54 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
Eilish was a sensitive kid with severe separation
anxiety. She slept in her parents’ bed until she was
- Her dad says that until she was 12, one of them
was literally with her around the clock. Maggie and
Patrick, “mostly unemployed” actors (his words)
who put their careers on hold to home-school the
kids, had no formal curriculum. Instead, they let
Billie and Finneas, who turns 22 on July 30th, ex-
plore whatever interested them that week: art class-
es; museums; science programs at Cal Tech. “Our
whole stance was, general knowledge is all,” her dad
says. “You need to know why the sky is blue, but you
don’t need to memorize a bunch of esoterica you’ll
never use.” (Eilish passed her high school equivalen-
cy exam and graduated at 15.)
Eilish tried acting a few times, but it didn’t take.
“I went on, like, two auditions,” she says. “So lame.
This creepy, cold room. All these kids that looked ex-
actly the same. Most actor kids are psychopaths.” She
had more fun looping — recording background dia-
logue for crowd scenes. “I did Diary of a Wimpy Kid,
Ramona and Beezus, X-Men,” she says. “It was fun —
a bunch of kids in a room yelling random things, and
then we’d have a break and get snacks.” In a way, not
too dissimilar from what she does now.
There was always music. The family had three pi-
anos in the house, including a junky old grand that
Patrick scavenged for free off the internet. Maggie
played guitar and taught both kids the basics of song-
writing: This is a verse, these are chords. “We kind
of had a rule that no one would ever make you go to
sleep if you were playing music,” Maggie says.
If they were trying to create an incubator for mu-
sical prodigies, it worked. Finneas asked for his first
drum kit for Christmas at age three and taught him-
self piano at 11. As for Eilish, she wrote her first song
on the ukulele at four, started performing in home-
school talent shows at six, and joined the L.A. Chil-
dren’s Chorus at eight. As they got older, she and Fin-
neas started writing together, eventually recording
their songs on an iMac that Finneas — a former child
actor who had small roles on Modern Family and Glee
— had saved his paychecks for. When Eilish signed
her record deal, her label tried to move her into a
real studio to collaborate with more seasoned pro-
ducers and songwriters. She was not a fan.
“I hated it so much,” she says. “It was always these
50-year-old men who’d written these ‘big hit songs!’
and then they’re horrible at it. I’m like, ‘Ugh, you
did this a hundred years ago.’ Also no one listened
to me, because I was 14 and a girl. And we made
‘Ocean Eyes’ without anyone involved — so why are
we doing this?”
When it came time to record her album, Eilish
stuck with the formula she knew. She and Finneas
co-wrote 11 of the 13 songs, while he wrote the other
two solo and produced them all. They worked in
spurts, for 45 minutes or all night long, just sitting in
each other’s bedrooms trading lines. Eilish recorded
her vocals on Finneas’ bed, singing into a mic while
surrounded by flower pillows. They kept a progress
chart scribbled on his wall, right above where they
used to mark their heights as kids.
Sonically, Eilish’s music is genre-omnivorous: post-
Lorde confessionals, bouncy Benny Blanco pop, skit-
tering-808 trap beats and Yeezus-era-Kanye abrasion.
Vocally, she recalls everyone from Lana Del Rey to
early Eminem, her singsongy nyah-nyah raps giving
way to beautiful, hushed ballads over a minimalist
bottom end. “Billie has this specific vocal range, sort
of between a whisper and a hum,” Finneas says. “If
you play a lot of instruments in that range, her voice
sounds foggy — but things like bass, kick drums, and
low, clocky snares can co-exist and not conflict.”
A few months ago, Finneas bought himself a new
house. It’s only four minutes away — but his bedroom
studio is still here, untouched. “If my parents were
like, ‘We need the room, take out all your stuff,’ I’d
be like, ‘That makes sense. I have a house now!’ ” he
says. “But their very kind argument is: ‘If Billie still
lives at home, and she still wants to make music with
you, we want you to be able to do that here.’ ”W
HILE SHE’S HOME, Eilish wants to
see about a horse.
There’s a stable near her house
where she learned to ride as a little
girl. Her family couldn’t afford to pay, so she worked
in exchange for lessons — bridling the horses and
brushing them afterward. But she stopped coming
around after a couple of years because she “couldn’t
take being the poor girl around the stable.” “I made a
couple of friends,” she adds. “But otherwise nobody
was very nice. Horse people don’t like poor people.”
But now that she has some money, she wants to
have access to a horse when she’s home. “It’s more
for my mental health than, like, a hobby,” she says.
Outside, her new car is parked on the curb: a
matte-black Dodge Challenger she’s nicknamed the
Dragon. “Look at her fine ass,” she says. “I love this
car so much.” Her dream car since she was 13, it was
a 17th-birthday gift from her label. But up until five
days ago, she wasn’t allowed to drive it without one
of her parents. She just passed her driver’s test Fri-
day; today is Wednesday. “Check this out,” Eilish
says. She opens her wallet and proudly shows off her
license. (Name: Billie Eilish O’Connell. Eyes: Blue.
Hair: Other.)
Outside the stables, the owner greets Eilish with
a hug. Then they go inside and discuss her options.
The owner says she can do something called a “half-lease,” which would give her access to a horse when-
ever she wants. The cost would be $1,000 a month.
“We can’t really afford that,” her mom says. “But
she can.”
Afterward, Eilish walks through the barn to visit
the horses. She remembers most of them: Rosie, Clo-
ver, Frenchie, Captain America, the ponies Jellybean
and Tinkerbell. She nuzzles each one, letting it smell
her head. Eventually she gets to a gorgeous black
mare named Jackie O, and Eilish practically swoons.
“I was literally in love with this horse,” she says.
For a while she took lessons on her — “but then this
other girl with more money wanted to ride her,” and
since she could afford to pay, she got priority. Eilish
was so crushed that she quit riding altogether. She
couldn’t bear to see someone else on Jackie O. “But
even after I stopped riding,” she says, “I came here
just to be with her.” Eilish strokes Jackie O’s neck and
grins. The horse seems to remember her, too.
Back home, Eilish sits on the couch and gazes out
the window while Maggie brews her tea. “Mom,” she
says, “can you get my notebook?” Her mom brings it
in, and Eilish flips it open to show me. “For a while
I wrote literally everything I was thinking or feeling
in this book,” she says. “I haven’t actually done any-
thing in it for a while, because I’ve been hiding all
my emotions.”
Eilish flips through pages of drawings and sketch-
es — optical illusions, spiders, the Babadook. There’s
a scary creature she sometimes dreams about, a kind
of cross between a snake and the xenomorph from
Alien. (“It’s kind of what I imagine I look like in my
head,” she says.) But most of the book is filled with
words: snippets from her favorite rap songs, draft
lyrics for songs she never put out, lyrics for ones she
did. Plus, she says, “some stupid 14-year-old shit.”
(On one page: “You really know how to make me
cry.” On another: “I just want to hold you,” with the
“hold” crossed out and replaced with “fuck.”)
Eilish turns the page. “And this page... oof. This is
just me depressed,” she says. “Scared, broken, and
alone,” it says. And: “I’m sad again.” “Yeah,” says Ei-
lish. “This is when I was... not good.”
Eilish says it started with a dance injury when she
was 13. She’d been dancing seriously for a few years
in a more well-to-do part of town: ballet, tap, jazz,
hip-hop. When she was 12, she joined the competi-
tive-dance company. A lot of “really pretty girls,” all
in school together, all friends. “That was probably
when I was the most insecure,” she says. “I couldn’t
speak and just be normal. At dance you wear really
tiny clothes, and I’ve never felt comfortable in really
tiny clothes. That was probably the peak of my body
dysmorphia. I couldn’t look in the mirror at all.”
Then catastrophe struck. “Basically, before you’re
16, the cartilage in your hip isn’t firm yet,” she says.
“It’s still growing. I was in a hip-hop class with all the
seniors, the most advanced level.” She was already
injury-prone, and one day, she ruptured the growth
plate in her hip.
The injury was devastating. She had to give up
dance altogether. “I think that’s when the depression
started,” she says. “It sent me down a hole. I went
through a whole self-harming phase — we don’t have
to go into it, but the gist was, I felt like I deserved to
be in pain. I was just so not OK with who I was.”
Ironically, it’s also when her career started to take
off. “It’s funny,” she says. “When anyone else thinksBILLIE EILISH
“When anyone
else thinks of
Billie Eilish at
14, they think of
all the good things
that happened,”
she says. “All
I think is how
miserable I was.
Thirteen to 16
was pretty rough.”