#11: The motivation of Billie Eilish

Down a popstar rabbit hole

Vanity Fair has finally released the fifth edition of its yearly interview montage with singer / songwriter Billie Eilish, which documents her growing from 15 to 19 years old while navigating insane levels of change and fame.

As I write this, the video has clocked more 6.8 million views in less than three days, so I see I’m not the only one who was feeling disproportionate excitement about it. I reckon it’s an endearing and strangely relatable 22 minutes to watch, even if you’re not familiar with her music:

I’ve read and watched a few (ahem! All for research!) of Eilish’s interviews with my intrinsic motivation glasses on, looking for clues about what drives her, and what environment she grew up in before / while she earned seven Grammy awards¹ and 94 million Instagram followers.

Like I wrote in my post about extraordinary rock climber Alex Honnold, I’m both fond and wary of stories of outliers, and try to be careful not to draw impractical advice from them. It’s easy to oversimplify stories of exception, to attribute achievements to a neat, single source or to glorify outward success without knowing what it really feels like.

Having said that, it’s hard not to feel touched by Eilish’s aplomb as she comes of age in the public eye, or inspired by the choices her parents made to help both of their kids’ talents and desires bloom in their own, unmonitored time.

Here are a few nuggets:

On performing

Billie Eilish: “[Live shows] are the thing that makes me feel the best that I am. It feels like the best that I can be when I’m on stage, and getting to do that again [after lockdown] I was like rewound, like I’m a music box. I can be in a bad mood before a show and then come off stage and I’m completely rejuvenated. It, likes, winds me up.”

On releasing songs

Eilish tells Rolling Stone that she doesn’t listen to her own songs after their release:

“I don’t know. Something changes,” she says, still confused by her own habit. 

“all the songs on the album feel like a specific time, because they feel like when I wrote them and made them,” she explains. “It’s so funny that to the rest of the world it’s going to feel like a certain moment for them, and it’s going to be so different than mine. That’s such a weird, weird thing to wrap my head around. And I will fucking love it. I love it. That’s the reason you do this. It’s for that.”

On not rushing

From an interview on The Tonight Show with her older brother, singer and producer Finneas:

Jimmy Fallon: When did you guys first realise that you’d be good working together?

Finneas: “I always knew she had an incredibly beautiful voice but […] I just kind of waited until she wanted to. […] When she seemed interested in recording I was like: ‘Well, let’s try some stuff out’.”

On raising Eilish

From an August interview with her mother, actress and activist Maggie Baird, on Rich Roll’s podcast²:

Maggie Baird: “We were so happy to have children. People used to say: Oh it’s really gonna change your life, and I was like: ‘Yeah, that’s what I want! I want to devote my life to someone else.”

From a January Vanity Fair profile:

“her parents homeschooled (or ‘unschooled’) both her and Finneas, in part because their father was inspired when he learned that the Hanson brothers had been taught at home and allowed to pursue whatever creative endeavors most struck their fancy, paving the way for ‘MMMBop.’”

“From a distance, [Eilish’s mum and dad] Baird and O’Connell bear the hallmarks of stage parents: They’re both actors who had fine but less than dazzling careers; the Hanson inspo could’ve been a red flag. But the ingredients haven’t concocted trouble. […]‘[Billie] seems to have such an even keel, and I credit it to her extraordinary, very tight family,’ says [actor Woody Harrelson, who hosted the 2019 season premiere of SNL for which Eilish was the musical guest].”

On making time for things you love

Maggie Baird*: “What in normal school would be an extra-curricular activity was their main activity, and the other stuff was extra-curricular. The things they were interested in, obsessed with, [were] the thing they could do most of the day. […] I think that made a major difference because they could spend a lot of time doing what they loved to do.”

Here’s how that looked in practice—from another, more awkward Vanity Fair video interview:

Billie Eilish: “We had a rule growing up that […] no matter what time it was, you know, no matter how old we were, if we were creating, writing music, playing piano, playing guitar, any instrument at all, we could stay up as long as we were doing that. […] No one is going to push that away from you. You get to be creative when you feel creative.”

On doing things for their own sake

Maggie Baird*: “Finneas went to a karate class one time. He loved this karate class so much. You could see the light in his eye. [But when he got crowned “student of the week” at his first class] it ruined it. Before they had the reward, he loved the class. It literally sunk it, and I saw it happening […]. The reward has to be the doing. The reward is making the music. The reward is making the thing. The prize can be fun, but it’s not the reason.”

“I guess that’s even what I try to do now: Is Billie’s team letting her care about the doing? Is there enough room for that? […] Sometimes you’ve got to fulfil a lot of obligations to a lot of people and that’s part of the game, but if you don’t keep coming back to the art and the making of the art, then what’s the point?”

1. That’s as many as The Beatles won. She’s broken several Grammy records.

2. I’ve marked the other quotes from that podcast interview with a *