Billie Eilish says she “lost all of my friends when I got famous”
Billie Eilish has revealed that she “lost all of my friends when I got famous”.
The singer-songwriter, who recently released her new album ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’, was speaking to Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver on their Miss Me podcast about her rise to fame.
“Well I lost all of my friends when I got famous,” she said. “I suddenly was famous and I couldn’t relate to anybody. It was tough. It was really hard.”
Eilish said that her best friend, Zoe, remained by her side but her only other friends were her employees.
“And then it was my 20th birthday and I remember looking around the room and it was only people that I employ. And all 15 years or more older than me,” she said.
She went to say one of her employees subsequently quit, out of the blue, and stopped talking to her.
Eilish added: “And it was the worst thing that happened to me. And that made me realise like ‘oh wait, this is a job’. If they left me they would never see me again.”
She also said that since then, she finds it hard to be friendly to people she works with, “because I’m very freaked out by loss and I have a lot of abandonment problems”.
Despite that, she said she has since got in touch with her old friends and made some new ones along the way.
Eilish added: “Exactly a year ago, I reconnected with a bunch of old friends and now, I have so many friends. I have a crew now! I could literally cry about it. It’s been the greatest thing that’s happened to me.”
She said that when she recently went with them to a party at Coachella, she burst into tears.
Eilish added: “I was like, ‘Guys, I have friends and I just love you guys so much, and it’s been so long since I’ve had friends’. I cried… and it’s literally because I actually have friendship now again.”
The singer-songwriter went on to say that the lyrics, “But with a little help from my friends / I found the light in the tunnel at the end“, from Allen’s 2006 debut single ‘Smile’ helped inspire her to make new friends.
She added: “I used to want to cry hearing that line because I didn’t feel that way, because I didn’t have friends. And I remember thinking I want to feel that way. And I want to listen to this song that I relate to in every way and hear that line about friends and be like, my friends got my through it.”
Eilish previously spoke about losing friends because of fame and touring when her debut album took off in 2019.
At the time, she said: “Having been on tour, I know how it works. I know that you leave and it’s a little bit of your friends being sad. Then, you’re gone for long enough that life moves on and they keep doing things.
“It’s the same if someone dies. You have to keep going. You shouldn’t be mourning them every two seconds for the rest of your life. You have to keep going.”
Meanwhile, Eilish recently shared a self-directed video for ‘Chihiro’ from her new album.
Her third LP scored a four-star review from NME, with Thomas Smith writing: “‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ remains distinctly unique, a portrait of a singular talent entering young adulthood, exploring her queerness and experiencing the emotional thrill and (sometimes) catastrophe of chasing passion or falling in love. In trying to write an album for herself, she’s made one that will resonate harder than anything she’s done before.”
Eilsh’s ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ world tour is scheduled to begin this autumn. The UK and Ireland leg will take place in July 2025, and includes six nights at The O2 in London. Find any remaining tickets here (UK/Ireland) and here (North America).
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Damian Jones
NME
