Being the youngest musician to take home a Grammy in all major categories should give anyone a healthy boost of confidence, but despite her career success, Billie Eilish still has some self-doubt. Awards and critical acclaim aside, Eilish still doesn’t think of herself “as a singer.”
Eilish expanded on her thought process in a recent interview with UK grime rapper Stormzy for i-D magazine. Eilish has been singing ever since she was a child, and chokes up the fact she doesn’t consider herself a singer to “imposter syndrome”:
“I loved singing, too. Since I was a little kid, I was singing all day. My parents were like, ‘Shuutttt uppppp!’ But still to this day I don’t really think of myself as a singer. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s impostor syndrome? When I was a kid my favorite thing to do was sing, but I’d never have told you that. I thought of all the other kids who were singing as singers, but never myself. I was just like, I like to sing! It’s not like a thing. It’s just something I love to do.
Eilish continued to describe how her songwriting career took off by accident. “My mom wrote songs, and she taught me and my brother to write songs, and we’d write by ourselves, and then one day we just started writing songs together,” she said. “That was when I was 13, and that’s when we did ‘Ocean Eyes.’ We put it on SoundCloud. I wasn’t trying to be an artist. It was a fun thing me and my brother did, and it just grew and grew and grew… And then I began, more and more, to feel more like me. I feel more like myself now than I ever did before. I never thought anyone would give two sh*ts.”
Read Eilish’s full interview with Stormzy for i-D here.
