Billie Eilish has revealed that she “lost all her friends” when she shot to global fame as a teenager.
The Bad Guy singer, now 22, first gained attention with her debut single Ocean Eyes and then achieved worldwide fame with her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? when she was just 17.
Speaking with Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver on their Miss Me podcast about her journey to fame, she shared: “I lost all of my friends when I got famous. Literally all except one. My best friend Zoe who I’ve been friends with since I was like two. She is still my girl.
“But she’s pretty much the only person that remained. I suddenly was famous and I couldn’t relate to anybody. It was tough. It was really hard.”
When asked if she attempted to reconnect with those friends after returning from tour, Eilish admitted she tried but they wouldn’t respond.
“I tried but I think I felt resentful that I didn’t feel… Like I don’t know I was so young,” she shared, revealing that she realised all her “friends” were in fact her employees during a moment at her 20th birthday.
Adding: “I remember looking around the room and it was only people that I employ. And all 15 years or more older than me.
“And then, one of my best friends, who worked with me, quit. Out of the blue and didn’t talk to me. And it was the worst thing that happened to me.
“I had this realisation that oh no, I might be actually alone for real.
“So since then I’ve become very distant in that way from people that I work with and I have a very weird relationship to being friendly with people that I work with because I’m very freaked out by loss and I have a lot of abandonment problems,” the two-time Oscar winner admitted.“Also I would get into relationships and that would be my one friend… even if it was a relationship that I didn’t necessarily really want after a second, I’d be like well, that’s all I have.
“And then I worked really hard on friendship and making friends, and making new friends, and rekindling old friendships and about exactly a year ago, I reconnected with a bunch of old friends and now, I have so many friends.”
Eilish, who recently released her new album Hit Me Hard And Soft, revealed that she was left in tears as she attended a Coachella afterparty in April because she has found her friendship crew.
The Grammy winner recounted: “We get in the car and my friends were like, ‘what’s going on are you ok?’ And I was like totally fine… And I burst into tears.
“And they said, ‘what’s going on’ and I was like guys, ‘I have friends and I just love you guys so much and it’s been so long since I’ve had friends’. I cried… and it’s literally because I actually have friendship now again.”
Eilish has previously discussed how fame and touring led to losing friends after her debut album soared in popularity in 2019.
She revealed at the time: “Having been on tour, I know how it works. I know that you leave and it’s a little bit of your friends being sad. Then, you’re gone for long enough that life moves on and they keep doing things.
“It’s the same if someone dies. You have to keep going. You shouldn’t be mourning them every two seconds for the rest of your life. You have to keep going.”
