As a music fan, I quickly became intrigued by the sound of this new singer who had not been on my radar. In fact, she was on most people's. Granted she was was well known enough to play a sold out show at Red Rocks. The show that summer evening was a wild one -- crazy rainstorm complemented the hauntingly beautiful sounds of Billie's voice, especially the song "When the Party's Over," which I believe she sang from a floating bed prop on stage.
At the time, I sort of casually started an article titled "Who is Billie Eilish and why we should care?"
Well, I never wrote that article, much to my chagrin. For, it was less than a year later that Billie (she's kinda reached the one name only rock star status at this point), she was gracing the cover of my copy of Vanity Fair magazine, and it was clear this young woman was a pop culture force to be reckoned with. That's the spirit of a great Wall Street Journal profile "How Billie Eilish Rewrote the Business of Pop Music."
At just 23, Eilish has already accumulated 44 Hot 100 hits, nine Grammys and a pair of Oscars. Her most recent record, Hit Me Hard and Soft, was the fifth-most popular release in the U.S. last year, earning over 2.2 billion streams, per the data company Luminate. She followed the album with a tour that has sold more than 383,000 tickets and grossed more than $55 million in the past nine months, according to Pollstar.Eilish has racked up these triumphs despite the fact that she is allergic to writing carefree pop hits, and many in the music industry did not believe her downbeat approach would be palatable to a wide audience. “It’s so funny to think back on all of the criticisms that were like, ‘The songs are too sad,’ ” she says. “So many people and companies wanted us to make happier songs.” Even when writing “Birds of a Feather,” she made sure to add “something dark” so the song wasn’t just “rainbows and smiles,” she says. “We wrote about the idea that you’re going to die soon, and let’s make it last.”
