Billie Eilish’s dad is a handy guy to have around.
The California pop sensation and her collaborator/brother Finneas were guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where the pair pointed out their family’s considerable talents extend beyond music.
While on tour, O’Connell senior gets to work behind the scenes. At the start, he was driving the van. Now, “he does set carpentry on tour,” Eilish says, building anything from staircases to stages. “He won’t tell anyone on the crew his full name crew because he doesn’t want anybody on the tour to know that he’s related to me,” the “Bad Guy” singer reckons. Dad doesn’t want to hear the word “nepotism” uttered in his presence. “He doesn’t want any special treatment at all,” she explains. And does Mom get her hands dirty? Not really. She stays with Billie.
The siblings also gave the late-night host a glimpse into their fights, over music or otherwise.
“When we get into something” – a row, that is – “we can like blow up at each other, we can have arguments or whatever,” Eilish explains in the video, which dropped overnight. “We honestly don’t as much as we did when we were children.”
On a musical disagreement, they have their battles. One has to “die on the hill,” Finneas recounts, or someone typically comes around.
Also, Billie talked songwriting (it helps to get “a prompt, a story to write about”); their latest single, “What Was I Made For” from the Barbie movie, which went to No. 1 in the U.K. and Australia, and has clocked 600 million streams (“It’s pretty nuts. That’s a lot of listens”); and she managed to poke fun at her biggest hit. “Objectively ‘Bad Guy’ is the stupidest song in the world,” she says, immediately clarifying “but it’s really good.” The song, a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019, is “supposed to be goofy.” It’s an act of “trolling,” she quips.
In her young, phenomenally successful career, Eilish has released two albums (2019’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and 2021’s Happier Than Ever) for two No. 1s on the Billboard 200 chart (each logging three weeks at the summit). Sister and brother are making progress on the third. “We’ve been filming the whole creation of the next album we’re working on,” she says.
Last month, Eilish took a similar line in an interview with the The Cookout, declaring “there is lots of music coming.”
Watch the Kimmel interview below.
