Chapter 1Highland Park

Foreword

The American fame story is a story of leaving. That is the version I know best, the one I have spent years taking apart in the archives of other people's manufacture: the bus out of the small town, the name traded for a better one, the accent flattened, the origin sanded down until nothing local shows on the finished surface. The machine that makes a star works by extraction. It finds a person somewhere specific and it takes her out of the somewhere, because the somewhere is small and the market is large, and the whole industrial logic of celebrity depends on the person becoming portable — detachable from the place and the people that made her, so she can be shipped anywhere and sold to anyone. That is the shape I had learned to expect. I could trace it in my sleep.

So when I said I wanted to write about Billie Eilish, the objections came fast, and most of them were about time. She was too young. The story was not finished. Wait ten years, people told me, and let the arc complete itself. What none of them said, because it took me a while to see it myself, was the actual reason her story kept pulling at me: it did not fit the shape. The machine had not extracted her. The girl on the world's biggest stages was still, by every documentary indicator, living inside the story that made her — the same street, the same brother, the same family that had organized the work from the beginning. She had not left. She had made the world come to the house.

That was exactly why I wanted her.

I had assumed I would be writing about music. I was, in the end, but I kept finding myself somewhere else — at a dinner table set against the windows of a small back yard, in the strategic informality of a homeschool co-op, in the arithmetic of a working-actor household budgeting a mortgage against the rhythm of casting. I worked from the record any biographer of a living, heavily documented subject works from: the published interviews across a decade, the family's own accounts, the press and awards archive, the wide public documentary trail that a career this size leaves behind. And that record kept refusing to point at a stage. It pointed, again and again, at a bungalow on a numbered avenue in northeast Los Angeles, and at a bedroom upstairs where two siblings did what their parents had built the household to let them do — make things together, in whatever hours the day left over.

That is the fact the title of this book is built around, and it is the fact I could not get past. Ocean Eyes was made in that room. So, later, were the records that swept the Grammys and filled the arenas. The story people expect from a phenomenon of this magnitude is the story of a discovery and a transformation — the moment the ordinary girl is remade into the extraordinary product. There is no such moment here. There is only a household that took artistic practice seriously as a daily discipline, and a brother's laptop, and a sister at a microphone, and the slow accumulation of small recorded artifacts that nobody thought to call a career until one of them escaped the bedroom and would not stop growing.

The reason she is worth a book is not the size of the numbers, though the numbers are enormous. It is that she has functioned, for a decade, as a mirror the country could not look away from. America tells its young women that the price of being seen is being consumed — that the body must be visible, and that once it is visible it belongs to the audience to appraise. Billie stepped into that machinery at thirteen and, with a family that had studied what the machinery had done to the girls before her, negotiated its terms in public, in real time, refusing every settled version of herself the culture tried to assign. The baggy clothes, the Vogue cover, the long argument about her own body conducted in front of everyone — this is a person holding the mirror up and making a distracted country look at what it does to the girls it decides to love.

I came to this subject braced for the objection that it was too soon. I leave it convinced the timing was the point — that the value of writing a life still in motion is that you are forced to describe a person rather than a verdict. That is the harder thing, and it is the better one. It is what the good subjects do to you. They make you set the template down and look at what is actually there.

— Keisha Morgan, Harlem

Chapter 1 · Highland Park

The neighborhood sits in northeast Los Angeles, in the Arroyo Seco basin, between the older Mexican-American district of Lincoln Heights to the west and the city of South Pasadena to the east. The Pacific Electric streetcar reached it in 1895. The Arts and Crafts bungalows that line its quieter streets were built between 1905 and 1925. By the late twentieth century the area had become one of the more racially mixed and architecturally distinctive of the Los Angeles inner-city neighborhoods. Latino working-class families on Figueroa, a small artist population in the foothills, a few Hollywood-adjacent households scattered across the smaller streets, and, in the early years of the twenty-first century, a wave of younger creative families who had been priced out of Echo Park and Silver Lake and were beginning to colonize the neighborhood as a quieter and cheaper alternative.

The house on Avenue 53 was a three-bedroom Craftsman bungalow with a small front porch, a steep concrete driveway, a Japanese maple in the yard, and the kind of internal layout (front room, dining room, kitchen at the back, two small bedrooms upstairs) that the original architect had imagined for a family with two children. The house had been built early in the twentieth century. It had been sold and resold a half-dozen times across the twentieth century. In the late 1990s it had come into the possession of a young couple of working actors named Maggie Baird and Patrick O'Connell, who had bought it on a working-actor's combined income at a price (about four hundred thousand dollars, in a market that had not yet been transformed by the Westside money) that, ten years later, would have been impossible.

Maggie was the more visible of the two parents. She had grown up in Colorado, had trained at the William Esper Studio in New York, had moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, and had built, across the 1990s and 2000s, the kind of working-actor career that supports a household without ever quite producing celebrity. She had recurring guest roles on Friends and The X-Files and Curb Your Enthusiasm. She had small parts in films. She also taught acting and wrote screenplays. She was, in the broader Los Angeles ecology of working artists, a respected figure: a person whose name producers knew, whose phone calls were returned, who could be relied on to deliver a small role with the precision and economy that small roles require.

Patrick was quieter. He had been raised in the Midwest. He had come to Los Angeles in the same period as Maggie. He had voice-over work and small roles in television. He had a small role as a reporter in the first Iron Man film. He played a bartender in an episode of The West Wing. He was, in the working-actor's economy, a journeyman: reliable, present, hireable. He had, across the years of his marriage, become also the parent who handled the practical management of the household, the school logistics, the daily rhythms.

Their first child, a son, was born on July 30, 1997. They named him Finneas Baird O'Connell. The name Finneas was an Irish variant the family had selected for its rhythm rather than its tradition; the Baird was Maggie's maiden name carried forward as a middle. He was a small, observant baby. He spoke early. By two he was singing. By four he was picking out melodies on the family piano.

Their second child was born on December 18, 2001. They named her Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell. Eilish had originally been intended as her first name — the parents had encountered it in a documentary about the Irish conjoined twins Katie and Eilish Holton and had favored its unusual softness. Pirate had been four-year-old Finneas's contribution: he had wanted to call his coming sister Pirate, an uncle had objected that pirates were bad, and the name had settled into middle position. Then, near the end of the pregnancy, Maggie's father, Bill, died, and the parents moved a feminine form of his name to the front in his honor. The combination, Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell, was, on paper, the name of a literary character. In life, it was the name of a small and very loud baby with dark blue eyes who spent her first months screaming, cooing, sleeping in fits, and demanding, at all hours, the constant presence of her parents and her older brother.

The household, in the years that followed, was organized around several principles that the parents articulated explicitly and that the children, retrospectively, would identify as the principal influence of their childhoods.

The first principle was that the children would not attend conventional school. Maggie and Patrick had decided, through the late 1990s and early 2000s, that the public schools available in their part of Los Angeles were not adequate to what they wanted for their children. They were also not interested in the private schools available. The cost was prohibitive on a working-actor's income, and the cultures of those schools did not, to either parent, match the values they wanted to transmit. They chose, accordingly, to homeschool. Maggie did the principal teaching. Patrick supplemented when his work permitted. The curriculum was, by formal standards, eccentric. The children learned to read and write and do arithmetic at approximately conventional ages. They also learned, from the beginning, that art was a serious activity, that artistic practice was a daily discipline, and that any child who showed interest in any artistic medium was to be supported, materially and emotionally, in the pursuit.

The second principle was that creative ambition was permitted. The parents themselves were working artists. The children grew up watching them go to auditions, watching them prepare scenes, watching them receive rejection without becoming bitter and acceptance without becoming inflated. The model the parents demonstrated was the model of a person who took the work seriously, who understood that most of the work would not result in immediate or visible success, and who continued to do the work anyway because the work was the thing. The children internalized this model. By the time Finneas was eight he was writing songs. By the time Billie was eight she was singing them.

The third principle was that the family ate together. The dining-room table at the Avenue 53 house, set against the windows that faced the small back yard, was, across the years of the children's childhoods, the central piece of furniture in their lives. Dinners were prepared, mostly by Maggie, mostly with the children's involvement. The food was, beginning in the early 2000s, vegetarian. Maggie's commitment to animal-rights and food-system ethics had been a feature of her adult life since her twenties, and she had, gradually, brought the family to a household-wide vegetarian diet that, by the time Billie was a small child, had become non-negotiable. The children, asked in subsequent interviews about the dietary choice, would say it had not felt like a choice. It had felt like the way food was. They had never known another way.

The fourth principle was that Los Angeles Children's Chorus, the city's leading children's choral group, was an important institution. Maggie had identified the chorus as a serious training ground for young singers. Both children eventually auditioned and were admitted. Billie joined at eight. She would remain with the chorus through her early teens. The choral training (sight-reading, ensemble singing, attention to tone, breath control) would, by her late teens, have given her a foundation in the technical disciplines of singing that the casual reader, listening to her later whisper-vocal recordings, might assume she did not possess. She did possess it. The bedroom-pop aesthetic of her recorded music was a stylistic choice rather than a limitation of her instrument.

The chorus rehearsals took place at Pasadena Presbyterian Church on Colorado Boulevard, where the chorus has kept its offices and rehearsal rooms since its founding — a short drive from Highland Park in light traffic and a considerably longer one in the afternoon rush — and Maggie or Patrick made the drive, several days a week, for the years that the children participated. The chorus's artistic director through the principal years of Billie's involvement, Anne Tomlinson, would recall, in a 2020 interview after Billie's career had become a global one, that Billie had been a quiet member of the ensemble whose voice had distinguished itself in the small auditioning solos that the chorus assigned to its more advanced singers. She had not, however, been the voice anyone in the chorus's faculty had identified as the one most likely to become a commercial recording artist. Several other young singers in the same cohort had seemed, at the time, more obviously destined for stage careers. The chorus had simply been, for Billie, the place where she had learned to sing in the technical sense; the recording career, when it arrived, would draw on the technical foundation without resembling the choral work in any superficial way.

The neighborhood Billie grew up in was not the Highland Park of the late 2010s and the 2020s, when the area would become, in the way Los Angeles neighborhoods do, gentrified almost beyond recognition. The Highland Park of her early childhood, in the years from 2001 through approximately 2010, was still principally a working-class Latino neighborhood, with the Eastside Market on the corner, the Avenue 50 elementary school down the street, the Saturday morning farmers' market at the parking lot of the old Sears, and the broader rhythms of a neighborhood that had not yet been discovered by the magazines.

Billie would, in interviews across her later career, speak about Highland Park as the place she belonged to. She would reference the local taquerias by name. She would speak about being a small child running around the streets of the neighborhood with her brother. She would identify the avenues, Avenue 50, Avenue 53, Avenue 56, by number, in the way that local people identified them, rather than by the names that newer residents would, by 2018 and 2019, have begun using as property values rose.

She had, also, during her childhood, the kind of small daily encounters with the neighborhood that the next generation of Highland Park children would not have because the new generation would, in the post-streamer wave, be the children of newer households who did not know the older neighborhood. Billie had known it. She had been embedded in it. The accent of her Los Angeles, in her speech, was the accent of a girl who had grown up in northeast L.A. rather than the West-Side accent of Beverly Hills children of the entertainment industry. The accent, and the cultural geography it implied, was a feature of her later public persona that her audience would, often without articulating it, register as authentic.

The homeschooling, day-to-day, was less the formal curriculum-with-textbooks model the word homeschooling in the broader American context typically suggests and more what the broader pedagogical literature would identify as unschooling. Maggie did not, in the strict sense, teach lessons. She and Patrick organized the days around the children's interests, supplemented with reading lists when reading lists seemed useful, math instruction when math instruction seemed useful, and the broader exposure to books, museums, theaters, and music that the parents' Los Angeles cultural network made accessible at low cost. The children read. They drew. They wrote stories. They composed songs. They had, on most weeks, several afternoons of structured activity (the chorus rehearsals, dance classes, occasional group meetings with other homeschooled children in the area) and several afternoons of unstructured time. The unstructured time, by both siblings' subsequent accounts, was the time in which the most consequential creative work had happened. Finneas, alone in his bedroom, had taught himself to use Logic Pro X by watching YouTube tutorials and by failing repeatedly at things until they worked. Billie, alone in the front room, had taught herself melodies by singing along to her brother's recordings and by inventing variations. The skills, accumulated quietly, had not registered to anyone as career preparation. They had registered as the children's hobbies.

Maggie's animal-rights commitment, which had organized the household's vegetarian diet, also organized the household's broader ethical orientation. Maggie had become, in her thirties, increasingly engaged with the literature of factory-farming and the climate consequences of industrial meat production. She had read books, watched documentaries, attended occasional lectures, and made the gradual personal-life shift that those exposures often produce. The household had become vegetarian by Billie's early childhood and would, by Billie's mid-teens, become essentially vegan (Billie herself had been vegan from the age of twelve, having watched a documentary about the dairy industry that had, by her own subsequent account, ended her tolerance for dairy consumption that same evening). Maggie would, in the post-Grammy years, formalize her food-ethics work in the founding of a non-profit organization called Support + Feed, which, by 2024 and 2025, would be running plant-based meal-distribution programs across the touring cycles of Billie's world tours and through additional independent operations supporting underserved communities in Los Angeles. The organization was, in its origins, an extension of the household's dinner-table principles into a more public and more ambitious scale. The principles had been the same since the children's earliest years: food was an ethical question; the choices a household made about food were small daily expressions of the household's broader values; the daily expressions, accumulated across years, became the substance of who the household's members were.

The family's economic position, through the years of the children's early childhoods, was middle-class but not affluent. The parents were working actors. They had health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. They had a mortgage on the Highland Park house. They had two children. The household's annual income, in the early 2000s, was probably in the range of one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand dollars in some years and considerably less in others, depending on the rhythm of casting. There was no excess. There were also no shortages of the kind that more truly struggling households know. The children grew up middle-class with creative parents in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood, and the combination (neither wealthy nor poor, surrounded by both wealthier and poorer families, embedded in a creative household that took artistic ambition seriously) would, in the eventual biographical accounting, prove formative.

The accounting could not have been predicted, of course, in the years when the children were small. Maggie and Patrick, in 2005 and 2008 and 2010, were not parents who had planned, even latently, for their daughter to become one of the most successful pop singers of her generation. They were parents who had hoped their children would be happy, would find work that interested them, and would, if they were fortunate, be able to support themselves through artistic activity in the manner that Maggie and Patrick had, themselves, managed. The trajectory the family ended up on was not the trajectory anyone in the family had imagined.

What the family had imagined was a life in which the children grew up making things together. The making together was the principle. It would, by the second half of the 2010s, produce one of the more consequential creative partnerships in twenty-first-century pop music. It produced, at the same time, a long series of small recorded artifacts (songs the brother wrote in his bedroom, songs the sister sang into a microphone the parents had bought, audio sketches made for fun in the late afternoons after the homeschooling lessons) that would not, at the time, register to anyone as the beginning of anything. They were, in the family's daily life, what the children did with their afternoons.

In November 2015, when Billie was thirteen and Finneas was eighteen, one of the small recorded artifacts would, for reasons no one in the family would ever fully be able to explain, escape the bedroom and travel through the SoundCloud platform out into the world, where it would find an audience that would not stop growing.

The Los Angeles Children's Chorus had been, across the family's years of participation, more than a rehearsal schedule. The organization had been founded in 1986 by Rebecca Thompson, with Anne Tomlinson succeeding as artistic director in 1997 and developing the group on a classical bel canto training model (the same model used by major European children's choirs); by the early 2000s the chorus had become one of the principal youth choral organizations on the West Coast, with a membership of approximately two hundred and fifty singers in its various age divisions. The chorus had performed at the Hollywood Bowl, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and on several occasions in the formal concert seasons of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand Avenue. The caliber of the training was, by the standards of what Los Angeles offered young singers in the early 2000s, exceptional.

Both siblings had auditioned, and both had been accepted. Finneas participated from approximately age ten through his mid-teens; Billie joined when she was eight and remained with the chorus until she was fifteen. The chorus rehearsals required her to be at the organization's rehearsal rooms at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, a drive from Highland Park that lengthened considerably in afternoon traffic, on the weekly rehearsal schedule the chorus set for its ensembles. Maggie made the drives. The drives, across seven years of Billie's participation, represented an investment of parental time that had, by any accounting, contributed as much to the eventual career as the studio equipment would.

What the chorus gave Billie, technically, was precise. The bel canto tradition trained singers to manage the passaggio, the transition zone between chest voice and head voice, without the breaks and inconsistencies that untrained teenage voices typically produce. The training also emphasized legato phrasing: the ability to sustain a melodic line across syllables and word boundaries without audible re-attacks. Both techniques, the smooth register transition and the sustained legato, are directly audible in Billie's later whisper-vocal recordings. The hushed intimacy that became her aesthetic signature was not despite her classical training. It was, partly, because of it. The chorus had given her the control that made intimacy technically possible at scale.

The homeschooling co-op that Maggie and Patrick participated in had organized, across the early years of the children's education, monthly performances at a rented community space in Silver Lake. The performances were informal (families gathered, children performed songs or scenes or recitations), but the informality was strategic. The purpose was not to produce polished performances. The purpose was to give the children experience in the basic cognitive fact of being watched. Most children, when watched by an unfamiliar audience, experience a brief surge of panic that subsides only across repeated exposure. Billie, by her family's later accounts, had experienced the surge at her first few informal performances and then had, by approximately her third or fourth, stopped experiencing it in any visible form. The subsidence had come faster than it typically came for children her age. Maggie had noted it. The noting had been the beginning of her understanding that her daughter had a particular orientation toward performance: not an absence of stage fright, precisely, but a capacity to metabolize stage fright into energy rather than into paralysis.

The informal homeschool co-op's role in the siblings' early development had also included a feature that Maggie's subsequent interviews have described as one of the more deliberately designed elements of the children's creative education: the regular practice of reading work aloud to other families. Maggie had, across the years of the co-op's operation, organized sessions in which children presented not only performances (songs, dances, theatrical scenes) but also written work (stories, poems, essays) to the assembled group of families. The practice had been, in Maggie's educational philosophy, a deliberate intervention against the conventional school model in which children's writing was produced for a single evaluator (the teacher) and in which the writing's audience had no stake in its quality. In the co-op model, the audience was made up of peers and their parents, who brought to the listening a genuine interest rather than a professional obligation. The children, sensing the difference, had, in Maggie's account, written differently for the co-op audiences than they might have written for a teacher. The writing had been more alive. The aliveness had been, she believed, a consequence of the audience being real.

One further detail about the years before the song. Billie, by the available accounts of her parents and her brother, had been an unusually expressive child from her earliest years. She had cried loudly. She had laughed loudly. She had insisted on being the principal feature of any room she occupied. She had also, in equal measure, been capable of long stretches of solitary absorption during which she would draw in notebooks, sing quietly to herself, or read books her mother had selected for her. The combination of expressiveness and absorption was one her mother would later identify, in interviews, as the combination she recognized as the foundation of the eventual artistic temperament. The expressiveness gave the artist the willingness to be seen. The absorption gave the artist the discipline to keep working when she was not being seen. The two together produced, by the time Billie was twelve and thirteen, a young person who could perform when the situation required performance and who could also, in the long quiet hours, do the work the eventual career would require.

The work, in those years, did not look like work. It looked like a girl singing along to her brother's piano in the front room of a small bungalow. It looked like a brother typing into a laptop in his upstairs bedroom while a microphone he had bought used was picking up the sound of his sister humming through a closed door. Plainly put, it looked like a household whose two children were doing what the parents had set the household up to permit them to do — make things together in whatever time the homeschooling and the chorus and the daily logistics permitted.

The next chapter is about the song. The song was called Ocean Eyes.