Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell (EYE-lish; born December 18, 2001) is an American singer-songwriter and musician. Eilish first gained public attention in 2015 with her debut single “Ocean Eyes”, written and produced by her brother Finneas O’Connell. In 2017, she released her debut EP, Don’t Smile at Me, which was commercially successful in various countries, including the US, UK, and Australia.
Eilish’s debut studio album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019), debuted atop the US Billboard 200 and UK Albums Chart and was one of the year’s best-selling albums. Its single “Bad Guy”

The single “Bad Guy” became the first by an artist born in the 21st century to top the US Billboard Hot 100 and be certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America. The next year, Eilish performed the theme song “No Time to Die” for the James Bond film No Time to Die, which topped the UK Singles Chart and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2022.

Eilish’s second studio album, Happier Than Ever (2021), topped the charts in multiple countries. Its singles “My Future”, “Therefore I Am”, “Happier Than Ever”, and “Your Power” each peaked within the top ten in the US and UK. She co-wrote and performed “What Was I Made For?” for the fantasy film Barbie (2023), which became her second number-one single in the UK and earned her a second Academy Award. Her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft (2024), was met with critical acclaim and spawned the US top-five singles “Lunch” and “Birds of a Feather”, with the latter becoming her first number-one on the Billboard Global 200.

Her accolades include two Academy Awards, nine Grammy Awards, nine American Music Awards, twenty Guinness World Records, eight MTV Video Music Awards, four Brit Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. She is the second artist in Grammy history to win all four general field categories—Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist—in the same year.

Eilish is the first person born in the 21st century to win an Academy Award and the youngest ever two-time winner. She was featured on Time magazine’s inaugural Time 100 Next list in 2019 and the Time 100 in 2021. According to the RIAA and Billboard, Eilish is the 26th-highest-certified digital singles artist and one of the most successful artists of the 2010s. She was honored as one of the BBC 100 Women in December 2022. Eilish has a history of political activism, focusing on climate change awareness, women’s reproductive rights, and gender equality.

Early life

Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 18, 2001. She is the daughter of actress and teacher Maggie Baird and actor Patrick O’Connell, both of whom are also musicians and work on Eilish’s tours. Eilish is of Irish and Scottish descent.

Her middle name, Eilish, was originally intended to be her first name, while Pirate was to have been her middle name. After her grandfather William Baird died while her mother was pregnant, her parents decided to name her Billie, after him. She grew up in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood.

Eilish and her older brother Finneas were homeschooled by Baird, a decision their parents made to spend time with them and give them the freedom to pursue their interests. Baird taught Eilish and Finneas the basics of songwriting. Eilish said her brother and mother inspired her to get into music. Their parents encouraged the siblings to express themselves and explore whatever they wanted, including art, dancing, and acting.

Eilish started playing the ukulele at age six. She performed at talent shows and joined the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus at age eight. She wrote her first “real” song at age 11 for her mother’s songwriting class. The song was about a zombie apocalypse, inspired by the television series The Walking Dead, from which she took script lines.

Eilish took some acting auditions, which she disliked, but she enjoyed recording background dialogue for crowd scenes and worked on the films Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Ramona and Beezus, and the X-Men series. She also took dance classes until 2016, when a growth plate injury ended her dance career, and she then focused fully on recording music.

Career

2015–2017: Don’t Smile at Me

In 2015, 13-year-old Eilish began working on songs with her brother Finneas, who had been writing and producing for several years and had his own band. The first songs they recorded together were called “She’s Broken” and “Fingers Crossed”, the former written by Finneas and the latter by Eilish. “We recorded them and put them out on SoundCloud, just for fun,” she recalled.

On January 14, 2017, Eilish released an EP with four remixes by Astronomyy, Blackbear, Goldhouse, and Cautious Clay for “Ocean Eyes”, and another EP for “Six Feet Under” featuring remixes by Blu J, Gazzo, Jerry Folk, and Aire Atlantica. After the success of the “Ocean Eyes” remixes, Eilish released “Bellyache” on February 24, 2017. A video for the song was released on March 22, 2017, directed by Miles and AJ. Eilish released “Bored” on March 30, 2017, as part of the soundtrack to the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. A video for “Bored” was released.

In March of the same year, Apple Music showcased Eilish at the South by Southwest music festival. On June 30, 2017, Eilish released “Watch”. She released another single, “Copycat”, on July 14, 2017, and announced the release of her debut EP, Don’t Smile at Me. Eilish later released “Idontwannabeyouanymore” and “My Boy”. On August 11, 2017, she released Don’t Smile at Me. The EP became a sleeper hit, reaching number 14 on the US Billboard 200. She embarked on the Don’t Smile at Me Tour throughout October 2017 in support of the EP. Eilish released “Bitches Broken Hearts” through SoundCloud on November 10, 2017.

2018–2020: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

In February 2018, Eilish embarked on her second headlining concert tour, the Where’s My Mind Tour, which concluded in April 2018. “Bitches Broken Hearts” was re-released worldwide on March 30, 2018. For Record Store Day 2018, Eilish released “Party Favor” on a pink 7-inch vinyl, along with a cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” as the B-side. Eilish collaborated with American singer Khalid on the single “Lovely”, which was released on April 19, 2018, and added to the soundtrack for the second season of 13 Reasons Why. She released “You Should See Me in a Crown” in July 2018. The same month, Eilish performed at the Mo Pop Festival.

On the day of release for her single “When the Party’s Over”, Eilish was featured in Vanity Fair’s “73 Questions” rapid-fire questionnaire video series by Joe Sabia, who revisited an interview from October 2017. The resulting video was a side-by-side time capsule of both interviews showing her growth in popularity over one year. She signed a talent contract with Next Management for fashion and beauty endorsements in October 2018. She was placed on the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in November of that year, and released the single “Come Out and Play” in November 2018, which was written for a holiday-themed Apple campaign.

commercial. In early January 2019, Don’t Smile at Me reached 1 billion streams on Spotify, making her the youngest artist to top 1 billion streams on a project. That month, Eilish released “Bury a Friend” as the third track from her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, along with “When I Was Older”, a song inspired by the 2018 film Roma, which appeared on the compilation album Music Inspired by the Film Roma. In February, Eilish partnered with YouTube on a documentary miniseries, “A Snippet Into Billie’s Mind”. “Wish You Were Gay”, her fourth track from the album, was released on March 4, 2019.

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was released on March 29, 2019. Spotify launched a multi-level campaign behind the album, creating a multimedia playlist and new product features that allowed for vertical video content, custom assets, and editorial storylines to create more meaningful and engaging context for Eilish’s fans.

In Los Angeles, Spotify set up a pop-up enhanced album experience, which included different artwork and a multi-sensory experience of each track for fans. The album debuted atop the Billboard 200 as well as on the UK Albums Chart, making Eilish the first artist born in the 2000s to have a number-one album in the U.S. and the youngest female ever to have a number-one album in the United Kingdom.

Upon the album’s debut, Eilish broke the record for most simultaneously charting Hot 100 songs by a female artist, with 14, after every song from the album, excluding “Goodbye,” charted on the Hot 100. The fifth track from the album, “Bad Guy,” was released in conjunction with the album. A remix of the song featuring Justin Bieber was released in July 2019. In August, “Bad Guy” peaked at number-one in the US, ending Lil Nas X’s record-breaking 19 weeks at number-one with “Old Town Road.” She is the first artist born in the 2000s and the youngest artist since Lorde (with “Royals”) to have a number-one single.

Eilish began her When We All Fall Asleep Tour at Coachella Festival in April 2019, with the tour concluding on November 17, 2019, in Mexico City. In August 2019, she partnered with Apple Music for Music Lab: Remix Billie Eilish, part of Apple Stores’ Music Lab sessions during which fans deconstruct her song “You Should See Me In A Crown” and learn how to create their own remix.

Fans learned how to create their own remix on Apple devices and GarageBand. On September 27, 2019, Eilish announced her Where Do We Go? World Tour. The tour began in Miami on March 9, 2020, and continued with two more shows on March 10 in Orlando and March 12 in Raleigh before Eilish ended the tour prematurely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The tour was originally set to conclude in Jakarta on September 7.

Since 2024: Hit Me Hard and Soft

On April 8, 2024, Eilish announced her third studio album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, which was released on May 17, 2024. She also announced a tour to support the album, Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour, on April 29, 2024, with concerts in North America, Oceania, and Europe between September 2024 and July 2025.

Eilish was the next “featured artist” in the Fortnite spin-off game Fortnite Festival, along with an unlockable outfit in the game. While visiting London due to the success of her recently released album in the UK, Eilish appeared alongside London-based content creator Amelia Dimoldenberg on her web series Chicken Shop Date, which was called the “flirtiest episode yet,” and also appeared as a guest host for children’s channel CBeebies’ bedtime story.

In August, Eilish featured on a remix of Charli XCX’s “Guess,” a song from the deluxe version of Charli XCX’s album Brat, accompanied by a video showing Eilish in a bulldozer and the pair surrounded by piles of women’s underwear, which were donated to the charity I Support the Girls. On August 11, 2024, Eilish performed “Birds of a Feather” on Belmont Shore, Long Beach, during the 2024 Summer Olympics closing ceremony as part of the handover to Los Angeles, which will host the Games in 2028.

Achievements

She has appeared on lists such as Rolling Stone’s 2023 revision of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time and Time’s 2019 “Time 100 Next” list. Billboard ranked her at number 15 on its 2025 “Top 100 Women Artists of the 21st Century” list. She is the youngest person, second person ever, and first female artist to win the four main Grammy categories—Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year—in the same year.

In 2022, Eilish won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “No Time to Die” from the James Bond film No Time to Die, becoming the first person born in the 21st century ever to win an Academy Award in any category. With her win in the same category in 2024 for “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie (2023), she became the…

youngest person ever to win two Academy Awards in any category and the song became the tenth song in history to win both an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

Discography

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019)
Happier Than Ever (2021)
Hit Me Hard and Soft (2024)

Tours

Headlining

Don’t Smile at Me Tour
Where’s My Mind Tour
1 by 1 Tour
When We All Fall Asleep Tour
Where Do We Go? World Tour
Happier Than Ever, The World Tour
Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour

Opening act

Florence and the Machine – High as Hope Tour

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes	Ref.
2010	Diary of a Wimpy Kid	Extra only	Film
2020	Not My Responsibility	Herself	Short film; also writer and producer	^[341]
2020	Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert	Herself	Documentary	^[342]
2021	Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry	Herself	Documentary	^[343]
2021	Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles	Herself	Concert film	^[344]
2022	When Billie Met Lisa	Herself	Voice; short film	^[345]

Year	Title	Role	Notes	Ref.
2019	Saturday Night Live	Herself	Episode: “Woody Harrelson/Billie Eilish”	^[346]
2020	Justin Bieber: Seasons	Herself	Episode: “The Finale”	^[347]
2021	Saturday Night Live	Herself	Episode: “Billie Eilish”	^[348]
2022	Sesame Street	Herself	Episode: “Elmo’s Number Adventure”	^[349]
2023	Swarm	Eva	Episode: “Running Scared”	^[161]
2023	Saturday Night Live	Herself	Episode: “Kate McKinnon/Billie Eilish”	^[350]
2024	CBeebies Bedtime Stories	Herself	Episode: “Billie Eilish – This Moose Belongs to Me”	^[172]
2024	Saturday Night Live	Herself	Episode: “Michael Keaton/Billie Eilish”	^[351]

Billie Eilish

Early life