Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Earlier this month, it became a lot easier to see Billie Eilish and Phineas in concert. Well, at least in concert at the movie theater. Along with filmmaker James Cameron, Eilish produced and directed the new concert film, Hit Me Hard and Soft, The Tour.
Hit Me Hard and Soft is also the name of their 2024 album, and its release was the occasion for the interview we're about to hear with Eilish and her brother Phineas. The song Wildflower from that album won a Grammy for Song of the Year. Billie Eilish and Phineas O'Connell write songs together. She sings on their albums. He produces and plays several instruments.
They began writing and recording together when she was 13 and he was 18. Considering the number of records they've broken in the last few years, they became more than popular. They became a phenomenon. Their album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, was the second in Grammy history to win in the major categories, Best Record, Album, Song, and New Artist, all in the same year.
Phineas was the youngest person to receive a Grammy for Producer of the Year, non-classical. Billy was the youngest to win two Oscars, one for the theme for the Bond film No Time to Die and another for What Was I Made For from the Barbie movie. Phineas also has an independent career as a producer and recording artist. Billie spent her teens in front of her fans and the press.
In 2019, music critic John Perales wrote in the New York Times, Eilish, age 17, has spent the last few years establishing herself as the negation of what a female teen pop star used to be. She doesn't play innocent or ingratiating or flirtatious or perky or cute.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Billie Eilish's new concert film?
Instead, she's sullen, depressive, death-haunted, sly, analytical, and confrontational all all without raising her voice. Let's start with a song from Hit Me Hard and Soft. This is L'Amour de ma Vie, which is French for The Love of My Life.
I wish you the best for the rest of your life Felt sorry for you when I looked in your eyes But I need to confess I told you a lie I said you, you Were the love of my life The love of my life Did I break your heart? Did I waste your time?
I tried to be there for you Then you tried to break mine It isn't asking for a lot for an apology For making me feel like I'd kill you if I tried to leave You said you'd never fall Billy Eilish, Phineas O'Connell, welcome to Fresh Air.
It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Billy, it strikes me you're singing more in a fuller voice. What's changing about your voice and how you choose to use it?
Well, you know, we started making music when I was about 13. And as most 13-year-olds, I had not, you know, grown into my body and my voice and all the things that you age into as a human. And I always, you know, it's funny, like when things like that happen at a young age, you kind of have this idea that that's how things are going to be forever.
And so in my mind at the time, my voice was going to sound like it did then forever I thought it was going to be soft and my range wasn't going to be like very big and I wasn't ever going to be able to belt and I wasn't ever going to be able to you know have much of a chest mix in my voice and um I spent many years touring and singing and doing shows and My voice matured and started to change.
And in the making of Hit Me Hard and Soft, I started working with a singing teacher, which I hadn't done since I was a kid in my choir. And I kind of always felt hesitant to and kind of embarrassed to somehow. And it completely has just... honestly changed my life. And I mean, I've just, my voice has just gotten, you know, 10 times better in the last two years.
And what's amazing is it's just going to keep getting better.
Did you want to do a whispery voice? Was that like a style choice or just like, that's the way your voice?
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Chapter 3: How did Billie Eilish and Finneas start their music career together?
Think about how your voice sounded when you were a kid opposed to now. It's a completely different thing.
Yeah. And Phineas, I assume you do the arrangements.
I would say that I do plenty of it, but Billy is deeply involved. And I would say that as time has gone on, Billie has become kind of more knowledgeable and articulate about what she likes and what she doesn't in instrumental arrangement and production and vocal arrangement.
So we're either brainstorming stuff together or at the very least she's reacting to what I do in a kind of a, I like that, go further, I'm not crazy about that, take that out kind of a sense, if that makes sense.
I want to play a track because I like the instrumentation, the arrangement so much, and it's called The Diner. So Phineas, do you want to say a little bit about the instrumental track of this?
The diner is a slight anomaly in terms of the way that Billy and I most commonly work. I would say the way that we most commonly work is I sit down with a guitar or I sit down at a piano and I play chords and Billy sings melodies and we come up with lyrics and melodies together over top of chords.
In the case of The Diner, on my own, I had made what became sort of most of the instrumental of The Diner. I'd been sitting around one day playing that sort of
sampled re-articulated horn thing that you take kind of a one track of a horn being played and then you load it onto a keyboard and the horn is then chromatic on the keyboard and you play the that's me playing piano but through a horn sample and then I programmed drum samples and then bass synthesizers over top of that and I presented it to Billy and then she riffed
you know, these super menacing, cool lyrics over top of it.
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Chapter 4: What changes have occurred in Billie Eilish's vocal style?
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.
If you're just joining us, we're listening to my interview with Billie Eilish and Phineas, recorded in 2024 after the release of their album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. Eilish co-produced and co-directed a new concert film with James Cameron. It's called Hit Me Hard and Soft, The Tour. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. I want to play another song from Hit Me Hard and Soft.
And this song is called Skinny. And, Billie, it's talking about how people think you look happy because you're skinny, you know, that you lost weight. But you're right, but I still cry. Did losing weight make a difference in your life? And do you, like, bounce back and forth? Because that's something so many people in your audience would relate to.
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.
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 and you look so happy. You look so healthy. Wow. Billy, 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, 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. Cause I'm not happy at all, but I definitely am skinny.
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Chapter 5: How do Billie and Finneas collaborate on music production?
government issued to soldiers during World War II. This is Fresh Air. This Memorial Day, our book critic Maureen Corrigan offers some reflections on the books that were carried into World War II.
When I was growing up, many of the dads in my neighborhood had served in World War II. True to stereotype, none of them talked much about the war. Information came sideways. My best friend's dad, who'd been in the Air Force in China, taught us how to say hot water in Mandarin. Another dad, an Army vet, let slip that he'd burned his uniform upon returning home, which puzzled us.
And my own dad, a Navy vet, once said something about the funny paperbacks around during the war. It wasn't until I began researching my book on the Great Gatsby that I realized my father had been one of the millions of servicemen on the receiving end of what's been called the biggest book giveaway in history. When the U.S.
entered World War II, there was an effort to get books into the hands of servicemen to combat boredom. The books, though, had to be light and small enough to fit in servicemen's pockets. That was only one of the challenges faced by a group of publishers, librarians, and booksellers who composed the Council on Books in Wartime.
The distribution program the Council eventually adopted stood in contrast to the Nazi book burnings that began in 1933. The motto of the Council on Books in Wartime was, Books are weapons in the war of ideas. America would initiate a program for servicemen that would implicitly affirm the freedom to read widely. Colonel Ray Troutman is the hero of this story.
In a terrific forthcoming book called A Librarian's War that'll be available in September, Molly Guptill Manning details how Troutman came up with the idea of not just distributing books for the troops, but producing them. The Armed Services Editions, or ASEs as they were called, were those funny paperbacks that my father had mentioned to me.
Printed on pulp paper, the Armed Services Editions began rolling off presses in 1943. By the time the program came to an end in 1947, nearly 123 million books were distributed to U.S. troops. The greatest distribution was on the eve of D-Day. Every soldier going over in a landing craft carried an ASE in his pocket. The most popular of the D-Day titles was Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Just as inspiring, to my mind, was the fact that the council's selection committee didn't limit its choices to just those books they assumed the troops would like. Sure, there were plenty of cowboy stories, Tarzan tales, and suspense fiction. Forever Amber, a steamy historical romance by Kathleen Windsor, was especially popular.
But among the 1,322 titles produced during the lifetime of the ASCs were Moby Dick, biographies of Frederick Douglass and Queen Victoria, essays by Lincoln and Emerson, and poetry collections by Longfellow, Keats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It must be acknowledged that the ASEs were overwhelmingly written by white authors.
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