Music is such a prevalent force in our daily lives and culture. When we want to listen to popular music, we typically will look at what ends up at the top of the charts and what we always hear on the radio for our confirmations of the norm of the culture. That is a very fancy and over-the-top way of saying that we look to the most popular and most successful material for new music to listen to. We came across a unique, yet not unheard of, situation back in March of 2019. During this time, there was an artist who had been coming into her own in the indie/alternative scene that hadn’t been receiving widespread coverage. Her work is a creation that blends the concoction of music that not only has an undeniable beautiful texture but also has the power and reach to influence tens of thousands of songwriters. This artist is none other than Billie Eilish, who, with her first album, “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?” (or WWAFAWDWG for short), has pulled this off while also being a Grammy award-winning artist and a Billboard Top 100 artist on top of all the other amazing recognitions and awards she has received for this album, along with of course FINNEAS, her brother and producer. This album to be honest is enough to write her name along with the other great female artists of the past two decades in the pop industry. But what sets this album apart, in my opinion, comes from the fact that the album did all of this without being an actual mainstream pop album. Gone are the requirements that your vocals be heavily processed and over-produced to top the charts. We now have definite proof that artistry can be recognized beyond processing and intense production efforts. Billie Eilish and FINNEAS prove once and for all that if you have the vision, you can succeed with the proper tools at your disposal.
When it comes to the actual music in this album, you may have the listeners who only listen to tracks like ‘bad guy’ and ‘you should see me in a crown’ and go “Yeah Billie Eilish is fuckin’ dope man. I love her music.” And, I mean, those people aren’t WRONG… but there are always more layers beyond the singles in an album. The deep tracks, or tracks that were created and only released on the album they came on, come to mind first and foremost to me. Sure, you can listen to ‘bad guy’ and catch a vibe with the bounce in the 808s and drums, but if you can’t also listen to ‘my strange addiction’ and also find something to enjoy, then I just don’t think you’re enjoying this album to the fullest extent. One thing that I’m always looking into when listening to this album that isn’t just the production is Billie’s lyrics. In ‘bad guy’, for example, the main idea for Billie’s lyrics is that she’s supposed to be imitating and pretending that she’s fake, or that she makes up a lot of B.S about her personality. It honestly gives a great sense of how conscious she is about society today and how aware she is of people that can only have those fake personalities. We get a complete 180° turnaround in ‘my strange addiction’. On that track, she’s telling us how much she loves the NBC comedy show ‘The Office’, which is evident in the abundant usage of audio excerpts that are sampled directly from the show. It’s a completely cathartic exercise for Billie because she’s laying it out in the open that her love for ‘The Office’ is so immense that she has to write a song about it. These contrasting ideas for me create the sense that Billie can show these sides of wanting to prove a point and getting a message across while also being able to just talk about something she loves. This sort of theme is constant throughout the entire album, and it’s the kind of hook or grabbing point that gets me to listen to it every time.
Another thing to note about this album is the level of production that went into every song. There are songs like ‘bad guy’ that Billie and FINNEAS mentioned in a Rolling Stone video that took an obscenely long amount of time to make1. Not only did it take that long to create that particular song, the level of detail, and production that they underwent for this one song is truly something to behold. I have been really into FINNEAS and his work as a producer ever since I had heard of Billie Eilish, so to hear him talk about the process of this song, as a producer is something cool and unique to hear about from artists right now. With the current situation of COVID-19, there’s just not a lot of opportunities to get with an artist in a recording studio to make music, so to find a creative and talented mind like FINNEAS talk through his ideas is something I have been personally craving as of late. But even without that kind of information out there, you can tell that there’s a tangible quantity of effort and polish that they put into every single song that gets put on to this album. For example, many people who have interviewed FINNEAS regarding his sound choices on the album have discussed the choices made in ‘bad guy’ and ‘bury a friend’ as the biggest and best decisions that FINNEAS made, sonically speaking. I think that while those choices are all amazing and creatively brilliant, there are other examples of creative sound design in the album that interviewers forgot to cover. There are many simple effects and sounds that FINNEAS includes that don’t always seem like they inherently add a creative element to the song, but in retrospect, these choices are what give these songs a lasting effect from a sonic perspective.
One thing that I love is the fact that FINNEAS knows how to utilize panning and crowd noises in ‘wish you were gay’ to create a dynamic texture that enhances the message of the song. Panning refers to the practice of taking an audio signal and placing it in a different area of a stereo listening field. I believe that panning is important, yet a criminally underrated tool that modern audio production has granted us. The way FINNEAS then utilizes panning in ‘wish you were gay’ is by taking things like guitar parts, percussion noises, or extra vocal harmonies and placing them in different areas of the stereo image. Usually, the default idea in production is to place things all the way to the left or all the way to the right, but an interesting exercise comes up when you place things in between either of the two directions. These choices, which by their nature are seemingly simple, offer a wide variety of different outcomes, and I think that the way FINNEAS thought through each decision regarding panning is extremely well-executed and unique. I think the crowd noises are another thing that is simple, yet effective. All it is is an extra sound that FINNEAS put in as another layer to the story, but that simple choice alters the way you think of the song. Not only is it someone breaking up with another person, but there’s an ironic element to the story because the crowd noises are something you wouldn’t associate with this type of story. FINNEAS utilizes this level of creative design so effortlessly and intuitively throughout the production of the album. His work on this record inspires me to experiment with various methods of simplistic production choices to create more cohesive and nuanced ideas in my music.
From the percussion and extra effects in ‘bad guy’, panning and extra sounds in ‘wish you were gay’, to the use of sampling in ‘my strange addiction’, and even the quiet and solemn moments of intimacy in ‘listen before i go’ and ‘i love you’, there’s something in this album for anyone who wants to get ideas from either a songwriting standpoint or production standpoint to go wild and study for years and years after this review shows up.
With the different angles of creativity and artistry that this album gives, it would make sense to categorize this album into a class all on its own. Some people want to immortalize it in music history as the big moment for one of the most influential artists of the 2010s, and then there’s the salty older generation that doesn’t understand the sound design wave of the current landscape of music. Those same people also cannot deny that Billie has created something that will impact pop music for the next few years at the very least. And I think the reason for that happening is because we have something rare happening. We have a ‘pop’ artist that doesn’t want to follow any traditional norms of pop music and pop production. She wants to stick with her sound and isn’t going to let a label inhibit her ideas. Her creativity, as long as she and FINNEAS can hold on to the ownership of their musical identity, won’t be stopped by label executives that want to push her in a different creative direction to make the most amount of profits. That’s where this album comes in. It is showing the beauty of an unfiltered and unshackled creative voice being able to express freely. This is shown by having ‘bad guy’, one song that is produced very intricately and has a clear theme of rejecting fake personalities and ‘my strange addiction’, a clear selfish love-letter to this cult classic tv show that anyone with a Netflix account knows and quotes from all the time. That’s the beauty of this album. We’re essentially getting the final product of what Billie wanted to create for her sound. An unapologetic and unfiltered voice. The key difference, in my eyes, between this album and many other projects and songs that are topping pop charts right now, is that it’s more of an unfiltered product and an authentic sound that doesn’t occur as often as it used to.
There’s currently an overabundance of pop that just sounds like a stale piece of bread. Yeah, you might appreciate the work that went into it, but at the end of the day, it’s still a cheesy pop song that you’re going to forget in about a year or so. With some songs, that same idea occurs even faster, like a few months. What’s going to keep this album, and Billie Eilish’s sound alive in my opinion is a steadfast approach centered around this idea of always creating music that she wants her fans to hear, and never giving in to pressure to send a message that she won’t agree with. I think that her current track record of being largely independent, with a more recent signing with a subsidiary of Interscope Records, is going to be key in her fight for being at the top while also being a free speaking artist. The battle is intense and difficult, but I believe it will be a victory for her, even though right now the future is not set yet in music. What I do know is that with this album, Billie Eilish has solidified her sound and has set the bar for her career in terms of being an artist with a true voice.
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