Billie Eilish has spoken about her identity and the quarantined context in which her new album was made.
The star’s follow-up to her 2019 debut ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’, which currently doesn’t have a release date nor a publicised title, was created during in coronavirus lockdown. Eilish told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 that the situation birthed “a completely different” album to what was likely intended initially.
“That’s what we’ve been talking about for months about how this year has sucked for a lot of people, and as much as I wished that I had been able to have the year I was planning on having and tour and blah, blah, blah, we would never have made this album,” Eilish told Lowe, while promoting her brand new single ‘Therefore I Am‘ today (November 12).
She continued: “I mean, we would have made something, but it would have been completely different. It’s not like we’re making songs about quarantine, we’re just in a different mindset than we would be otherwise. And that’s just how everything is. It’s the butterfly effect. It’s like if you hadn’t done this three years ago, maybe you wouldn’t be doing this three years later. It’s just the way that it is. At the same time, this is the most time off I’ve ever had in my life, first of all. And especially since this all started like five years ago.
“So it’s been a blessing, huge blessing and a curse, but I’m really, really happy that we’ve been able to make the things that we’re making. And I can’t wait for you to hear this sh-t. I can’t wait to have the world hear. I’m very excited and hopeful for the future.”
Elsewhere in the interview Eilish addressed a recurring experience in which she’s felt “like a parody” of herself.
“For most of this year, like the first half of this year, I felt very trapped in my own facade weirdly. I was having a real problem of…because I kept feeling like a parody of myself, which was crazy and very weird and hard to manoeuvre And I don’t really know how I got out of it, but it was very…I mean, it happens occasionally still, but there was a couple of months in there where I was like, everything I wore, I was like, ‘Oh, I look like Billie Eilish.’ Everything I said, everything I did. And then we would make music and I would be like, this feels…I kept feeling like…what’s the word? Inauthentic. Yeah, inauthentic version of myself, because I felt like I was being myself too much.
“I go home and I watch myself on TV and hear myself in the store and it’s like, it’s great. It’s just like, I got really in my head because I forgot…because it was always natural. And so suddenly when it was like a thing that everybody knew about, then I was like, now I feel like I’m trying to be…it was crazy. So yes, I definitely had to kind of get over that hurdle of feeling like a Billie Eilish parody.”
NME‘s Thomas Smith wrote about Eilish’s comeback single, noting in a five-star review: “Billie fuses critical philosophy with a swipe at the haters on her thrilling new single, a deliciously spicy tale that will no doubt have fans decoding every line.”
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