When Billie Eilish first came to international attention, she was an absolute phenomenon. That can be tough for anybody to deal with, especially a teenager. Now, though, Eilish says some words from John Mayer helped her reconsider her situation.
In a new Billboard interview, Eilish was asked what having a “long and healthy career” looks like to her and she answered:
“It’s really a real thing that I think about a lot. […] It’s really hard to maintain a timeless kind of career, and the longer I exist as Billie Eilish, I’m more and more aware of like, ‘Let’s look at this through a different lens.’ Because when I was ‘hot’ or whatever, when you have that first moment of, ‘Boom, everybody’s looking at you,’ […] it feels like that will literally never go away, in all the bad ways and all the good ways. It was actually John Mayer who said something to Finneas that made me think about it.”
Eilish then asked Finneas what Mayer said and Finneas started, “We were at an airport in Wisconsin in the summer of 2019, and it was really crazy, like all of the TSA agents were filming Billie, it was like a zoo.”
Eilish interjected, “Everywhere we went, I mean, it was a nightmare.” Finneas continued, “I was like, ‘Everything is just crazy right now.’ And John was like, ‘Ah, Billie’s white hot.’ He was like, ‘It’s like seeing an animal on safari.’”
Eilish added, “And it’s scary. It feels like it’s never going to end because when you’re new, that is like nothing else. But it changes. It doesn’t last for a really long time.”
Finneas added, “Which is good,” to which Eilish replied, “Which is very, very good.”
Read the full interview here.