Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell was born in Los Angeles, California on December 18, 2001. She is the daughter of actress and teacher Maggie Baird and actor Patrick O’Connell, both of whom are also musicians, and work on Eilish’s tours. Eilish is of Irish and Scottish descent.She was conceived via in vitro fertilization. Her middle name, Eilish, was originally meant to be her first name, while Pirate was to be her middle name. She was brought up in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
In 2015, 13-year-old Eilish began working on songs with her brother Finneas, who had been writing and producing for several years and had his own band. The first songs they recorded together were called “She’s Broken” and “Fingers Crossed”. “The first songs that we worked on, we didn’t write together. He wrote this song called ‘She’s Broken’ and I wrote one called ‘Fingers Crossed,’ and we recorded them and put them out on SoundCloud, just for fun,” she recalls.
On November 18, 2015, Eilish released the song “Ocean Eyes”. The track was written, mixed, and produced by Finneas, who had written and produced it originally for his band the Slightlys, before realizing it would be a better fit for Eilish’s vocals. He gave it to Eilish when her dance teacher at the Revolution Dance Center, Fred Diaz, asked them to write a song for choreography. The siblings uploaded the song to SoundCloud, where Diaz could access and download it.
The song received several hundred thousand listens in two weeks, and Finneas’s manager, Danny Rukasin, reached out to him to discuss Eilish’s potential. In Rukasin’s opinion, she could achieve significant success with Finneas’s help. In January 2016, Finneas and his manager arranged a deal in which Apple Music signed Eilish to A&R company Platoon, specializing in packaging emerging artists before they get a major-label contract.
Eilish then got a publicist, who connected her to the luxury fashion brand Chanel, and a stylist, both of whom helped shape her image. On March 24, 2016, a music video for “Ocean Eyes” directed by Megan Thompson was premiered on Eilish’s official YouTube channel. “Ocean Eyes” and Eilish would receive praise and promotion from various media outlets and marketers, including radio stations and music supervisors such as Beats 1, KCRW, BBC One, Zane Lowe, Jason Kramer, Annie Mac, and Chris Douridas.
Eilish’s team worked with Spotify, which promoted her on its most popular playlist, “Today’s Top Hits”. The Baffler described Eilish’s sound as fitting into the “streambait” genre consisting of largely “mid-tempo, melancholy pop” influenced by Lana Del Rey, whose “singing style, bleakness, and… hip-hop influenced production” shaped the aesthetic.
Eilish’s commercial success expanded with her Spotify promotion.In September 2017, Apple Music named Eilish their Up Next artist, which followed with a short documentary, a live session EP and an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s radio station Beats 1. That month, the live EP titled Up Next Session: Billie Eilish was released. On December 15, 2017, Eilish released her collaboration with American rapper Vince Staples titled “&Burn”, which is a remix of Eilish’s previously released single “Watch”. It was later included on the expanded edition of Don’t Smile at Me.
