Billie Eilish has spawned a whole legion of imitators since her debut as a teenager. The aftermath of her pop dominance has bred a lot of young women doing the wispy singing without any of the depth that makes Billie great. Since “Ocean Eyes,” her soft cooing creates a subtle emotional heft that coincides with her deeply impactful songwriting. Eilish is raw, and she wears her heart on her sleeve, even when she was just a kid. However, as popular as a record like “Ocean Eyes” is, she doesn’t seem to take it as seriously as her fanbase does.
In a 2024 interview with Stephen Colbert, Billie Eilish opened up about her album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. By that point, she’d been around for a while. Currently, she’s circling around a decade in the music industry, in the spotlight since early puberty. Consequently, Colbert wanted to know how it felt to release her album as compared to her days when she released her first big hit, “Ocean Eyes.” Ultimately, Eilish dismisses the comparison, emphasizing that her work as an adult holds significantly more weight.
“‘Ocean Eyes’ was not even serious. I was 13, and we had a free download link on Soundcloud,” Billie Eilish said when Colbert interjected about how people went on to download that link. “They absolutely did. It had 1,000 plays in like a week, and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. So there was no reality to it. Now, it’s like, everyone’s going to… I don’t know, it’s scary, Stephen!”
Billie Eilish Doesn’t Take Big Hit “Ocean Eyes” Seriously
For what it’s worth, Billie Eilish has remained pretty consistent on this point for years. Even when it was freshly viral, she shrugged to Interview Magazine that it’s the work of a 13-year-old doing an assignment. “It was weird, because we didn’t plan for it to do anything really. The reason we put it out when we did was that the whole song was meant to be for my dance teacher, because he wanted to use it for a dance. That’s why the production is dance-esque, contemporary, and lyrical,” Billie Eilish explained at the time.
“And then it was done, and we were going to wait till Friday to put it out, and thought, ‘Screw it. Let’s just put it out now.’ So we did, and it hit 1,000 the next day. My brother and I were like, ‘We made it! 1,000—we’re it. That’s our whole career. We’re done,’” Eilish added.
At 15 years old, Billie Eilish found it kind of strange to impact people so viscerally at the time. But she also says that that’s the big goal when she creates anything. “It’s a little odd, because it was one song that they heard, and then it’s like, ‘This changed my life!’ And that’s insane. This thing that meant a lot to me can mean something to you; that’s always what I thought was really cool, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do more of. I want to touch people in the way that it touches me, and have somebody feel a certain way that they didn’t know they felt,” Billie Eilish concluded.
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