Billie Eilish

Yes, exactly correct. I would watch those videos and instead of being jealous of the women who get to be around the hot men, I would be jealous of the hot men and I wanted to be them. And I wanted to dress like them and I wanted to, you know, be able to act like them. And to be fair... I had all sorts of women that I looked up to and artists that are the reason that I am who I am.

And also, I wouldn't have been able, even if I felt the way I did, I wouldn't have been able to achieve it had it not been for the incredibly powerful, strong-willed women artists and people in the public eye that came before me that made it possible for me. So my favorite singers are all kind of old jazz singers that I've always looked up to.

And I'm always forcing people to watch videos of Ella Fitzgerald singing live and Julie London singing live and, you know, Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson and all these people. We were watching these videos and Every single one, of course, because of that period of time, they're all wearing dresses. They're all wearing tight, you know, corseted maybe dresses with their hair done.

But like they didn't, they couldn't, they couldn't just not do that. You know, that's part of how things were then. And so thank God that those women came before me because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to do anything.

I've been watching you for some time Can't stop staring at those ocean eyes Burning cities and napalm skies Fifteen flares inside those ocean eyes

Yeah, I mean, honestly, there was one thing that really helped me, which was Our mom had us like go home and like watch something on TV or read something and just write down any interesting words that we see or like an interesting sentence.

And then kind of taking whatever you wrote and just try to make a song out of what you wrote or make a song about the thing that you thought was cool or about this one word or whatever.

you know at least incorporating this one word into a song you already wrote just like new ways of of kind of taking um pressure off of yourself a little like that really helped me because songwriting always felt like a lot of pressure on me in myself alone and I think that I don't know if Phineas would agree but like something that I think has always helped in songwriting is

giving yourself permission to write a bad song. I think that sometimes you have this high expectation for yourself and you're like, no, no, no, it has to be really good. But you can't just sit down and make something perfect immediately every time. You have to try and fail. And that was something that was really hard for me. I'm not good at patience and I'm not good at

not being good at something until I am. I want to be really good immediately. And I think it's just something that helps me a lot is just allowing myself to not be amazing and just make something to make it and not worry if it's good.

um yeah you know I like everyone and every woman suffer with a lot of body image issues and just hatred and dysmorphia and um I always have since I was a kid and I still have that girl in me and you know I've had a lot of as a human does getting thinner and then getting bigger and then getting fit and then getting not as fit.

Like your body changes over time, especially depending on like how you're living your life. And a couple of years back when we were making this album, I had been on this like really intense kind of health journey and I had lost a lot of weight and I'd gotten so strong and I was like thinner than I'd ever been and stronger than I'd ever been. Um,

But separately, I was like extremely unhappy and unaware of how unhappy I was until I was happy again kind of thing. Were you unhappy because you weren't eating enough? No, honestly, my fitness journey was like the thing that I held on to that I was the most proud of. But what was really interesting was I felt really proud of my body and how hard I'd worked. I mean, I was working out like...

two hours, like five or six days a week and, you know, wasn't eating gluten and dairy and sugar and past 7 p.m. and, you know, not a fun way to live at all, but it was something that, you know, I'm an addictive person and that was something that I got very addicted to and I loved that experience. But you were sad. Yeah, I didn't have much else to hold on to and I really had that.

I had this kind of, journey of my strength kind of and within that period of time i would be on tour and i would come back and i remember like every single person that i would see that i hadn't seen in many weeks would be like oh my god you look amazing you look so skinny wow You look so happy. You look so healthy. Wow, Billie, you just look like you're just glowing. Like you're just so happy.

And it's just so nice to see her so happy. And she's just doing so great. And it was really interesting because I got obsessed with that validation. And I loved it. I loved every single thing that everybody said to me. But then I kind of started to think like, that's really interesting because I'm not happy at all. But I definitely am skinny. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Skinny was a song that we wrote out of a really, really like uninspired period of time that we had not created anything in and like had no ideas for anything. And it was just kind of a depressing period of time. And we were sitting in a studio and we wanted to write something. I really wanted to write something and couldn't come up with anything.

and Phineas started playing chords and I started riffing on melodies and the lyrics came about because Phineas could see how I was feeling and kind of you know starts asking me questions and I start talking about how I feel and the things I've been going through and he's just so good at seeing me like nobody else does and like I don't even and being able to put it into words in a way that you know

I didn't even realize I was feeling, you know? And, like, he said that lyric, people say I look happy just because I got skinny, but the old me is still me and maybe the real me and I think she's pretty. And that was his lyric. And it's funny that he wrote that because it's me. It's how I felt.

But it's just the magic of, like, working with somebody who, A, is such a genius, but also knows you like nobody else does. Wow.