After Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell won their second Oscar early this year for their viral Barbie song that had us ugly crying all year, “What Was I Made For?”, the songwriting duo is up for even more awards in the new year with their multiple Grammy nominations. Ahead of the biggest night in music being part of the many upcoming award shows unfolding on the 2025 TV schedule, Billie Eilish got real about what it was like growing up with her brother and how his talent affected her own perception of herself.
During an over 45-minute interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Billie Eilish talked about why she hasn’t called herself a songwriter over the years, despite having songwriting credits with her brother on just about every track in her discography. As she shared:
Because I grew up with Finneas, his passion is songwriting, and my passion has never been songwriting. My passion is music, performing and singing. And songwriting is something that I do so that I can then sing it and perform it. The people that I know are real songwriters and that’s what they call themselves, they do it to survive. And for me, I do it to then sing… I think [for] Finneas songwriting helps him survive.
If you have siblings, you can probably understand where Billie Eilish is coming from to an extent. While the artist is praised left and right (and absolutely deserves her accolades for her songwriting abilities), as she spoke to in the interview, in the context of her own life, she hasn’t defined herself as a songwriter. As she continued:
I did way more writing on this album than anything ever. But this is the thing I’m trying to say. I’ve been writing music since I was 11, but because I wasn’t as fast at it or it wasn’t as good as my brother, I kind of thought, ‘Oh, I’m not a songwriter.’ But the truth is, if I was an only child in a household with no music and no musicians, then it’d be like ‘Billie is the songwriter.’
Billie Eilish has certainly been humble about her perspective on her own work before, calling one of her biggest hits “bad guy” the “stupidest song in the world.” However, her honest words about what it’s been like to develop as a songwriter, alongside another songwriter in her brother, clarifies what it has been like for her. She’s lived her whole life feeling some sort of comparison with her brother, and that’s a common and universal experience. It’s also rather subjective, isn’t it?
When it comes to Billie Eilish’s latest album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, the 22-year-old has said the duo were both dealing with writer’s block when Greta Gerwig came along and helped get the creative juices flowing that would play into the 2024 album. While Eilish in the past has felt like Finneas was the one who would help her push through the songwriting process, this time around the roles were reversed and she took a more central role into the entire songwriting process than she ever had before.
Billie Eilish is currently on her world tour until this upcoming summer. We’ll see if she and Finneas go home with more Grammys when the telecast premieres on February 2, 2025.
