Nothing Like Her

Billie Eilish was adored by millions before she fully understood who she was. Now, as she sets out on tour without her family for the first time, she is finally getting to know herself.

- By Alessandra Codinha . Photographed by Mikael Jansson

It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says.

She’s telling this story, about the music video that wasn’t, a few days after she came to that particular realization. We are sitting in the cool dark of her rehearsal space, curled up on a couch with her gray rescue pit bull, Shark, gently snoring between us. She is dressed in the kind of figure obscuring oversized streetwear she’s favored (with certain gala and editorial exceptions) since she first became famous: wide khaki cargo shorts, black and white FTP high-tops, a well-loved orange Air Jordan tee. It’s as good an outfit as any for writing the next page of the rest of your life.

Eilish has been directing her own music videos for the past five years. But in this case, faced with the not-quite working video, she decided to start over and hand the reins to someone else: Aidan Zamiri, a friend who also directed the video for the Eilish-featuring remix of Charli XCX’s “Guess.” And she found she enjoyed ceding control. “I’ve kind of proven myself as a director,” she shrugs. It ’s a stance that embodies where Eilish is in 2024: 22 years old and nine Grammys into the kind of annually escalating superstardom most artists could only dream of. She is now learning how she wants to be in the world, and it feels a little like a moment—like she’s graduated, or just grew up.