Billie Eilish on “feeling like a parody” and making an album in quarantine
Billie Eilish has spoken about her identity and the quarantined context in which her new album was made.
The star’s follow-up to her 2019 debut ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’, which currently doesn’t have a release date nor a publicised title, was created during in coronavirus lockdown. Eilish told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 that the situation birthed “a completely different” album to what was likely intended initially.
She continued: “I mean, we would have made something, but it would have been completely different. It’s not like we’re making songs about quarantine, we’re just in a different mindset than we would be otherwise. And that’s just how everything is. It’s the butterfly effect. It’s like if you hadn’t done this three years ago, maybe you wouldn’t be doing this three years later. It’s just the way that it is. At the same time, this is the most time off I’ve ever had in my life, first of all. And especially since this all started like five years ago.
“So it’s been a blessing, huge blessing and a curse, but I’m really, really happy that we’ve been able to make the things that we’re making. And I can’t wait for you to hear this sh-t. I can’t wait to have the world hear. I’m very excited and hopeful for the future.”
Elsewhere in the interview Eilish addressed a recurring experience in which she’s felt “like a parody” of herself.
“For most of this year, like the first half of this year, I felt very trapped in my own facade weirdly. I was having a real problem of…because I kept feeling like a parody of myself, which was crazy and very weird and hard to manoeuvre And I don’t really know how I got out of it, but it was very…I mean, it happens occasionally still, but there was a couple of months in there where I was like, everything I wore, I was like, ‘Oh, I look like Billie Eilish.’ Everything I said, everything I did. And then we would make music and I would be like, this feels…I kept feeling like…what’s the word? Inauthentic. Yeah, inauthentic version of myself, because I felt like I was being myself too much.
“I go home and I watch myself on TV and hear myself in the store and it’s like, it’s great. It’s just like, I got really in my head because I forgot…because it was always natural. And so suddenly when it was like a thing that everybody knew about, then I was like, now I feel like I’m trying to be…it was crazy. So yes, I definitely had to kind of get over that hurdle of feeling like a Billie Eilish parody.”