dont smile at me, kid

walking through los angeles with billie eilish while pop music develops a new problem originally published in Rolling Stone; September 2017. august 12, 2017 los angeles is burning gold at the edges. the pavement is still coughing heat back into the evening, palm trees are cutting black crooked shapes across a bruised orange sky, and somewhere beyond the houses and telephone wires and traffic there is the pacific, enormous and indifferent, swallowing the last daylight whole. and walking beside me through all of this is a fifteen year old girl wearing enough loose clothing to conceal several additional people. billie eilish has blue hair, pale eyes, a strange little half grin that appears whenever she thinks somebody has said something stupid, and the unnerving calm of a person who has already decided that most adult bullshit is exactly that. bullshit. yesterday she released an eight song ep called dont smile at me. the title sounds like something somebody writes under a photograph when they are sick of being told they would look prettier if they smiled, which is basically the point. i ask her why she called it that. because i hate smiling, she says. then she laughs, which immediately screws up the entire argument. you are smiling right now. shut up. fair enough. we keep walking. this is billie eilish pirate baird oconnell, fifteen years old, born and raised in los angeles, homeschooled, dancer, songwriter, singer, and currently one of those irritating young people who makes grown adults wonder whether they wasted adolescence doing absolutely nothing. her older brother finneas oconnell is deeply tangled up in all of this too. he writes with her, records with her, produces her, plays with her. there is no giant laboratory full of middle aged men in expensive sneakers calculating youth culture behind the curtain here. a lot of this music comes from bedrooms and family rooms and siblings screwing around with sounds until something sticks. that matters, because dont smile at me sounds homemade without sounding small. there is a difference. homemade can mean intimate. homemade can mean nobody had enough money or enough authority around to ruin the original idea. billie walks with her hands buried somewhere inside her clothes. i tell her the record feels like eight different versions of somebody refusing to behave properly. she looks pleased. good. that is all i get. good. jesus christ. interviewing teenagers is fantastic. i ask her how she and finneas actually work together, because the sibling thing interests me more than the usual producer singer arrangement. siblings have advantages. they know where the bodies are buried. they remember your embarrassing childhood shit. they are generally immune to whatever mythology you are beginning to construct around yourself. it changes, she says. sometimes he has something and shows me. sometimes i have something. sometimes one of us has a line or a melody or something. so there is no formula. no. that would be boring. do you fight. yeah. about songs. about everything. who wins. me. that answer arrives so quickly i almost walk into a parked car. does finneas know that. no. billie starts laughing again. the ep begins with copycat, which is billie staring directly at somebody she thinks has been stealing her style and essentially telling them to get their own damn personality. the production crawls and snaps underneath her. bass. percussion. little electronic noises placed exactly where they can irritate the nervous system. billie does not belt because she does not need to. she keeps her voice close. that becomes one of the record's smartest tricks. everybody keeps trying to make pop singers sound enormous. billie sounds inches away. sometimes that is worse. i ask if she ever worries people will mistake the softness for weakness. no, she says. because it isnt weak. there is no hesitation. she says it like i asked whether water is wet. i like singing close, she says. i like hearing all the little things in a voice. you dont have to be loud to make something feel big. you could scream. i could. you dont. sometimes i do. but not because somebody tells you that the chorus requires it. exactly. this is one of those answers that seems simple until you remember how much of the music business is built around somebody telling somebody else what the chorus requires. i tell her that pop music usually likes teenage girls when teenage girls are easy to package. happy. heartbroken. desirable. wounded but not too wounded. rebellious but still available for christmas television specials. there is an acceptable amount of danger permitted. enough to sell a poster. not enough to frighten anybody signing checks. billie rolls her eyes. people always want you to be something. what do they want you to be. i dont know. whatever they want. and what do you want. whatever i want. there it is. the entire damn ep in four words. whatever i want. idontwannabeyouanymore is where the armor slips. not completely. just enough. the song moves with a slow bruised pulse while billie sings about looking at yourself and not particularly enjoying the company. it is uncomfortable because she does not turn insecurity into some grand inspirational speech. there is no inspirational poster waiting at the end. no glorious key change where everybody suddenly discovers self love. sometimes you look in the mirror and think. fuck. apparently pop music is allowed to admit this now. we pass a house with sprinklers ticking across a lawn. billie steps around the water. i ask whether writing something that personal bothers her. not really. nothing. i mean. yeah. sometimes. you dont feel exposed. of course. but if youre gonna write about something then write about it. she thinks about that for another second. everybody has stuff they dont like about themselves. you can have people telling you good things about you and still not feel good about yourself. does writing it fix it. no. that is refreshingly quick. so what does writing do. it makes it into something. that sentence sticks with me. it makes it into something. not everything has to heal you. maybe art does not have to repair every wound it touches. sometimes the wound gets three minutes and a melody and now at least you have something to show for the damage. teenagers are supposedly the evasive ones. meanwhile adults have built entire industries around saying absolutely nothing with tremendous confidence. my boy is nastier. thank god. the song is basically a breakup delivered with an eye roll. the rhythm changes underneath her. the vocal stacks multiply. the whole thing has that slightly crooked feeling that runs throughout the ep. not experimental enough to scare anybody away. just strange enough that you keep checking the machinery. i tell her my boy sounds like somebody realizing the person they are dating is an idiot. she laughs. thats pretty accurate. was he an idiot. im not telling you. that means yes. no it doesnt. it absolutely means yes. she gives me the look again. apparently i have been warned. what becomes interesting as we keep talking is how little billie seems interested in separating songwriting from imagination. some songs are personal. some are exaggerated. some are characters. some begin with an emotion and then wander off somewhere considerably less responsible. you dont have to write exactly what happened to you, she says. thats boring. all autobiography is boring. not all of it. good. bob dylan can sleep tonight. who. i stop walking. she starts laughing before i can say anything. im kidding. you nearly killed me. i know. fucking teenagers. watch is heartbreak without begging. this is important because there are roughly nine trillion songs about somebody leaving and the abandoned person begging them to return. billie sounds more interested in watching the wreckage burn. literally, at least in the song's central image. the relationship did damage. fine. let it burn itself out. i ask whether anger is easier to write than sadness. sometimes. why. because anger is fun. fun. yeah. you can do more with it. like what. you can be mean. you enjoy being mean. sometimes. this kid is going places. she smiles again. i point at her. you keep doing that. doing what. smiling. fuck you. now we are getting somewhere. party favor is almost perversely cute. ukulele. voice. a breakup delivered like a voicemail. this should be unbearable. somehow it is not. maybe because billie never sounds like she is begging you to find her adorable. the arrangement is small enough that every little change matters. her phrasing does most of the work. she stretches words. drops others. sings around the beat. there is already a peculiar sense that she understands microphones better than singers twice her age. not how to overpower one. how to get inside one. i ask about the contradiction between something that sounds sweet and something that is actually pretty shitty. thats why its fun, she says. because they dont match. yeah. if everything matches its boring. if its a sad song and everything sounds sad and youre singing sad and everything is just sad. okay. we get it. you sound personally offended by obviousness. i am. fair enough. then comes bellyache. now this one is fucked up. billie sings from the perspective of somebody who has killed people and is beginning to experience the inconvenient psychological consequences of murder. normal fifteen year old pop material. the genius of bellyache is that the music does not behave like a murder ballad. it is bright. acoustic guitar. bouncing rhythm. almost playful. meanwhile the narrator is sitting around with bodies on her conscience. i ask billie why she likes writing characters. because you can do anything. anything. yeah. you dont have to be yourself all the time. she kicks at something on the sidewalk. and its boring if every song is just exactly what happened to you. you can make somebody up and think about what they would feel. so bellyache is acting. kind of. you are playing a murderer. basically. how reassuring. she laughs. its about guilt though. this gets her talking. she explains that the interesting part is not simply the killing. that is the hook. the actual subject underneath it is what happens after somebody has done something horrible and has to sit there with it. the stomach becomes conscience. the body knows something is wrong before the character can comfortably admit it. its like when you do something and afterward youre like. oh shit. most of my oh shit moments involve considerably fewer corpses. yeah. hopefully. does the character regret it. kind of. kind of. thats what makes it interesting. they did it. theyre bad. but they also have to live with it. there is something genuinely promising in that answer. popular music has always needed liars. good liars. people who understand that songwriting is not sworn testimony. johnny cash did not shoot a man in reno just to watch him die. that did not stop generations of listeners from believing him for a few minutes. billie understands instinctively that a song can be a room you walk into. you can become somebody else in there. then you leave. ocean eyes is the reason many people are paying attention in the first place. the song was written by finneas. billie recorded it originally in connection with dance. it went onto soundcloud in 2015 and began spreading far beyond whatever modest expectations anybody had for it. that voice was suddenly loose on the internet. and the internet did what the internet occasionally does between destroying civilization. it noticed something good. ocean eyes is gorgeous. no sarcasm. sorry. i tried. the song floats because billie refuses to squeeze it. her vocal is delicate without becoming precious. finneas surrounds her with atmosphere and pulse, but nothing crowds her. i ask whether she knew the song was special when they recorded it. i loved it. thats not what i asked. i know. did you think people would care. no. really. not like this. she tells me that they originally put the recording online because her dance teacher needed to hear it. there was no giant scheme. no carefully plotted viral campaign. no cigar smoking executive saying this internet thing might really catch on. we just put it up, she says. and then. people found it. what was that like. weird. good weird. yeah. but really weird. because we didnt do anything. it just started getting plays. did you keep checking. of course. how often. a lot. so you were obsessed. shut up. i knew it. she laughs. people found it. that is the strange little miracle underneath this whole story. not through some giant television talent competition. not because billie had spent years being marched through shopping malls by a label executive. a song went online. somebody heard it. then somebody else did. then somebody else. the oldest mechanism in music history wearing twenty first century clothes. word of mouth. except the mouth now has wifi. i ask her about dance because it is easy to forget that music did not begin for her solely as something to sing. movement matters. rhythm matters physically. when youre dancing you hear everything differently, she says. youre listening for every little thing because your body has to do something with it. do you see music. yeah. actually see it. kind of. colors. images. stuff. what color is ocean eyes. blue. thats incredibly predictable. fuck you. she laughs. hostage closes the ep and may be its most disturbing love song. love becomes possession. intimacy becomes enclosure. billie sings about wanting somebody close enough that affection starts resembling captivity. it is beautiful. it is also uncomfortable. good. love songs could stand to be uncomfortable more often. i ask whether she thinks love songs are usually too clean. some of them. what is wrong with them. nothing. i just dont want to write the same thing everybody else writes. you dont want to sing i love you seventeen times. maybe eighteen. commercial instinct. exactly. she laughs, then gets serious again. you can take one feeling and make it into something else. it doesnt have to be exactly what happened. so songwriting is lying. no. fiction. whats the difference. she thinks about that. lying is trying to make somebody think something really happened. and fiction. youre trying to make them feel it. well. shit. sometimes the kid gets one past me. the sky has gone dark now. cars move past us with headlights on. somewhere a dog starts barking because dogs apparently have contractual obligations to bark during reflective moments. windows glow behind curtains. the whole city is moving into nighttime and billie keeps walking like she has nowhere particularly urgent to be. i tell her that the title dont smile at me feels different after hearing the whole thing. how. at first it sounds hostile. and now. now it sounds defensive. she thinks about that. maybe. you dont agree. i didnt say that. you didnt say anything. exactly. goddammit. billie is fifteen. that fact is going to dominate everything written about her for a while because journalists cannot resist arithmetic. fifteen. fifteen. fifteen. look everybody. the teenager made music. but age is probably the least interesting thing about dont smile at me. the interesting thing is control. billie already seems to understand what she does not want, and that may be more valuable than knowing exactly what she does want. she does not want the vocals polished until they become anonymous. she does not want every song built around the same emotional temperature. she does not want sadness separated from humor or menace separated from sweetness. she does not seem particularly interested in behaving like whatever somebody has decided a young female pop singer is supposed to behave like. and finneas appears smart enough not to sand those edges down. i ask what happens when the two of them disagree in the studio. we argue. and then. we keep arguing. productive. sometimes. what happens if finneas thinks something is brilliant and you think it sucks. i tell him it sucks. older brother privilege destroyed. he tells me when my stuff sucks too. does that piss you off. yeah. does he sometimes turn out to be right. she waits. sometimes. that looked physically painful to admit. it was. the production deserves more credit than it will probably get. listen to the space. listen to how few sounds are sometimes necessary. listen to where the bass enters. listen to the vocal layering. listen to the little pauses. these songs understand that silence is part of arrangement. that sounds obvious. apparently it is not. half of modern pop production resembles somebody trying to fit an entire furniture store into a studio apartment. dont smile at me leaves room. billie occupies it. i ask if she and finneas consciously think about keeping the arrangements small. sometimes you add something and it makes the song worse, she says. that simple. yeah. just because you can put something there doesnt mean it should be there. somewhere in los angeles several producers suddenly wake up sweating. she looks at me. what. nothing. continue saving popular music. shut up. i ask her what she wants people to understand about the ep. nothing. nothing. yeah. they can understand whatever they want. that does not frustrate you. why would it. because critics are going to explain your own songs to you. she laughs. thats weird. welcome to the business. thanks. she says it with exactly enough sarcasm that i feel proud. there are flaws here. of course there are. some of the writing occasionally feels young because the writer is, and i know this will shock everybody, young. a couple of ideas are stronger than their execution. the production occasionally feels like it is discovering its own rules while the song is already happening. fine. i would rather hear somebody discovering the rules than somebody obeying them. dont smile at me is not a masterpiece. calm down. it is more interesting than that right now. it is evidence. evidence that something is developing in this strange little sibling laboratory in los angeles. evidence that billie eilish has figured out that a microphone can be more threatening when you whisper into it. evidence that finneas oconnell understands how to make inexpensive space sound expensive. evidence that neither of them seems particularly interested in reproducing ocean eyes eight times merely because people liked ocean eyes. i ask her about exactly that. could you make another ocean eyes. probably. would you. why. because people liked it. we already made it. there it is. we already made it. five words that could save thousands of musicians from terrible second albums. the music business is built on asking artists to repeat whatever worked. make another one of those. wear that again. sing like that again. use that producer again. make the chorus bigger. make the single shorter. give us the thing people already bought, except convince them it is new. billie seems fundamentally suspicious of that idea. i dont want everything to sound the same, she says. whats the point. money. she looks at me. okay. besides money. funny how quickly capitalism ruins an artistic discussion. we keep walking. what happens next. who the hell knows. it is august 12, 2017. we do not get to cheat. we do not get to look ahead. all i have is this ep. eight songs. one strange voice. one brother somewhere behind the machinery. one soundcloud accident that got considerably bigger than expected. and a fifteen year old walking through los angeles acting as though none of this is particularly extraordinary. i ask whether the attention scares her. sometimes. finally. hesitation. what part. people knowing who you are. you wanted people to hear the music. yeah. thats different. how. i want people to know the music. i dont know if i want everybody knowing everything about me. that sounds like an impossible distinction once fame enters the room. probably. you worried about that. i dont know yet. good answer. because she does not know yet. neither do i. nobody does. there is something almost obscene about pretending otherwise. journalists love turning beginnings into prophecies. we hear three good songs and start predicting revolutions. we see a teenager with an unusual voice and immediately begin building the documentary before the poor bastard has even finished high school. not today. today there is just the record. and the record is good. very good. strange enough to be interesting. catchy enough to travel. personal without becoming diary sludge. theatrical without becoming costume drama. occasionally immature because adolescence is apparently still permitted to happen to adolescents. we reach the corner. i ask one last question. what happens if this gets huge. billie looks at me. the traffic keeps moving. somebody leans on a horn. the pedestrian signal is still red. she shrugs. i dont know. you worried. no. excited. yeah. what do you actually want out of it. she thinks for a second. i just want to keep making stuff. music. music. videos. whatever. you have a master plan. no. five year strategy. no. marketing objectives. stop. projected market penetration. shut the fuck up. finally. journalism. then she looks at me with that same half amused expression she has been wearing most of the evening. you ask a lot of questions. occupational disease. thats annoying. occupational disease. that still doesnt make sense. i know. she laughs. the light changes. billie starts across the street. and for a few seconds she is just another fifteen year old disappearing into the los angeles night, blue hair under streetlights, sneakers hitting pavement, while somewhere behind us eight little songs have been released into the world and nobody yet knows what the hell they are going to do. maybe nothing. maybe everything. we do not know yet. that is what makes this part worth being around for. before the mythology. before everybody decides what the story was supposed to mean. before critics start drawing straight lines through events that were crooked when people actually lived them. right now there is only a girl, her brother, some songs made largely in the domestic geography of home, a voice people found on the internet, and an ep with a title that sounds like an instruction. billie gets several steps ahead of me and turns around. you coming. yeah. then hurry up. bossy. youre slow. im reviewing your record. youve been reviewing it for like an hour. occupational disease. stop saying that. she turns and keeps walking. i follow. right now all anybody can do is listen. and whatever you do. dont tell her to smile. ...at least that’s what i hear.