Billie Eilish battled her own demons to find chart success

Art is therapy for singer of the moment Billie Eilish, who learnt the hard way that being true to herself is the best way to be.

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Art is therapy for singer of the moment Billie Eilish, who learnt the hard way that being true to herself is the best way to be.

Honesty it is paying off for the American teen singer who is arguably the biggest star in the music world right now.

“I have just always been someone that doesn’t feel comfortable not being myself,” Eilish told Confidential.

Billie Eilish performing at Outdoor Theatre during the 2019 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival in Indio, California.

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“There were times in my life where I was just so completely not confident in who I was. The only reason is that I wasn’t who I actually was, I was trying to be something else because I thought that was what people would care about. Nobody’s opinion is going to change the way that you feel about yourself unless you think it and unless you feel it. It is kind of difficult to realise it is up to you but it is. That shouldn’t make you feel bad. It should make you feel better.”

Seventeen-year-old Eilish spoke to The Daily Telegraph from Adelaide ahead of headlining the Groovin The Moo festival there yesterday.

The festival heads to Maitland today and Canberra tomorrow with Eilish set to play a sell out solo show at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on Tuesday night.

The tour comes after Eilish spent weeks at the top of the ARIA charts with her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and single Bad Guy.

Billie Eilish at the Coachella Music & Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club.

She’s also topped the charts back home in the US and across the globe, from Greece to Holland, Finland and Norway.

“It is shocking and amazing to me,” she said of the chart success. “It is so insane. Shit is insane right now, I don’t know what is going on. I have kinda got to slap myself in the face every two seconds.”

Eilish, who performed at Coachella earlier this month, played Auckland’s Spark Arena on Wednesday night and said the experience brought her to tears.

“I grew up going to as many concerts as I could go to and standing as close as I could, that was my happy place,” she explained. “It was the most beautiful feeling but to stand on the stage and look out at like 10,000 people just there to see you, it is the most unbelievable feeling. I stood there and cried like four different times during the show. I just couldn’t believe it. It is really an indescribable feeling, there is nothing like it in the whole world.”

Eilish’s lyrics are unapologetically raw.

American singer/songwriter Billie Eilish.

Having battled her own demons — depression, anxiety and suffering from Tourette syndrome — she shares those stories with her fans. Some though have raised concerns that her music might be fuelling anxiety in impressionable fans.

“That is so horribly inaccurate because if you took time to actually talk to your child instead of reading articles about why your child is depressed, maybe listen to them and hear that the thing helping them through it is art and music like mine,” she said. “It is a therapy, music is a therapy to everyone and whatever they are listening to is their therapy.

“It is less of a ‘this is why I am upset and here, let me bring you down with me’. That is not at all what this is. This is something that I’ve dealt with my whole life and I am making art about it. I am making it into art instead of just letting it haunt me for my whole life and actually turning it into something beautiful and I’m in it too. Just as much as you’re hurting, I’m hurting. It is like, ‘here, let me hold you with my music’ because I can’t hold 20 million people but I can give them my music.”

Originally published as Billie Eilish battled her own demons to find chart success