“You can just be a person, and you should get awards for just being.”
More than anyone, Billie Eilish knows the pressures that come with both womanhood and success (see: her hit song for the Barbie soundtrack, “What Was I Made For?”), which is why she now wants to reassure women everywhere that it’s OK to “just be a person.”
In a new cover story with Allure, the songstress opened up about the early career experiences that led her to realize that women don’t always have to be “exceptional.”
“I have to give credit to the person I’ve always been — I did not give a fuck at all,” she told the publication when asked about always being on the younger side of the industry. “Between being a 14-year-old girl, and Finneas being a 17-year-old boy, and us making these little songs — we had to be very clear we weren’t going to just do what anybody said.”
She added, “People could have done crazy shit, and I didn’t let them. 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.”
The singer then explained that while she may have had “plans,” it’s fine if others don’t. “But the thing is, people should know — women should know — you don’t have to be exceptional,” Eilish continued. “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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Billie also discussed how her aforementioned Barbie hit first came to be.
“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 [meaning Billie and her brother-collaborator, Finneas O’Connell] wrote that song in an hour or two.”
Eilish continued, “We wrote most of the song without thinking about ourselves and our own lives, but thinking about this character we were inspired by. A couple of days went by, and I realized it was about me. It’s everything I feel. And it’s not just me — everyone feels like that, eventually.”
