Billie Eilish has had a meteoric rise to fame, becoming one of the most famous artists on the planet. She has a very distinctive and divisive voice but there is no doubt she has had a huge impact on the music industry with it. What is it about her that connects with so many people? What makes Billie Eilish Great?
Technique
Tone
Billie is known for her distinctively quiet breathy tone but has that always been the way? I was quite surprised when researching this, she doesn’t use as much of that breathy tone on that first single Ocean Eyes.
Whereas in a live performance, later on, it sounds like this.
The first thing to bear in mind is that she was only 13 when she realised this single! But it shows that her trademark tone is a choice. It’s hardly surprising that she hadn’t fully embodied her vocal style at age 13 but you can hear the fingerprints of what was coming. She could have gone either way with the vocals. In this clip of her singing Alicia Keys age 12, you can hear how she could have gone towards a more standard contemporary sound. Perhaps, her voice could have ended up similar to Alicias!
But with time she has lent more and more into her vocal idiosyncrasies, giving her voice an authentic, fragile, and unique sound. Billie's breathy tone has been a choice or at least an amplification of a natural vocal quality rather than something her voice just does, meaning that when she needs a fuller tone like in No Time To Die she can.
She has flipped the idea of what a “good” singer is, on it’s head and although there have been singers in the past with this tone none have been quite as detailed and creative in their delivery.
But what causes a breathy tone and how can we sing like that? Singing with a breathy tone is controversial in the vocal coach world because it is an inefficient way of singing. You have to put in a lot of breath to get a small amount of sound and it can be pretty harsh on some people's voices. Sound is created when air from the lung moves through two bands of tissue in your throat called the vocal cords. When making a full tone they close fully and the air puffs through the middle. It sounds like this… A breathy tone happens when you don’t put your vocal cords together fully, letting more air from the lungs leak through. It sounds like this… It is the force of this air that can cause vocal damage over the long term for some people. However, if you can do this without tension and without forcing out too much air, are warming up and exercising your voice with cord closure, and are giving your voice recovery time after singing you should be fine.
From what I see Billie seems to have a good group of people around her and I am very hopeful that she is looking after her vocal health. It is interesting to note that in her more recent performances, she has gone back to singing with more vocal cord closure, and although she does use that breathy texture she is a little more sparing with it. This could be because she wants to protect her voice or maybe she is just adapting to the emotional need of each song, making them less fragile and more self-assured. Either way, it shows that Billie will keep on adapting, changing, and creating, following the needs of her voice, her fans, and her songs. It will be interesting to see how each of the areas I am going to talk about has changed in a few years.
Range & Registers
Billie uses a relatively small range. She has a great resonance of her lower range when she wants it, dipping down to an E3 with a relaxed and easy technique.
I am sure she has more upper range than she uses although does go up to a G5 in her song Copycat.
It’s very difficult to get much higher than she does without full cord closure and her technique contributes to that thinner sound on her high notes. However, showy high notes aren’t important in her vocal style and it fits with the rest of her vocals. But who knows, it wouldn’t surprise me if one day she suddenly started using this range if she felt like the emotion of a song required it. I think she has many textures in her voice that maybe she hasn’t explored or shown us yet and I think she is so adaptable anything could be possible with what she brings to the table next. She has made a very bold choice to lean towards expression in her unique way and chooses to sing in ways that are less technically efficient to fulfil her emotional delivery. She is not about showing off but expressing something very real and human.
Billie has control over her registers, sometimes keeping a smooth transition between head and chest voice by slowly lightening it off, and at others playing with the textures created when contrasting a slightly fuller chest voice with a light airy head voice. You can hear these two techniques in the two verses of My Future, pay close attention to the words ‘here’ and ‘better’
She can use a fuller tone as she gets higher in the range and even has a heavy mix that she uses very sparingly and sometimes with a little tension.
But because she uses this texture so sparingly that tension shouldn’t cause many issues and when she gets the belt spot on, it has an even greater effect than it would with other singers as it contrasts so much with the rest of her singing. She favours bringing her head voice lower than most contemporary singers, adding to that light falsetto sound.
Further Technique
Billie is so controlled and despite her reputation for throwing away technique does use the standard technique but only when it suits the emotion of the song or if she feels she needs it. She can have good breath support but often drops it and allows extra air to leak through or forces the breath a little. Sometimes she doesn’t have enough breath which contributes to a squeezed sound sometimes. However, I think this is purposeful. For those of you that are unsure, what breath support is - good breath support is a nice relaxed in-breath and then slowly letting the air out at the perfect rate to allow the vocal cords to vibrate efficiently.
When learning technique there are things you need, you want to be able to pitch well and sing rhythm well but beyond that stylistically, in my opinion, it is up to you and what you want to express. If you want to sing opera, you need brilliant breath support to create that sound, but if you want to sing emotionally and conversationally you need to be able to embody how we sound in emotional situations in day to day life. I am pretty sure that when I am upset or angry my breath support is not on point. Having said that, I think the key is to know how to do at least a basic amount of standard technique so if you want a big high note or long phrases or a balanced tone, you can do that, but don’t be afraid to let that go sometimes.
Billie is very good with pitch, even when she drops her breath support. For most singers, when you drop that, your pitch can wander. Partially I think this is down to her meticulous nature in regards to her music. When recording she will record until it’s perfect and when your body sings something enough, with that much detail, those details become muscle memory. I usually talk about vowels in this section but she doesn’t use them to aid her technique that much and again this is a place where she favours expression so I’ll get to that in the Emotional Expression section.
Emotional Expression
Billie Eilish expresses emotion in the most subtle stark way. So I’ve picked out some vocal technique that helps. Let’s start with vowels and consonants.
Vowels & Consonants
Her use of consonants is so nuanced. Due to her quiet vocal style and the production by her brother Finneas her vocal style has to be incredibly detailed as you can hear everything. I watched an interview with her and her brother on Rolling Stone Youtube, on how they made ‘Bad Guy’ and Billie recorded the vocals over and over until she got the perfect take. Just because the sound is small doesn’t mean it is easy and the detailing that goes into each song is beyond anything I have heard before.
Because of the use of close-up highly amplified and compressed microphones, you can hear every detail and therefore she uses quite soft consonants keeping her tongue really relaxed. She often favours a dental consonant where you use the flat of the tongue rather than the blade to produce the sound and sometimes even changing the consonants completely. With the production, you can hear every tiny mouth sound, and she uses these intentionally, whether it is a breath or a mouth slap. But, by softening the consonants you avoid pops in the microphone and don’t lose the fluid nature of her singing. Let’s listen to a clip of her singing ‘idontwannabeyouanymore’. Head straight to the chorus.
You can hear on the word ‘teardrops’ the t is dental, she drops the ‘r’ and uses a soft ‘p’. The c’ on “could’ is quite far forward and crisp and then on ‘bottled’ she almost makes the ‘l’ a ‘w’. ‘There’ is almost a ‘dere’. Then my favourite, she drops the ‘l’ on pools to make ‘poo’. And ‘mod’oo’s instead of models. Normally the consonants get in the way of smooth singing so by dropping them and changing them to vowels she maintains a smooth sound. Billie embodies a modern style of singing that has been dubbed ‘cursive‘ singing as if each letter is joined.
Her vowels change again depending on the emotional context, sometimes opening up and singing on the vowel, especially when she wants to get up to those higher notes, and sometimes closing and singing on the consonants or squeezing the vowel to make it sound more intense or vulnerable. You can hear both these techniques on this clip as she sings an open vowel on ‘Falling for’ and closes it on ‘lie’.
Again she mixes and matches between using a standard technique to achieve notes and anything else that will achieve the emotion, style, and storytelling. And sometimes she just does unusual things that sound cool. Listen to the vowel on this clip from My Future. On the words 'know myself’ instead of on an ‘eh’ she for myself she uses an ‘oo’.
Vocal Fry
Billie uses a more really interesting texture called Vocal Fry. This both echoes some of the really genius distorted production tools used by Finneas and is used as a great emotional tool. Vocal fry sounds like this. You can hear it a lot in ‘when the party’s over’
Vocal Fry happens when you are using a relatively small amount of air through really slack vocal cords and held together quite tightly. It means that rather than vocal cords vibrating in an even way like they do when you sing without any effects or distortion, air pops through in little irregular bubbles resulting in the creaking popping sound. The use of fry, breathy tone and full tone becomes a subtle yet effective vocal texture palette that she switches between to create her emotional picture. Interestingly, how she uses breath in vocal fry is pretty opposite from what she is physically doing in her breathy tone so it’s quite impressive how quickly she can switch between the two. You can hear those quick switches on ‘Bad Guy’
Breath
Billie makes the breath almost an equal part of the vocal textures as the singing. This is down to Finneas production, modern technology in mics and compression, as well her style. It is something that has been long used in cinematic sound design. In Hans Zimmer's score for Interstellar, he asked the 60 person choir not only to sing but recorded them breathing collectively. He wanted "to hear the exhalation of 60 people as if the wind flows through the dunes in the Sahara." To me, breath can express so much, whether it is a sigh or a quick sudden excited breath or even where it is silent.
The production in this is just gorgeous and so creative. The idea of hearing the breath is something that has come up a lot as well in modern art forms like ASMR and podcasting. Hearing the breath clearly is an intimate experience and makes you feel closer to the singer as if they are speaking into your ear. Taking these ideas and putting them into music is a massive part of the genius of her sound. I can’t think of any singer that performs their music to us so closely and intimately before and it is very difficult to replicate live. I have never been to any of her live shows so I am not sure how well it translates but in each track the combination of ambient synths and sounds and her voice and breath is captivating.
Dynamics, Phrasing & Articulation
Billies musically is phenomenal. She would not be able to speak to us so directly if she did not have this sense of phrasing and dynamics. She adapts to each song, generally favours a smoother more legato line rather than short and rhythmic and percussive but this works well with the style. She loves a slide where instead of hitting each note cleanly moves through all the possible frequencies in between each note. Her phrasing has constant movement. Dynamically she keeps within a fairly small and quiet range of volume but makes up for any lack of the louder dynamic range by masterfully using textures including a lovely relaxed vibrato.
She often does an interesting dynamic which is quite different to what most people would do. Instead of having a louder higher note and backing off at the end of a phrase, perhaps using some breath and keeping the vowel open. She often starts a higher note in a breathy place, slides down a third then lands the note in a fuller full cord closure slightly closed and squeezed and a pushed vibrato. It's a really intense sound and a real Billie Eilishism.
Production & Songwriting
Of course, I cannot skim past the genius production on her tracks. Their songwriting is catchy, dark and takes us to places we don’t usually explore in pop music. The production is subtle and considered, yet with bold textural choices used in just the right amount in the right places to evoke the world in which each song belongs. Again it has an ASMR feel, with crisp sounds, which are among the most common ASMR triggers, being a main part of the production. The clean base and minimal percussion that form the skeleton of her beats leave plenty of space for her unusual sounds and samples. For example ‘Bad Guy’ has very soft amplified finger snaps, claps and tiny scratching turning cog (All ASMR sounds) where you'd usually have a snare drum..
And this clarity of production happens in her vocals. Because you catch all these tiny sounds it is incredibly immersive. He also uses a cool trick that is also used in ASMR and binaural beats - stereo sound. Billie's vocals move between different ears. If you wear headphones you can hear that back and forth movement in Xanny.
Or when there are multiple layers of her voice he will have different tracks playing in different ears. It makes it sound three dimensional like you are surrounded by and immersed in Billie’s voice
Although he has produced for other artists there really is something special you get when they work together. For most singers, you will go to the studio and work with a producer for the allotted amount of time the record label will pay for. The work between the two of them does not feel rushed but each note is intentional. It is the sort of work that you would only do for someone you love and I think you can hear that love in its meticulous execution. Of course, that love is shown very clearly in ‘everything i ever wanted’ in which the music video begins with.
finneas is my brother and best friend. No matter the circumstance, we always have and always will be there for each other
And sometimes it just seems like they are having the best time together making some really fun music.
Social Context
I’ve talked about technically what I think makes Billie Eilish great but to me, no artist is truly great unless they and their music are doing something for the world and Billie Eilish certainly is. She has an activist spirit that runs through the lyrics of her songs and although her voice is quiet but her words are outspoken, becoming an icon for young people around the world. Tackling climate change in ‘all the good girls go to hell’, sexism in ‘your power’, mental health in ‘lovely’ and promoting self-love in ‘my future’. Outside her music she is outspoken regarding all of these topics as well as animal rights. Her music does not shy away from the dark side of human nature but explores where we should draw the line between darkness and light. It’s fascinating to watch her learn lessons about life herself and express them through her music, giving a voice to the people who are going through the same things and providing a new perspective to people who aren’t. This ability to communicate human truths is made even starker by the close-up production and vocal style. She is an intimate immersive voice in a technological pandemic world that is more and more lacking in intimacy. Speaking directly into the listeners’ ears, making you lean in and listen even more intently. From what I have seen she is providing a great moral compass for young and old people alike and it is wonderful to see an artist that underpins each song, fashion choice and social media post with the aim to make the world a little bit of a better place.
