On March 29th of last year, 17-year-old Billie Eilish entered the public consciousness, and the Billboard charts, with her self-produced début album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, the 2nd-biggest album of 2019, and the third-largest streaming week for an album by a woman, with six Billboard Hot 100 top 40 songs: When the Party’s Over, Bury a Friend, Wish You Were Gay, Xanny and Bad Guy, the last of which became her first number one single stateside, in the U.K., Mexico, and Australia.
The rest, as they say, is utterly unique, groundbreaking rock ‘n roll history.
Billie Eilish’s accolades include 5 Grammy Awards, 2 American Music Awards, 2 Guinness World Records, 3 MTV Video Music Awards, and one Brit Award. Eilish is the youngest person and second person ever to win the four main Grammy categories — Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year — in the same year. No mean feat that.
The daughter of teacher, actress, and screenwriter Maggie Baird, and construction worker and part-time actor, Billie Eilish and her older brother / producer and co-songwriter, Finneas O’Connell hail from decidedly working class roots. Both parents encouraged the siblings — who were homeschooled — to express themselves and explore whatever they wanted, including music, art, dancing and acting.
In October 2015, at age fourteen, Billie recorded the song Ocean Eyes, co-written and produced with Finneas, after his sister’s dance teacher asked them to record a song for a dance routine. In 2015, releasing the song on SoundCloud, and the next year on YouTube (at present, Ocean Eyes has 293,733,254 views), coinciding with a deal Finneas had made to sign Billie with Apple Music, Billie’s budding music career began to kick into high gear.
In March 2017, Billie recorded songs for the soundtrack to the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why — one song, Lovely, recorded with Khalid, was certified platinum in North America — and that same month, Billie was showcased at the South by Southwest music festival. In February 2018, Billie, Finneas and their parents embarked on the Where’s My Mind World Tour, where they débuted the songs constituting the tracks on Billie’s first album. By January 2019, Billie reached an unprecedented one billion Spotify streams.
Billie kicked off her When We All Fall Asleep World Tour at the Coachella Festival in Indio, California in April 2019, travelling across the U.S. and Canada, and then the globe, before returning to the Americas and concluding her world tour on November 17, 2019 in Mexico City.
Why does VanRamblings write in the headline that Billie Eilish (and her brother Finneas) constitute the new Beatles? Watch the videos directly above, and feel the emotional reactions of Billie’s fans, how those in attendance know the lyrics to the songs, and are clearly moved. In more than 50 years writing about music, aside from the reaction to the Beatles that could be observed in the mid-1960s, no other artist or group has come along with stronger album sales, and a larger, more devoted fan base. Although radio doesn’t quite know what to do with her, Billie Eilish is making her own career, and together with Finneas, making decisions about her career. And, fortunate for all of us, in the summer and fall of 2020, that means Billie’s full-throated support for the Democratic Party in the United States, and the candidacy of Joe Biden, no matter the impact on her career. Woebetide the right-wing, Trump-supporting political candidates and QAnon-supporting conspiracy theorist journalists who take Billie Eilish on.
And, finally for today, we’ll leave you with a bit of human-scale Finneas and Billie, and all the painstaking work the two of them put into recording the first track for the When We All Fall Asleep album release. When you watch the video below, you’ll also come to realize that Billie and Finneas are, very much, the 21st century John Lennon and Paul McCartney for our new age.
