Billie Eilish parents considered putting her in therapy over unlikely obsession

With song and dance playing a key part in her life from the moment she could talk, Billie’s chosen career path was not entirely surprising. “Music was always underlying,” she once said. “I always sang. It was like wearing underwear. It was just always underneath whatever else you were doing.”

Billie was born in LA on 18 December 2001 to actor-musician parents Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, who called her Billie to honour her grandfather William. Eilish was her middle name – a popular Irish choice – along with Pirate, which older brother Finneas affectionately called her before her birth.

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She wasn’t always entirely happy about it though, admitting in a recent interview, “I absolutely hated my name when I was a kid. I thought Billie was a boy’s name. I remember just being so mad, and all I wanted was to have a girly name, like Violet or like Lavender. Some sort of, you know, pretty flowery name.” However, it grew on her and she added, “Now there’s no other name in the universe that could be my name besides Billie. I love my name so, so, so much.”

Her mum Maggie, now 66, had TV roles in The X Files, Bones and Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as a cameo in Friends , while dad Patrick, 67, spent time on Broadway and appeared in The West Wing and NYPD Blue.

But in a fiercely competitive industry, work was often hard for the two jobbing actors to come by. “For years, I saw my parents beat up over the fact that they didn’t have it better,” Billie has said. “My dad is the best actor I’ve ever seen. And my mom can do all these voices and characters – she’s incredible. So I wish they’d had more recognition.”

As a unit of four who loved performing together, former music teacher Maggie has said, “There was just always singing. Someone playing piano or guitar, lots of lullabies at night and always music in the car.” That meant Billie’s songwriting journey began exceptionally early. “When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole,” she recalled.

“But it was really upbeat, like, ‘I’m going down, down, down into the black hole.’” She also learned to play the ukelele aged six, and started performing at local talent shows and with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus. Influenced by her parents, she tried her hand at acting too, but found it less enjoyable. “I went to an audition and I came back going, ‘I hate this. I’m not doing this ever again.’”

Both she and Finneas were homeschooled, which Billie believes was highly beneficial to her development. “I learned how to do math by cooking with my mom,” she said. “I learned, like, how to build sh*t from my dad.” Explaining their decision to educate their children themselves, Patrick said, “Our whole stance was ‘general knowledge is all’.”

Home was a two-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow in the Highland Park area of LA – which her parents still live in. To ensure both their children had their own rooms, they even slept in the living room. “It was a modest upbringing,” says Thomas Smith, editor of Billboard UK. “She was certainly not a nepo baby, and doors were not opened for her in the same way they have been for other artists. But so much time together in that house created an incredible bond between them all, and a support system that has served Billie well throughout her life.”

She returned to the house in a 2019 episode of Carpool Karaoke , pointing out her “very red” bedroom, as well as her pet tarantula, which she insisted was “cute” to horrified presenter James Corden. Viewers got a peek inside Finneas’ bedroom too, which doubled up as a recording studio. “This is the belly of the beast,” Billie said. The room still even had pencil markings on the door frame which had tracked the pair’s height as youngsters.

One of Billie’s biggest influences in her early years was singer Justin Bieber, whose face adorned the walls of her small bedroom. In fact, she was such an ardent ‘Belieber’ that her parents nearly sought professional help for her around the time of his 2012 hit, As Long As You Love Me. Speaking on Billie and Patrick’s Apple Music show Me & Dad Radi o, Maggie told how her daughter would be “sobbing and sobbing” to the song in the car. “I just want to say we did consider taking you to therapy,” she told Billie. “You were in so much pain over Justin Bieber.” In response, her daughter admitted, “There was a period where I cried every single day of my life.”

As well as her Bieber crush, another source of distress was a serious hip injury she suffered at the age of 13, which ended her dancing aspirations. “My bone separated from my muscle in my hip. It was really bad,” she said. “Going through my teenage years, hating myself and all that stupid sh*t, a lot of it came from my anger toward my body, and how mad I was at how much pain it’s caused me, and how much I’ve lost because of things that happened to it.”

However, Billie began channelling her emotions into making music with Finneas, and when her dance teacher asked her to record a track in late 2015, she jumped at the chance. “He asked us to make a song and I thought that was the coolest thing ever,” she said. The result was Ocean Eyes , an astonishingly mature ballad that compared falling in love to falling off a cliff under “napalm skies”. Finneas had originally written it for his band, The Slightlys, but realised it was better suited to his sister’s vocals. “I remember doing Ocean Eyes as a band and just being like, ‘I’m failing the song,’” he said. “And I remember hearing Billie sing it... And it was just like, ‘Oh, this is what this song deserves.’”

Aged just 13 at the time, Billie posted the song on music-sharing platform SoundCloud, and the next morning woke up to a flurry of interest. “It just grew from there,” she said. “It was really confusing. I didn’t understand what was going on. I literally thought it was like my popular friend had reposted it. ‘Wow, it’s getting so many listens!’” It notched up 1,000 listens in one day and hundreds of thousands more over the next fortnight. Billie later premiered a video for it on her YouTube channel. “That song is the reason I have the life I have,” she later reflected.

“Ocean Eyes was just a classic song,” says Thomas. “It’s one of those numbers that has travelled through time and still sounds fresh today, because the craft and the lyrics were just perfect. And for Billie, it was the start of something amazing.”

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