-Our first guest tonight is a multi-Grammy-Award winning
musician whose song, "No Time To Die"
was recently nominated for an Academy Award.
She is making history as the youngest artist to headline
both the Glastonbury and Coachella music festivals
this year, and is currently on
her "Happier Than Ever" world tour.
Please welcome to the show, Billie Eilish, everybody.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-Welcome to the show, Billie! -Thank you. How you doing?
-I'm fantastic. I'm so happy to have you here.
And New York has been so happy to have you here.
You got to play Madison Square Garden.
-I sure did.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-I think all of us are in awe
at how much you've accomplished in your very young life so far.
But I can imagine, does it still blow your mind,
when you're in a room like MSG?
-Yes. -That's great.
[ Audience awws ] -Yeah, no, it's great.
I did bawl onstage. -Okay, gotcha.
I did.
Yeah, it was just really weird.
I have a song during the set
where it's all baby footage of me.
[ Audience awws ]
And I was like, walking across the stage
looking at baby me, looking at the crowd,
and I bawled.
-Yeah. -Quite embarrassing.
But what are you gonna do? -What are you gonna do?
I will say, and again,
I think the reaction from this audience
bears that out --
I don't think your audience minds
when you get a little emotional.
-No, they love it. -Yeah, I think they do, too.
[ Cheering ]
And this strikes me as a relationship you had
with your live audience even before this pandemic
that took it away from us, right?
You always had a very close relationship with your audience,
and one that was very honest and open.
And you always told them how much they meant to you.
-Yeah.
I mean, the fan connection has been the number one priority
since literally the beginning.
I wouldn't want to do any of this without it.
I'm dead serious.
There's no reason to do any of this without the connection.
Like, literally no reason at all.
-We love you, Billie!
[ Applause ]
-They write a lot of signs.
There's a lot of preparation that goes into
going to see you live.
And I think that speaks to the connection.
-It's ridiculous.
-This makes sense.
I didn't realize this until I heard you say it.
It must be hard to read a sign while you're singing a song.
-I can't do it. -Okay.
-I literally can't do it.
I try to, because I want to read their signs.
They work so hard on them. They color them in and draw.
I -- I -- Yeah.
I'll be like, "Oh, cool sign," and I'll read it,
and then I forget the words, and it's really bad.
-You wouldn't want to accidentally
sing the words on the sign, sometime.
-No. No.
-This one, you know.
That is somebody who wants, so,
"Sign my body and I will tattoo it on me."
They want you to sign it and they would take --
-That's crazy pressure, man. Right in the middle of a show?
Please. -This one, though.
These are really...
These are a little bit harder to read,
but I've read them earlier.
So this one -- -[ Laughing ]
-"Will you pierce my nipples?"
[ Laughter ]
-Can you imagine if I was like, "Yeah, let's do it right now."
-"Yeah, let's do it right now."
And then then this one is even, this is,
"Burp into the mic."
And by the way, I think they just printed these out.
They didn't even work that hard on them.
-No, that's true, but the crazy thing is,
they hold those up literally for the entire hour and a half.
They never put them down.
And I'm all like, "Burp into the mic"?
Like, okay. That's the statement you want to be...
-Also, it's a very hard thing. -I love it.
-You want to tell them, like, "If I do that,
no one here will understand
it's 'cause it was on your weird, little sign."
[ Laughter ]
And then sometimes they collectively,
like, a large group of them make signs.
[ Audience awws ]
That's is really nice. -This makes me cry.
-I mean, look at these faces. -Yeah.
-They do that.
I think that what they do is somebody organizes it
and they tell everybody else, and then they're all like,
"Okay, here's all these signs."
I'm guessing that they make, like, a bunch at once
and then they hand them out and they're like,
"For this song, let's hold them up."
That's what I thought.
It's so cute. I have cried for that, too.
-And this festival, I mean,
doing festivals again must be so exciting,
and headlining these big...
How excited are you about getting back and doing that?
-Oh, my God, so good.
I did a few in September, and those were like,
the first back since COVID.
[ Applause ]
Oh, it feels so good.
-That, especially that time, obviously another wave came
and made it a little bit less enthusiastic,
being out in public,
but that late summer, early fall was an exceptional time
to be doing live performing again.
-Yeah, oh, my God, we were free.
It was great.
It was like, a month of like, "Oh, COVID's gone."
Nope.
-And then you went and you did "SNL."
You hosted "SNL." -I did.
[ Applause ]
-And like, just got in under the wire before COVID came back.
-Literally the week before. -Yeah.
-I think the host the week after you left was omicron.
-Uh-huh. It was.
It was. -It was omicron.
I have a bunch of questions about "SNL."
Stick around, we will be right back
with more from Billie Eilish.