Sometimes you hear a song and it just smacks you upside the head. This what happened when I first heard “Ocean Eyes,” the debut single from 15-year-old singer-songstress on the rise, Billie Eilish!
As unprepared as I was for the sparse, intimate love ballad, “Ocean Eyes” did a whole lot more for Billie than she could have ever have imagined. Written and produced by her older brother Finneas, the song was originally created with no intent to launch a music career. It was simply for Billie‘s dance teacher, who wanted her to choreograph a dance routine to original music. The siblings uploaded the track onto Soundcloud and within a few days “Ocean Eyes” became an overnight viral smash, gained much praise from the blogsphere, and eventually lead to the meeting of her now manager, Danny Ruckasin, who along with the success of “Ocean Eyes” scored her a recording contract with Instercope Records.
Billie followed up “Ocean Eyes” with the equally impressive “Six Feet Under” back in June, it’s a mesmerizing and intimate lullaby coated in gorgeous piano melodies and a kind of hypnotic tripping beat that brings to mind Lorde‘s debut. “Our love is six feet under/ I can’t help but wonder/ If our grave was watered by the rain/ Would roses bloom?/ Could roses bloom… Again?,” she softly croons on the hook – Straight up poetry, folks!
It too was co-written alongside her brother Finneas, you can hear him in the background providing soothing vocal support.
Last week, Billie did it again in a more unexpected way with her latest single, the comically titled “Bellyache.”
“Bellyache” is impressive too, but in a whole different way — the dark, sing-talk brooding verses and addictive choruses of Lorde or Tove Lo vaguely come to mind. “Maybe it’s in the gutter/ Where I left my lover/ What an expensive fate/ My V is for Vendetta/ Thought that I’d feel better/ But I now I got a bellyache,” she casually declares above the infectious guitar plucks and cool, dancehall-lite pulsations.
“‘Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real,” Billie told Teen Vogue. “The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you. In the end, you might think, “That was stupid,” and feel bad about what you did. So basically it’s about doing what you think is right and cool and not following what other people want you to do.”
It’s hard to say that Billie fits comfortably alongside her contemporaries – she doesn’t, but then, that’s the reason she’s all the more refreshing: At just 15-years-old, she seems to know exactly who she wants to be as an artist. I couldn’t even decide what I wanted to eat for breakfast at that age (I still can’t). That alone my friends speaks volumes – GET FAMILIAR NOW!!