Billie Eilish is the teenage pop star who goes to the psychologist. She comments on it naturally in her and her interviews, her followers, in addition to admiring her for her music, feel identified with her. That is one of the keys to the success of this 17-year-old American who has arrived in Spain at the beginning of September to fill stadiums. The naturalness with which she speaks in the media about mental illness places her on a very different plane from other idols of her generation.
Before releasing her album When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? (Where do we go when we sleep?) In February 2019, she already explained in an interview with well-known radio host Zane Lowe on Beats 1 the way she addresses the anxiety she suffers from in her songs. she. "I think in general people feel uncomfortable when these issues are brought up because when they don't experience this kind of unhappiness, they can't understand what it is. They say things like: Why do you feel bad if you have this and that? ?".
Her mother, the actress Maggie Baird, who has educated Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas at her home in Los Angeles instead of taking them to school, explained in Rolling Stone magazine that her daughter had suffered from anxiety throughout her childhood. She also confesses who keeps taking her to the pediatrician to keep track of her problems: "It's weird. There's a waiting room full of four-year-olds and then there's Billie."
After composing the song Ocean Eyes with her brother and seeing how it went viral in 2016 through the digital platform Soundcloud, the concerts arrived and, with them, the need to go see a psychologist. "She may not have wanted to listen to her advice, but she needed to be heard," she explains in the interview.
In her first world tour that she has brought to Spain, she has incorporated an extra bus so that her friends can accompany her. "It costs a lot of money, but I need to take care of my mental health," says the singer in Rolling Stone. She has also taken the issue to the cover of the Australian edition of Vogue, a magazine accustomed to highlighting the beauty of female fashion and film stars.
On the Ellen Degeneres show, the teenage singer spoke in April 2019 with the same naturalness of Tourette syndrome. It is a neurological disorder that causes involuntary tics. Although she usually keeps them under control, she does not mind that they appear during the interviews since "it serves so that other people who also suffer from it downplay it," she commented to the presenter. She also says that she feels comfortable with her followers making compilations of her gestures on YouTube.
Her album When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? is made of lyrics that talk about these problems. They have made her the first singer born in the 21st century to be number 1 in the United States and half the world (she has also been in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, among other countries).
Without projecting a hypersexualized image, or singing sweetened or grandiose ballads, Billie Eilish is a serious candidate to achieve the best-selling album of 2019 if BTS's K-Pop allows it. In addition to being a teen icon, she has her own parents' idols as fans, such as Thom Yorke (Radiohead) or Billie Joe Armstrong (Greenday).
Dave Grohl, 50, former member of Nirvana and leader of Foo Fighters, compared in February 2019 through his Instagram account the phenomenon Billie Eilish with that of the legendary grunge band in the 90s. The vital discomfort that it transmits has connected from unexpected way with millions of young people who see themselves reflected in it. As a twenty-something Kurt Cobain in his day, she has become a beacon for many who feel just as lost.
Relying on a teenage audience that loves her melancholy songs about anxiety and depression, the American is especially sensitive to issues such as self-mutilation. "Sometimes I see girls at my concerts with wounds on their arms and it breaks my heart. I have said to some of them: Treat yourself well because I know what that is about. I have been in that situation."
To top off this crusade to confront the taboo of mental and neurological illnesses, Billie Eilish participated in the soundtrack for Thirteen Reasons Why, the Netflix teen series that addresses these issues. She did it in 2018, singing Lovely in a duet with another great Generation Z pop star, Kahlid. With all these ingredients, the formula has been a complete success: another 665 millionns of reproductions on Spotify that are added to the 2,000 million listeners that the singer has achieved in just two years.
