On the night of September 4, 2018, Billie Eilish had a dream. “I jumped off a building,” she tells me. What is most alarming about it, as she looks back, is how little it alarmed her. “I was in a really bad place mentally,” Eilish says; the dream struck her less as a nightmare than as a grimly alluring fantasy. The next day, she approached her older brother, Finneas O’Connell, a songwriter and producer, and told him about it. They have collaborated on every piece of music she has put out, and she presented the dream to him as possible inspiration for a new song.
Eilish, whose full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, was raised in a two-bedroom, 1,200sq ft bungalow in a