Billie Eilish Isn’t Allowed to Drink Soda
And more extremely Gen-Z factoids revealed in her first Rolling Stone cover interview.
Is there any other teen pop prodigy successfully dominating the ether right now more than Billie Eilish? Probably not. She’s weird and boundary pushing when it comes to her music, and most importantly, she is still a teen and don’t you forget it.
After placing herself firmly at the center of Gen-Z by innocently asking, “Who is Hilary Duff?” and admitting she didn’t realize the Spice Girls were real until 2017, only to later bridge the millennial-generation Z divide by commenting “omg” on an Instagram video in which Britney Spears danced to her song, “Bad Guy,” Eilish has continued to make everyone else feel old by comparison. Whether or not you “get” Eilish doesn’t matter—all you need to know is that she is wiping the floor with the industry she is simultaneously ruling. For her first Rolling Stone cover, the musician opened up about touring, living with her parents, and being “too old.”
She was unfazed to receive a gold record plaque.
When Eilish’s record label tried to win her over by presenting her with a golden plaque, her dad told Rolling Stone that she didn’t care at all. “What am I gonna do with a fucking plaque?” she asked. To be fair, what is one supposed to do with a plaque besides say thank you and hang it up?
She is a synesthete.
Dev Hynes. Pharrell. Tori Amos. Leonard Bernstein. What do they all have in common? That neurological condition that causes the senses to be perceived by other senses known as synesthesia. And Billie Eilish has it too. “Every person I know has their own color and shape and number in my head, but it’s normal to me,” Eilish told Rolling Stone. She sees her brother Finneas’s entire being as an orange triangle but his name is dark green to her. Her single “Bad Guy” (which peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100) is experienced as “yellow, but also red, and the number seven,” according to Eilish. “It’s not hot, but warm, like an oven. And it smells like cookies.”
She was a background actor.
Eilish recorded background dialog for crowd scenes in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Ramona and Beezus, and X-Men, but she didn’t want to continue acting after going on two auditions because “most actor kids are psychopaths.”
She’s a horse girl.
According to Eilish’s mom, “the one thing she’s always really loved is horses.” As a child, Eilish worked in exchange for lessons at a stable near her home. She was “literally in love” with a black mare named Jackie O, “but then this other girl with more money wanted to ride her” so Eilish quit riding altogether. Now, she goes back to the stable and visits Jackie O.
She named her car “Dragon.”
Ever since Eilish was 13 years old, she dreamed of driving a Dodge Challenger. Well, her label answered her prayers, and at 17, she is finally the owner of that “fine ass” car, which she has named Dragon, and she can finally drive it without a parent in the passenger seat.
She’s never eaten meat.
Eilish is a lifelong vegetarian, but apparently she once broke that streak momentarily when she “accidentally” swallowed an ant that was swimming in a glass of soy milk.
Her mom doesn’t let her drink soda.
Seltzer it is, then.
She’s not starstruck by Gen-X icons.
The story goes that Dave Grohl, Billie Joe Armstrong, and Thom Yorke came backstage once and Yorke complimented her by saying “You’re the only one doing anything fucking interesting nowadays,” to which Eilish replied, “Thank you,” but didn’t really seem to care how cool it is to get the Thom Yorke stamp of approval. As her dad said, Eilish “has no tolerance for people she’s not interested in and doesn’t give a shit whether you like her or not.”
She descends from actors.
Her mom, Maggie Baird, was Melissa McCarthy’s first improv teacher and performed with Will Ferrell as part of the Groundlings improv troupe in Los Angeles. Her dad, Patrick O’Connell, has been on The West Wing and NYPD Blue. But don’t expect Eilish to follow in her parents footsteps any time soon because she believes acting is “superweird.” Instead she’d rather step behind the camera and make a movie with her parents as part of the cast.
She thinks being 27 is “too old.”
In case you needed to be reminded again that Eilish really is a teen, she would like you to know that to be 27 years old is to be “too old.”
Related: A Saturday Night in the Hamptons With Billie Eilish
