Billie Eilish has spoken about her relationship with fame in a new interview, admitting that she “used to despise it”.
The teen pop star was thrust into the spotlight in 2015, when she was 14 years old, with the Soundcloud release of her first song ‘Ocean Eyes’.
Since then, she has become one of the biggest artists in the world, selling out arenas across the globe, topping charts in multiple countries and scoring four Grammy awards in 2020.
During an appearance on the SmartLess podcast, which is hosted by actors Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, she discussed her feelings on fame and how her relationship with it has changed. “The parts I hated three years ago, those are the parts that I’m digging now,” she said.
“Fame, in general, I used to just despise it, I hated everything about it. I hated being recognised, I hated not being able to go out, I hated not being able to post a place because then people would show up at that place wherever it was because they’d figure out where it is.”
She continued to say that she “felt stupid” for feeling like that because she had something that “people would kill for”. “I was also forgetting that I was really, really depressed and that can make you hate almost anything,” she said. “I don’t really know what changed, but I fucking love fame. I love it. I definitely like what I’m doing with it. I feel more confident with it.”
Being in the public eye so young also affected how she felt around her friends. “There were some years where I felt like I had to prove myself all the time, especially to the kids I grew up with,” Eilish said, adding that sometimes she felt like people around her saw her as “a joke”. “I felt like I had to prove that I was actually doing pretty well.”
The musician is currently working on the follow-up to her 2019 debut album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go’. Last year, she released a handful of new tracks, including her latest ‘Therefore I Am’.
