text: In the last year, Billie Eilish scored five Grammys, went multiplatinum eight times, released the new Bond theme, and had to cancel a world tour. Then, she turned 19.Before I ever meet Billie Eilish, I feel like I know her. I have already watched her ride a pinto across a New Zealand beach, get her sprained ankle wrapped, grind on a bag of bagels, blow a slobbery raspberry into hеr brother Finneas’s face, mimic hеr mother, expound on the seriousness of the coronavirus, shoot water out one nostril while using a neti pot, and fit much of an Oscar Schmidt Aloha ukulele headstock into her mouth. I know what a Billie Eilish burp sounds like, and also a sneeze. Here, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary about her life, is blond-haired toddler Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell perched on a piano bench. Here she is a few years later, singing at a talent show. I have listened to her perform at the Democratic National Convention, the Academy Awards, the Grammys , Coachella, SNL, Howard Stern, NPR’s Tiny Desk, Ellen, The Tonight Show, and in a car with James Corden.
  The muchness of Eilish’s online presence is overwhelming and kaleidoscopic, her own posts and performances spawning fan accounts and compilation videos and ecstatic reaction videos and memes, so many memes, refractions of Billie Eilish ad infinitum. There is the Baader-Meinhof effect too; once you are aware of Eilish, she really is everywhere. She’s trending on Twitter, her emotive face shows up in a group text, her beautiful voice Dopplers out of a passing car. In the four short years since she signed with Darkroom/Interscope Records, she has risen to mind-boggling stardom: Her 49-show Where Do We Go? arena tour, which had just kicked off in March and would have run through September had it not been for the pandemic, sold out days after tickets went on sale. In October, when we first speak, her music video for the deliciously delinquent pop-trap tune “Bad Guy” hits a billion views; a couple weeks later, she drops “Therefore I Am,” a single from her forthcoming album, and it’s watched 12 million times in the first 24 hours. And she isn’t yet 19.
  Because of all this preconditioning—to profile a celebrity is to dip a toe into the waters of extreme fandom—it is both thrilling and banal to see Eilish pop up on Zoom. She’s wending her way through her family’s home in Highland Park, Los Angeles, where she’s filmed so many clips for Instagram and conducted almost all of her interviews over the last four years.
  “I just made a magnificent breakfast,” Eilish tells me as she props her phone against a mirror in the little blue bathroom. This, too, seems normal. Eilish has few if any pretenses. Her hands smell like garlic and onions, she says. “I have to wash them now.” She makes a show of it, finishing with a little ta-da! move, as though she should be wearing a top hat. I half expect her to start singing. Alas, she does not.
  She’s in an oversize black T-shirt emblazoned with the rapper Duckwrth’s face. She’s embraced the body-obscuring street style pioneered by female artists like Missy Elliott and TLC. “Earlier this year my album Igor was the number one album in the country,” Tyler, the Creator growled at the 2019 American Music Awards, “and then this 17-year-old girl who dresses like a quarterback decided to change that.” At five feet three, she’s almost always dwarfed by whoever she’s with, be it one of her burly bodyguards or her lanky six-foot-tall brother, Finneas, who is also her producer and collaborator—but she could be any height onscreen, and throughout our conversations she’s either got the phone placed somewhere around her knees so she’s looming above me, backgrounded by the black and red motif of her childhood bedroom, or I’m looking down at her as she lolls on her bed amid Blohsh pillows. With her enviable eyebrows, button nose, and heavy-lidded eyes, she looks not unlike a fresh-faced Marilyn Monroe—albeit with a two-tone dye job, the raven black pushed out by neon-green roots.
  In photos she smolders or glowers or sulks. Her music videos are awash in black liquids streaming from her eyes, oil spills, burn marks, tarantulas, disembodied hands clawing at her face. Finneas has worked the sickening whiz of a dentist’s drill and the wet suck of Eilish removing her Invisalign into her songs. There is an extreme teen-ness to her, which elicits the same sort of rebukes bestowed upon other young stars who haven’t taken fondly to instant fame. A screenshot of Eilish, her lip curled in what appears to be confused derision, went viral seemingly nanoseconds after she made the expression during Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph’s performance at the 2020 Academy Awards, drawing instant ire for her apparent dis of our comedic lords and saviors. But the Twitter takedowns left out context: Eilish had been smiling up at the performance until she caught sight of herself on a giant screen. At the Grammys, following her sweep of every other major category, the camera caught her mouthing “Please don’t let it be me,” like a shy overachiever on school awards day, before they called album of the year. 
  Billie is a member of the unique moment in history,” says R.J. Cutler, who directs the forthcoming Apple TV+ documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which filmed from 2018 into early 2020, “where perhaps every second of her life has been recorded in some form or another.” Cutler, director of The War Room and executive producer of ABC’s Nashville, had been immediately drawn to the project. “Those stories of teenage life are so interesting to me. It’s such a fascinating time of life, where you were both child and adult; one foot in childhood, one foot in adulthood. And especially for somebody who’s going through what Billie was going through and who was such a remarkable talent.”
  Eilish was excited about the prospect of the documentary from the beginning. “I just have always loved cameras,” she says, that moment at the Oscars aside, “and I loved being on camera, and I’ve always loved watching videos of myself, since I was a little kid. I remember being 10 and being like, ‘Mom, can I watch home movies?’ ” Eilish is sentimental about memory, and she fills boxes under her bed with mementos: receipts from a trip to Japan, keys to old diaries, a beanie that belonged to the first person she fell in love with. “I have perfumes in that box. Small little vials of perfumes that smell exactly the way I smelled in that relationship,” she says, and another one “that smells like somebody that was abusive to me, mentally.”
  For all her professional Sturm und Drang, in conversation she’s animated and smiley, her big blue eyes often crinkling at the corners. “In our creative life and minds,” she says of herself and Finneas, “we’re just at an all-time good.” She was 16 when she recorded When We All Fall Asleep, and “parts of it were great and I love that album, but I was,” she says, “not in a great mental place.” Since then, she’s started seeing a therapist. She’s more settled. She laughs a lot—a midsentence hiccup when she’s making fun of her own earnestness; a throaty chuckle when she’s proud of and/or flabbergasted by her trajectory, like when I ask where she keeps her Grammys and she says, “Right on the shelf, right on the shelf, heh-heh.” But the ultimate Eilish laugh is an open-mouth-grinning, eyebrows-raised ha-haaa! that falls somewhere between a chortle and a squawk—it is a laugh that might belong to a very charming cartoon chicken.
  The music she’s working on now, she says, “feels exactly how I want it to. There isn’t one song, or one part of one song, that I wish was this or that I wish it was that.” An early single, “Therefore I Am,” thrilled fans and critics with its can’t-touch-this vibe coupled with Descartes’s “cogito, ergo sum” reflections on being, the lyrics a decoder ring of references. Eilish describes it as “a pretty solid fuck-it type song.” In the music video, filmed at the Glendale Galleria on an iPhone at 4 a.m., she acts out a universal fantasy of any budding American consumer, running through the mall’s empty fluorescence, collecting junk food from various stalls. 
  Even without the documentary, aspects of the Eilish origin story have been so well-chronicled as to achieve a kind of mythic status: that her parents homeschooled both her and Finneas, in part because their father was inspired when he learned that the Hanson brothers had been taught at home and allowed to pursue whatever creative endeavors most struck their fancy, paving the way for “MMMBop.” That Finneas and Eilish recorded the mesmeric, ethereal “Ocean Eyes” for her dance class, and when they uploaded it to SoundCloud in November 2015, it went viral overnight. That a growth-plate injury soon after would end her dance aspirations, and around the same time she wouldn’t make it into the exclusive chamber choir in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, which she’d been singing with since age eight. That in summer 2016, then 25-year-old Justin Lubliner signed her to his label Darkroom in partnership with Interscope Records.
  Her appeal transcends generations—she’s found admirers in Alicia Keys, who recorded a cover of “Ocean Eyes”; Julia Roberts, who has said she “is everything”; and Dave Grohl, who called her “unbelievable.” Woody Harrelson, who hosted the 2019 season premiere of SNL for which she was the musical guest, calls her “a little bit otherworldly.” But, unsurprisingly, it’s teen girls who make up the most vocal contingent of her fan base. Harrelson had to keep the fact that Eilish was performing at the show from his teen daughter, because he knew she’d insist on coming to the show . “A great deal of it has to do with how much loves the music. Also, there’s something about Billie that just feels genuine,” he says. “She’s just herself, which is very hard to be.”
  “She’s direct and unaffected,” her father, Patrick O’Connell, says. “It’s disarming and visible to anyone who sees it, but I think it’s so appealing and magnetic to her fans.” There is a typical Billie Eilish fan experience, he says, channeling it: “ ‘Oh my gosh, she’s just like me. Oh my God, we could be friends if we only knew each other. Oh my God, she’s saying exactly what I would say.’ ”
  The teenage years are often fueled by big emotions, an enormous and self-critical solipsism, and the feeling that nobody understands, nobody sees, that every terrible, confusing, embarrassing aspect of life is happening to you and you alone. Art is the thing that saves us, that teaches us early lessons in empathy: Others can and do experience the same feelings of lust, of sadness, of shame. It’s a sense of being seen, a first taste of deep love. The looks on the faces of Eilish’s fans—so many of them young, so many of them girls—as they stare up at her onstage and weep is so universal, so visceral. It’s earthshaking.
  That kind of devotion, Eilish says, “makes you kind of crazy. We all know the feeling of seeing yourself and being like, What is going on with me, I’m acting insane. When you’re excited about something, you forget boundaries and you forget what’s polite and what’s kind of not polite. I’ve had a lot of weird situations—people will kiss me and pick me up, spin me around.”
  For meet-and-greets, back when those were still happening, members of her team started briefing the kids in line about how to behave. “It is definitely important to have the boundaries and also have people around you that can help in a situation like that,” Eilish says. “I never want to push away somebody that’s showing me only love. And even if it’s coming from a place of crazy love, I don’t ever want to push that too far away.”
  “I think Patrick and I, in a way, get to benefit from it a little bit more than Billie does, because we can see the beautiful effect she’s having on people’s lives,” says Baird. “It’s hard for her to take that in. You can easily feel like you’re letting people down.”
  Part of her connection with her fans, Eilish says, is because she understands them so well, and describes herself as “a fan type person.” Her own musical obsessions are well-cataloged, in particular her early infatuation with Justin Bieber, for which her mother once considered putting her into therapy. In April 2019, they met for the first time, at Coachella. Eilish stood speechless in front of him for a full 30 seconds before falling into his arms for an airport-terminal-grade hug. They danced to a surprise NSYNC performance of “Tearin’ Up My Heart,” a song recorded more than four years before Eilish was born. Three months later, Bieber recorded a verse for a “Bad Guy” remix; the accompanying art is a photo of Eilish at age 12 surrounded by the Bieber posters taped to her bedroom walls. 
  While a generation of teenage girls may be channeling their angst and vicarious rebellions through Eilish’s moody lyrics, the concerned parent can take comfort in the fact that Eilish is a teetotaler. At 15, one of her friends ended up in rehab following an overdose, others close to her have died. The motif of “burying” friends and lovers “not dying by mistake” appears throughout her music. In a sea of anthems to the glory of getting fucked up, Eilish’s “Xanny,” sung with a jazzy, benzo-laced ennui, is actually about the sadness of being among people who can’t stay sober. “When I was growing up and I was around my group of friends back then,” says Eilish of her own sobriety, “and they would all be drinking and smoking and doing drugs and whatever, I think because of the way that my personality is—I’m a very strong-willed person, and I think at the time I was very alpha—I’m coming to realize that I may have felt a feeling of superiority.”
  These days, she says, as long as her friends are steering clear of hard drugs and being safe with everything else, she’s not worried—besides which, the issue comes up less. “I’m not out here going to parties and also,” she slows down, “I’m me, so I can’t really go…anywhere.” I must have made an expression of sympathy, because she follows with “But it’s okay!” as though trying to reassure me.
  The world has no shortage of child stars hewn by parent managers—Britney, Beyoncé, Lindsay—whose relationships, as the children inevitably turn into adults, follow varying rocky trajectories. From a distance, Baird and O’Connell bear the hallmarks of stage parents: They’re both actors who had fine but less than dazzling careers; the Hanson inspo could’ve been a red flag. But the ingredients haven’t concocted trouble. While Baird, who taught the kids, does serve as a sometime manager for her daughter, she’s more of a tour mom, and O’Connell, who worked construction for Mattel, started out as a handyman at his children’s shows; now he does the lights. “ seems to have such an even keel, and I credit it to her extraordinary, very tight family,” says Harrelson, who went to lunch with them the day after the SNL broadcast. “They’re looking after each other, they love each other immensely. And so there’s not the same kind of head games.”
  And a sibling rivalry is meanwhile hard to imagine. Finneas has a full-blown musical career in his own right, putting out a solo EP in 2019 and producing songs for Selena Gomez and Camila Cabello. “He has this special and unique ability to work with Billie that nobody else has,” says O’Connell. “He’s her older brother. He’s seen it all from the start. She’s seen it all. So they have this honesty with each other and they can be very frank. They can tell each other that they suck. They also have great respect for each other’s individual talents.” Her pretty, mournful song, “Everything I Wanted” is about the comfort and stability of their relationship.
  I had a dream
  I got everything I wanted
  But when I wake up, I see
  You with me
  And you say, “As long as I’m here
  No one can hurt you…”
  As the Eilish operation scales exponentially up, moving from the single bus and motel rooms of its early tours to the arenas, first-class flights, and full security detail that it is today, on a basic musical level it has retained its DIY roots: Eilish and Finneas still record all of their songs themselves, most often in Finneas’s childhood bedroom, his multiple keyboards jammed between Murakami flower pillows.
  The homespun production has lent them a nimbleness that proved useful pre-pandemic, when they spent so much time on tour. In 2019, when longtime James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli invited Eilish and Finneas to work on a No Time to Die theme, they wrote it on the road and recorded it in the quietest place they could find: their tour bus. “The bus was off, so it was completely pitch-black,” Eilish says, “and I was sitting hunched over in my bunk and Finneas was sitting in his bunk across the aisle.” Hans Zimmer himself plucked the song from the list of options—going against the sensibilities, he’s said, of other decision makers—calling it “hugely personal,” “really well crafted,” and “lean.” The morning after Eilish’s 18th birthday they traveled to London, and following a jet-lagged viewing, they recorded “No Time to Die” with Zimmer’s orchestra at Sir George Martin’s AIR Studios. It, too, garnered a nomination at this year’s Grammys.
  If a Google search turns up scant paparazzi shots of one of the world’s most popular musicians, it’s because she makes herself vigorously unavailable. She doesn’t eat out and no longer takes spins around Trader Joe’s, where she once hoped to become a checker. Weeks before I met her, a pap snapped a photo of her in the few seconds it took to get from her car to her brother’s house. She was wearing a tank top, on the way to the beach, and the image spawned a range of opinions, from the celebratory to the vile.
  “I think that the people around me were more worried about it than I was, because the reason I used to cut myself was because of my body. To be quite honest with you, I only started wearing baggy clothes because of my body,” says Eilish. “I was really, really glad though, mainly, that I’m in this place in my life, because if that had happened three years ago, when I was in the midst of my horrible body relationship—or dancing a ton, five years ago, I wasn’t really eating. I was, like, starving myself. I remember taking a pill that told me that it would make me lose weight and it only made me pee the bed—when I was 12. It’s just crazy. I can’t even believe, like I—wow. Yeah. I thought that I would be the only one dealing with my hatred for my body, but I guess the internet also hates my body. So that’s great.”
  I posit that the internet might hate all women’s bodies.
  “The internet hates women,” Eilish says. Last year, she made a short film in which she very slowly disrobes from a black hoodie to a bra and sinks into thick black liquid. “Do you know me?” her voiceover asks. “Really know me? You have opinions about my opinions, about my music, about my clothes, about my body.”
  The pandemic has tightened her already tight-knit circle; she spends most of her time with her family and a few close friends, many of whom work for her. On our first call, two publicists and one of her managers, Laura, whom she calls her “best friend,” unexpectedly joined us—a publicist has been present for every cover interview, they say, “since day one”—but a week later, it’s just us, as requested.
  “I am sitting here and napping with the ugly little dog,” she says at the start of our second Zoom: “He is snoring and smells terrible.” She moves the phone so I can take in Shark, her jowly 10-month-old blue nose pit bull rescue, adopted toward the beginning of the pandemic, who is going through a rebellious phase. At the moment he is luxuriating on his back, his face tucked into her armpit, making a noise that could be warped into a background track on one of her songs. 
  During the pandemic, she has discovered the joys of ordering online. “I don’t know what things cost because I’ve never been an adult before,” she says. “And, you know, I grew up with no money.” Then she crash-landed into the adult world as a multiplatinum artist selling out arena tours. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? sold 3.9 million units. “It’s a really weird position I’m in. I feel kind of stupid because I’m like, I don’t know how much Froot Loops are. I tried to order one box of Froot Loops and I was like, Oh yeah, sure. It’s $35. I didn’t know that that’s expensive.” She raises her eyebrows. “I ordered 70 boxes.” 
  She also finished watching The Office—for the 15th time. When I ask about her devotion to the show, which she sampled on “My Strange Addiction,” she says, “I’ve got a lot going on in my head and my brain really can’t shut the fuck up unless there’s something else going on. It takes me out of my thoughts. And I like that it’s just, like, realistic shit. It’s the most average people’s lives, and I love that.”
  Eight months into the pandemic, Finneas and Eilish managed a feat few have attempted: They gave a live concert to thousands of fans. At 3 p.m. PT, as the lights came up on Eilish’s Los Angeles stage, the words “the show is best on a bigger screen” appeared at the corner of my laptop, a reminder for a generation of teenagers raised on smartphones. The show setup looked simple enough: Finneas at his keyboard, Eilish with a mic, and Andrew Marshall on drums, each occupying their own third of the stage. But then the VR kicked in. During the set’s opener, “Bury a Friend,” a song from the perspective of the monster under your bed, Eilish’s shadow stretched nightmarishly up the backboard into a looming Tim Burton-esque bogeyman. A three-dimensional wall-spanning spider, the platonic ideal of every arachnophobe’s worst anxieties, skittered and stomped around Eilish as she sang “You Should See Me in a Crown.” A cute forest bloomed; a shark devoured her; she and her brother soared skyward on a pillar, surrounded by stars and backed by the moon. It was magical in a very 21st century kind of way. And mega-graphics aside, the clapping from the crew between songs lent a sense of intimacy to the proceedings. It was “to give me a little something,” Eilish says, “because it’s weird to not have the crowd. All of my performance energy comes from the crowd.”
  Still, the energy was there. Growing up, Eilish watched concert videos of her favorite rappers. “I envied them because they get to just take their shirts off, because they’re men, and jump around the stage, and the whole crowd is jumping around and spraying water, and moshing and they’re dirty and they don’t care!” she says. “I have pretty much been channeling that energy for years.” During rehearsals and performances, Eilish’s bombast has racked up a torn hip flexor, shin splints, and sprained ankles. As damaging as her profession has been to her body, it’s been productive exercise for her mind. Eilish, who has an auditory processing disorder, was also diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome around the time “Ocean Eyes” took off. “I think music is a great therapy for her, but it’s her own music and it’s her performing,” says O’Connell. “She doesn’t suffer from Tourette’s during performance.”
  An unexpected pleasure of the livestream is hearing nearly 19-year-old Eilish singing songs recorded at ages 14, 15, 16, and realizing just how much her voice has matured. “It’s been five years since ‘Ocean Eyes’ came out, and I thought she had an incredibly beautiful voice then,” Finneas says. “I would liken it to the way that an Olympic trainer might see a 15-year-old Apolo Ohno and think, This is a really good speed skater for a 15-year-old—imagine how good they’ll be at 20.” He says that the new album, which he calls “a continuation of Billie’s life story,” has grown with her. “Even just little moments of variety, like on ‘No Time to Die,’ she has a big belt moment that a couple of years younger Billie might not have had the training or the stamina to do.” On songs like “Ocean Eyes,” spanning two octaves and arranged for a 13-year-old’s fluty vocal cords, Eilish’s voice now often dissolves into a haunting whisper in that highest register; everywhere else is richer, fuller.
  The timing of the livestream, just 10 days before the election, was no accident. “That was a big part of making sure that we were taking advantage of the reach,” Eilish says. In the hour before kickoff, the preshow included messages from Jameela Jamil, Eilish’s “surrogate dad” Steve Carell, and Alicia Keys encouraging fans to exercise their right to vote. During “All the Good Girls Go to Hell,” with its line “hills burn in California,” scenes of climate disaster—Eilish’s soapbox bugbear—spun over the soundstage. “Vooote, for God’s sake,” she said as she left the stage at the end of the show, her head tipped back in the universal expression of adolescent irritation.
  “I think it’s human to care, and I just don’t really get why people don’t care,” she says. “I want to have kids and I want those kids to have kids. Like, I don’t—” she stops and gives a sad non-laugh. “We’re going to die.” 
  Young people become catalysts in times of political and social unrest, when the future, their future, is uncertain. In the ’60s, the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights saw uprisings on college campuses. In the last four years, a new activist generation has come of age, from Greta Thunberg fighting for climate action; to 13-year-old Flint, Michigan, resident Mari Copeny raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for nationwide water filters; to teenage TikTokers pulling a prank on a Trump rally. At the beginning of the pandemic, Baird launched Support + Feed, which partners with local restaurants to provide plant-based meals to those experiencing food insecurity, a venture that she says Eilish has supported “emotionally, financially, and social media-wise.”
  Baird, who grew up “in Colorado with a Democratic family in a very Republican state and area” , says that politics have always been important in the O’Connell-Baird-Finneas-Eilish household. In 2016, “I think Billie and Finneas and every one of their age group, to be honest, had a real blow, because your parents are supposed to make you feel safe, and your parents are supposed to say everything’s going to be okay. And when Trump won, we just kind of fell apart,” she says. “I always think that maybe that had a lot to do with them making the album that they made.” In the lead-up to the election, following her performance at the DNC, Eilish received a callout from President Biden on Twitter: “I’ll just say what @billieeilish said: vote like your life depends on it.” The week before, she’d posted a short video call with Vice President Kamala Harris to talk about climate change. The outgoing Trump administration highlighted her name in a document as an artist who should not be used in a coronavirus ad campaign. “I was very proud of myself,” she says. “Tons of my friends texted me and they were like, I’m so proud of you! Trump is afraid of you! I was like, Damn right.”
  A week after the election, I checked in. “I was up with a bunch of horses all day,” she says of Election Day—she’s been riding on and off since her early teens. “I was trying to distract myself, giving my energy to the horses, which was honestly so nice.” When the networks called the election for Biden and Harris, Eilish says she “immediately started howling and cheering at eight in the morning. And so did the rest of the neighborhood.” She grabbed some leftover fireworks from the Fourth of July and “I lit the bitches.” “There’s still a million things we need to do better,” she says, “but just getting that orange piece of shit out of that White House is the best thing that could happen right now.”
  It feels like I’m catching her in a relative calm before a storm. As she barrels through her final year of the teen age, the release of The World’s a Little Blurry is about to put on display aspects of her life she’d never planned on sharing, including the intimate details of a romantic relationship that she’d never wanted to talk about publicly. “That was a huge part of my life,” she says. “And nobody knew it. It was this main thing that was taking control of my life.”
  When I ask whether she’s in a relationship now, I get a direct, “Girl, no.” I point out that she’s said this before and later took it back. She thinks for a moment. “I am glad every day that I’m single, but I’m also like, not out here pushing people away. I’d be fine to have somebody, but I don’t.”
  “The fundamental theme of Billie’s story,” says Cutler, is “empathy, connection.” When Eilish finally watched an early cut of the documentary, she had a hard time getting through it. “It’s really about my life, me, in such a way that I was not expecting, and was pretty brutal to relive.” But that experience has been ultimately rewarding—and it gave her something equally unexpected. “I was going through hell in certain parts of my life, and I had no idea anyone was seeing it,” she says. “The fact that they have footage of it and you can see my emotions…. It’s like, I can’t help but think about the last episode of The Office when Erin was like,” she paraphrases, “How did you do it? How did you really get how we felt and what we were doing? How did you do it? I used to watch that episode and be like, That would be amazing if somebody did that and you could rewatch those parts of your life from a different perspective. And I did it!”