Billie Eilish says that people encouraged her to smile more and sing less moody tracks early in her music career.
"I didn't realize that I was saying and touching on aspects in life that were deeper than the average song," the 17-year-old breakout star said during an interview with Variety. "I didn't try to do that — I just did it."
Eilish, known for genre-bending tracks that have come to be known as "dark pop," went on to say that years ago, people told her to project a more positive and uplifting image.
"When I was starting out, one of the only things I heard was that the music was too dark, too sad, too depressing, that it wasn't happy enough," she said. "There was this period where all I was hearing was 'Smile! Talk about how much you love yourself!' — and I was literally at a time when I didn't love myself."
Eilish went on to say that she's grown since, "but then, I was a little 14-year-old. I didn't know anything about self-love or self-care. All I knew was the stuff that I knew, and a lot of it was bad and negative."
"That's what I wanted to write about, and that's why people relate to it," she added. "I mean, even the Beatles have songs that are just like, 'I'm miserable!'"
Eilish's first big hit was "Ocean Eyes," which was written and produced by older brother Finneas O'Connell, and released on SoundCloud in 2015. The song was later included on Eilish's first EP titled "Don't Smile at Me," which came out two years later. The accompanying music showed Eilish singing at the camera while surrounded by dreamy, purple lighting.
In 2019, Eilish released her debut album called "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" In April, she made history as the first artist born in the 2000s to have a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart. She also made her "Saturday Night Live" debut with a trippy, gravity-defying performance, embarked on a tour, and became the youngest artist to be nominated in all of the Grammy's top categories for the 2020 awards show.
The pop star's unique sound and whisper-like vocals make her stand out from her peers in the music industry, and her music videos feature creepy and sometimes gruesome visuals.
The video for "Bad Guy" showed Eilish smearing blood on her face and dancing around wildly while the video for "Bury a Friend" had horror-like visuals. Her video for "When the Party's Over" showed the artist drinking a black liquid, which later dripped out of her eyes like tears.
Meanwhile, Eilish's music video for "All the Good Girls Go to Hell," which has 88 million views on YouTube, opened with the singer being injected in her back with multiple syringes before a pair of black wings burst out.
