Billie Eilish - When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

March 29, 2019 - Darkroom/Interscope Records

If life is a cabaret, youth is a shadow play. Light and dark are separated by sharp edges in dramatic high definition, and you discover that it’s effortless to run your hand through both extremes.  

With her new debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Billie Eilish has entered stage right with the spotlight drawn close to her, casting a shadow as tall as a nightmare. Much of the album was created and recorded by Billie and her brother Finneas O’Connell in the family room of their childhood home in LA. But its curated collection of musical influence, its syntax, and its production value present an image that is larger than the lives of two siblings on a couch. Combine that low-fi magic trick (how did they do it!?) with the facts that Billie is only seventeen years old and Finneas is only twenty-one, and an underdog story is born for the American public. We will be talking about this phenomenon for a long time, and it’s as supernatural as Billie’s brand. 

It took me some time to get past the melodrama of this album. There are times from my adolescence I don’t care to relive, and the roller coaster of emotions on When We Fall Asleep is over-the-top vivid like a teenage wasteland. The recurring themes on the tracks are fundamental extremes in high contrast—unrequited love, from the receiving side and the giving side; loss of self, of life, of friends; death by mistake versus death on purpose. It’s dangerous subject matter. Sometimes the poetry is so smart it’s cheesy, like the biblical allegory in ‘all the good girls go to hell.’ And the majority of the tracks (all but the most tragic ballads) feature a punchy, rattling bass as a highly-effective emotive device. At its peak, in the anthemic ‘you should see me in a crown,’ it knocks you off your chair. Like that bass, everything is heavy with meaning when we are young because we are experiencing all of it for the first time. That existential angst was exhausting then, and it’s exhausting still now that I am older. Though, with time, it has become a familiar friendly demon. Whereas I’ve accepted the chain and am dragging my boulder up the mountain, Billie Eilish is punching her boulder and trying to shatter it. I shake my head at that folly as I work past it (even though sometimes I punch my boulder too). 

I am not her target audience. To grow up in this time, with a deep, diverse musical foundation that’s only a few clicks and milliseconds away, to hold the expanse of that expressive power in your hands during formative creative years, and to have the empowerment to stitch it all together into something completely new, are actions that define the greatest edge Billie and Finneas have demonstrated. They are a sheer force of nature, and they are so casual about it. The samples of their voices playfully talking and laughing together through the tracks is intimate and raw, and it gives the listener a feeling that they’ve drawn back the green curtain and there actually is a wizard there. She’s off-duty, not granting wishes, just making magic for magic’s sake, for the joy of the activity. Her Invisalign retainer is sitting sloppily on the table in a puddle of drool.

Despite the youthful fire and naivety of the subject matter, the gothic theater of this album is extremely self-aware. What is it like to experience explosive emotions and a predetermined mass of conflicting impulses while simultaneously observing yourself objectively? The lyrics and the compositional structure of the tracks are sharp, and once you peel back the stage effects, the experimentation is highly sophisticated. I think, intellectually, the poetry and the musicality could stand alone individually. I also think they are both better together.  

Billie sings at the same distance from the microphone on all fourteen tracks. Her voice doesn’t express a wide dynamic range by itself. In fact, it croons like a whispered chant, constant and unfaltering, while the instrumental tempest swells around her. Like a Baroque painting, Billie’s voice is the umber underpainting that sets the inky foundation, and Finneas’ production strategies pull the emotional space forward from the shadows and into the listener’s space, uncomfortably close. The result is surreal because it subverts our expectations. Usually, the most human element in a song is the voice of an actual human. But Billie’s voice is distant and ethereal, an other. We are the most human thing about the experience. Listening to When We Fall Asleep is catching a glimpse of a deity through a window that was intentionally left ajar. We can’t look away. ☔

WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, an album by Billie Eilish on Spotify