Billie Eilish Is Not Your Typical 17-Year-Old Pop Star. Get Used to Her.

Dave Grohl, whose daughters are obsessed with Eilish, could only compare her to his old band: “The same thing is happening with her that happened with Nirvana in 1991,” he told a music business conference recently, holding up Eilish’s tough-to-categorize music as proof that “rock ’n’ roll is not even close to being dead.” The hip-hop producer Timbaland called this year, and next, hers for the taking.“I do not see a ceiling,” said Brandon Goodman, one of Eilish’s managers. (Her lifelong friend Zoe Donahoe chimed in from nearby: “She just knew what she wanted.”)/Finneas committed to music first, but when he enlisted a 13-year-old Eilish to sing “Ocean Eyes,” a song he’d written for his band, the family’s lives were forever altered. In the kitchen at home, her mother called, half-jokingly, for Eilish’s publicist in the other room.“I want to be able to mourn, I don’t want to be shamed for it,” said Eilish, who performed a tribute song following XXXTentacion’s death. “I don’t think I deserve getting hate for loving someone that passed.” No one chimed in to coach her.Flanked at all times by her family, Eilish felt sturdy, if a bit jaded, in anticipation of the ways her life would continue to change in the coming months — harder questions, greater expectations, less privacy.Earlier, her brother had described the surreality of Eilish’s rise as “an autonomous thing, and it’s moving forward really fast, and we’re all on it.” Her father chimed in: “It’s a train, or a river, or a vortex, and we’re all flying down.” Finneas added: “But traveling it safely feels much easier than trying to bail out.”Eilish agreed, and said she was working on being in the moment while also keeping perspective, motivated especially by the promise of larger and larger concerts, which have become near-religious experiences for her fans.