing to preserve that commitment to her ideas through years of public performance and the roller coaster of growing up. Still, she realizes how lucky she’s been in her own evolution.
“When I was 17, I was like, I found it. I found the person I am, forever. This is how I’m going to do it. I found all the ways!” She laughs at her own naivete, leaning back in her chair — moving, moving, always moving, even when she’s sitting down. “These are my boundaries. These are the things that make me happy, and this is my recipe for how I’m going to make music and be happy. Then I grew up a little, and suddenly life was like, These aren’t going to work. You've got to change. You're not that person anymore."
She throws her hands up in the air, smiling and grieving at the same time — conflicting feelings that on her shoulders feel perfectly synchronized. “But the more I think about being myself, the better my life is. The more I am myself, the better my life is,” she says, leaning closer in her chair to make her point. It sounds like a secret shared between us, however simple the notion is. You can tell she means it.
Our time together is just about over. The perfume has settled into the couch, a final parting gift that conditions the leather just a bit. It’s still sweet but not cloying; it dances through the air with little effort. Just like Billie, a dancer at heart. She gets up to head outside. I look at the Ping-Pong table behind us. She turns to me as she opens the door, already moving on. “I’m going to win next time,” I say, nodding at the table. She cackles. “Yeah, right,” she says, perfectly confident in her skills, her talent, and, hopefully, herself. And then she’s gone.
Photographed by Cho Gi-Seok
Fashion stylist: Anna Trevelyan
Hair: Benjamin Mohapi
Hair colorist: Jess Gonzalez
Makeup: Holly Silius
Manicure: Erin Moffett
Set design: Lauren Machen
(Motion) DP: Tyler Kohlhoff
Production: Viewfinders