Billie Eilish fans tend to remember what they were doing the first time they heard her.
They talk about it on Reddit. Some were on to her with “Ocean Eyes” in 2015. Some stumbled upon her via TikTok or a YouTube recommendation. Some from the radio or friends.
“I thought she was some guy singer who got famous,” one Redditer wrote of Eilish.
Not everyone liked what they heard … at first. It had to grow on them, because it was different from what they were used to. It was nothing like Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Harry Styles. It was underground and intimate, dark and whispery.
It began in 2015 with the 13-year-old Billie Eilish O’Connell and her brother Finneas recording a song for her dance class and uploading to Soundcloud. Within a few weeks, “Ocean Eyes” had several hundred thousand clicks. By August 2017, she had an eight-song EP, “Don’t Smile at Me,” at No. 14 on the Billboard 200.
The quiet teen angst in the songs she and Finneas composed certainly spoke to her peers — “I'm pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They're all either about like, 'I hate you,' or 'you make me hate me',” she told Billboard — but it was the lo-fi bedroom-pop vibe that made them even more relatable and exotic.
The songs were recorded right in the bedroom of the home where they were raised and home-schooled, in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. According to Pro Sound, “Eilish sat to record her vocals, facing a desk and bookshelves and O’Connell’s modest production setup: Apple Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and a pair of Yamaha HS5 nearfields with an H8S subwoofer.”
“It’s the Galapagos,” says producer Sean McDonald, the Pittsburgh producer known for his work with The Clarks, Gene the Werewolf and others, comparing Eilish’s music to Darwin’s so-called “laboratory of evolution” in the Pacific.
“It's working in a vacuum. It's not being influenced by this trend or that trend, either compositionally or performance-wise or arrangement-wise. They were just two people doing their thing. Again, the Galapagos, these animals only live on this island because there was no outside influence, and that's kind of what happened with them.
“In modern pop music, when you see the songwriters and producers on Beyonce tracks, they are 15, 18 people, creatively, putting their two cents into something, so, in my opinion, on those modern pop records, there's not a real point of view. It's kind of homogenized because everybody put in their two cents, where the Billie Eilish thing, it's just two people in a room locked down doing it, so, for better or worse, it's going to be something very unique.”
“I’m a huge fan of Billie Eilish,” says E. Dan, the ID Labs producer behind much of the music from Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller. “I love that she doesn’t look like a typical pop singer, doesn’t make typical ‘pop’ music and still occupies that space. Her and Finneas just have such a unique and singular sound together. Really some of the only recent pop records I’ve added to my collection.”
Jake Hanner, a Gibsonia-based producer, knows a little about the sibling dynamic, working with his sister, Casey, in the pop-rock band Donora and on her solo work.
“It’s probably less about it being a sibling,” he says of the sound they create, “and more just how close you are with someone. If you’re working with a sibling or a good friend there is an ease about it that allows you to be more honest and vulnerable.
“I love the music [Eilish] and her brother make together. They’re both such talented writers and performers. The fact that you can create a No. 1 record in your bedroom is such an exciting idea. I often wonder if their soft whisper vocal tones and arrangements that accompany them came about because of being in a bedroom, and that just felt the most natural.”
This does not mean you can simply get Logic Pro, record an EP and expect your music to blow up on the internet.
Eilish’s first EP and subsequent albums, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” (Grammy winner for album of the year) and last year’s Grammy-nominated “Happier Than Ever” were produced and engineered by Finneas and then sent to Rob Kinelski for mixing and John Greenham for mastering. The latter had previous experience with Common, Nas, Ed Sheeran and Big Sean, among others.
“In the mixing process,” McDonald says, “it could just be him just adding a little bass, adding a little treble, sanding off some rough edges. Or, it could be, ‘Hey, let's take up the drums in the chorus.’ It could be a lot of different things in the mix process. He’s worked in two worlds, so If you listen to her records, they've got that R&B, almost-hip-hop low-end thing, but it's got this distortion and crazy weirdo [stuff] going on that you'd find on a rock record. He's the perfect dude to mix those records.”
Once Kinelski has the instruments balanced, it goes to Greenham for the third step of mastering.
“What mastering does is final QC [or quality control],” McDonald says. “So if it is a 10-song record, they make sure that song one, if it's a little bassy, and song two, if it’s a little trebly, they try to pull a thread of a tonal and volume consistency through all 10 songs. Mastering is important because all these digital services have slightly different volume target. The mastering guy, that's his job nowadays, where he’ll take my stereo mix and say, ‘Hey dude, you’ve got too much low-end’ or ‘You’ve got too much high-end’ or ‘Song three is louder than song five, let me even that out’ and then he makes sure it plays nice on YouTube and iTunes and all the other worlds.”
Eilish’s small team is the most successful of its kind, generating sales of 41.5 million digital singles and 5 million albums. She was the fourth bestselling artist of 2019 and fifth bestselling artist of 2020.
A bedroom-pop playlist could be filled out with such artists as beabadoobee, Arlo Parks and Cavetown.
“The computer has changed creating music, and the music industry in general, so much,” Hanner says. “For me, it’s the best and worst part of music. On one hand it makes it so anyone can create a great album if they are talented enough. No excuses. But on the other hand it makes it so anyone can create an album. Ha!
“Bands used have to play a bunch of shows, work really hard at writing and arranging as a band, before they were able to make an album. But most projects today seem to start as a recording project. It’s such an amazing tool because of the speed you’re able to work at, which allows for very little to get in the way of the creative process.”
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