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Billie Eilish · S1 E3
The Dancer
Years of dance training, the injury at 13 that ended one career and started another
A dance studio in Los Angeles, 2014. Thirteen-year-old Billie Eilish feels something give in her hip during a routine, and the dance career she's been building since she was eight years old ends with a growth plate injury.
"bury a friend" (Billie Eilish, 2019). Watch how Billie moves in this video: the contortions, the physical control, the way she uses her body like a prop in a horror film. That's not acting. That's five years of dance training repurposed into something darker and stranger.
The Dancer
From age eight, Billie trains seriously as a dancer: contemporary, hip-hop, multiple sessions a week, recitals across Los Angeles. She also joins the Los Angeles Children's Chorus around the same age, learning to harmonize before she can write a song. But dance is the real dream, the thing she pours everything into.
Sources
Rolling Stone
Apple TV+ documentary
Vanity Fair
“I was a dancer. That was my whole life. When I couldn't do that anymore, I needed something else.”
— Billie Eilish, Rolling Stone, 2019
TAP TO REVEAL: What exactly happened to end Billie's dance career?
bury a friend, Billie Eilish (2019)
Finneas built this track from the question "what do the monsters under your bed think of you?" and constructed a sonic nightmare around it. The production uses distorted samples, processed vocals, and sub-bass you feel in your chest more than hear through speakers. Watch any live performance and you'll see a dancer's precision in every movement Billie makes on stage. The injury took away the career but it couldn't take away five years of training.
Sources
Pitchfork
NME
Billboard
The Dancer's Resume
lovely, Billie Eilish & Khalid
Released in 2018 for the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack. The song is about feeling trapped, locked inside something you can't escape. For a 13-year-old dancer told she can never dance again, the glass box in this video isn't a metaphor. It's a diagnosis.
lovely, Billie Eilish & Khalid (2018)
"Isn't it lovely, all alone?" The lyrics trace the feeling of being stuck inside your own body with nowhere to go. Written about depression, but listen again knowing it came from a girl who just lost the only thing she'd ever trained for.
What type of injury ended Billie Eilish's dance career at age 13?
Dance is gone, but Billie still has her brother's bedroom and a microphone. Next: she steps behind the mic, Finneas hits record, and a 13-year-old discovers that the voice she's been training in children's chorus can do things nobody expected.
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