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Billie Eilish
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Billie Eilish was born in 2001 in Los Angeles, the daughter of two actors who also made music. She and her older brother Finneas were home-schooled by their mother, who taught them the basics of songwriting. Billie played the ukulele at six, sang in a children's choir and wrote her first real song at eleven. She also took dance lessons, until an injury put an end to that in 2016.
Music and breakthrough
In 2015 she put the song Ocean Eyes on SoundCloud together with Finneas, really for her dance teacher. Within two weeks it had been listened to hundreds of thousands of times, and that was the beginning. After the EP Don't Smile at Me (2017), her first album appeared in 2019, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, made with Finneas as producer. The single bad guy reached number 1 in America. Happier Than Ever (2021) and HIT ME HARD AND SOFT (2024) followed, with Birds of a Feather. She won two Oscars, for No Time to Die from the James Bond film of the same name and for What Was I Made For? from Barbie.
Influence
Her music is often soft and intimate: whispered vocals, many layers of voices on top of one another, deep basses and small sounds. It sounds as if she is standing right beside you. At eighteen she won the four most important Grammys in a single evening. Billie Eilish showed that a teenager and her brother, at home and without a big hit factory, could change world pop. In this way she closes a long line of women in popular music who defined their own sound.
Listening
Discography
Studio albums
In School of Rock
The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.
- Mixtape 10: Women in Pop MusicNL Reader