Billie Eilish shares advice for women and aspiring musicians: “You don’t have to be exceptional”
Billie Eilish has shared some advice for fellow women and aspiring artists, telling them they “don’t have to be exceptional” all the time.
The 21-year-old reflected on her early career in a new interview, recalling her and her brother Finneas “making these little songs” as teenagers and trying to be as different as possible.
Eilish stressed that, although the siblings had a clear mission to not “do what anybody said”, it’s OK for people not to have everything as planned out as they did.
“I have to give credit to the person I’ve always been — I did not give a fuck at all,” she told Allure. “It was many, many years of having to convince a room full of people that I was going to do what I knew was right for me. I had ideas; I had plans.
“But the thing is, people should know — women should know — you don’t have to be exceptional,” she countered. “You can just be a person, and you should get awards for just being. Sometimes artists don’t have plans, and that’s fine, but I did, and I wasn’t going to waste them.”
The acclaimed pop star also shared that she’s still grappling with fame and being internationally renowned. “I’m starting to do better, but I’ve not been doing so great, to be honest… I have impending-doom feelings most of the day,” Eilish explained. “When I think too much about it, how I can never have privacy again, it’s enough to make you want to do all sorts of crazy things. But you have to let it go.”
Elsewhere, the Grammy Award winner also reminisced about how ‘What Was I Made For?’ – her popular contribution to the highly-acclaimed Barbie soundtrack – came about. “It was as if this song was a tiny creature inside of me for years, scratching the inside of me,” she said. “As soon as we got that prompt, the creature was like, ‘Okay, I’m out’, and we wrote that song in an hour or two.”
She continued: “We wrote it in a period of time where we couldn’t have been less inspired and less creative. That day we were making stuff, and were like, ‘We’ve lost it. Why are we even doing this?’”
In other news, Eilish has teased that “there is a whole album of music coming.” While talking to The Cookout, she said that she is “in the final stages of making it”, but that doesn’t mean the music is “about to come out.”
The highly-anticipated album will be the follow-up to her 2021 album ‘Happier Than Ever’. In a five-star review, NME called the record “fully establishes Billie Eilish as one of her generation’s most significant pop artists – and, better still, does so without repeating a single trick from the debut that turned her life upside down.”
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