Hello Billie Eilish,
I was delighted to see you on the cover of rolling stone this week, where you appear to be hoisted through the air on a rope into a beige liminal space. As a Cancer, I’m a big fan of your saddest, darkest songs, and I’ve spent many nights listening to “Everything I Wanted” on repeat when I wanted to cry. I found a lot of things you said in your rolling stone interview, like asking people to be aware of their contribution to animal agriculture and refreshingly calling masturbation “jerks.” But I admit that I was surprised to read this information:
As a child, Eilish’s biggest fear was water. She has traumatic memories – of the swimming instructor whose method was to submit her and wait for her to “get it”, or of the time she was sucked into the ocean waves and a lifeguard had to save. She always found the courage to dive, but for years the mere thought of swimming made her heart beat faster. And don’t even get it started on the whales.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “How can we accept that a whale exists, y’all? These things are huge. The noises they make. This shit terrifies me. Uh! Creepy.
I was surprised by these feelings. I was perhaps wondering if, like some Spanish yacht owners, you have ever been wronged by a whale in the past. Digging deeper, I discovered that in 2019 you shared similar thoughts with Billboard:
“I’m afraid of the ocean and I love whales and all that. Whales are really scary. Whales are so scary. You can’t tell me that sound that whales make – oooooh – you can’t don’t tell me it’s not scary as hell.
I completely understand where you’re coming from. I love the ocean almost more than anything and I’m afraid of it too. And I’m so sorry to hear about your ocean trauma: that swimming instructor looks atrocious, and being sucked into the waves is extremely scary. The ocean is a force more powerful than any of us, capable of gently carrying our bodies to shore or annihilating us entirely, a force we would do well to respect. I can tell that this respect underlies your fear.
But, Billie Eilish, I would like to gently push back on your criticism of whales. In particular, I would like to ask you why you, as a musician and songwriter, call their vocalizations “sounds” and “noises” instead of songs. I don’t know how much you know about whales, but they are almost as famous for their songs as they are for their large size. We have known that whales vocalize – make, as you say, sounds and noises – for centuries. But in 1967, marine biologist Roger Payne discovered that the sounds of humpback whales are organized into repeating patterns and are therefore comparable to music. Payne’s discovery helped scientists discover that all whale species sing with complexity and rhythm. The whales sang songs that evolved over time and transformed across geography. Each year, whales chop and remix their songs, with melodies unique to each population. And whales can transmit these songs across the world, with whales near Australia transmitting their songs to whales near French Polynesia and those in Ecuador. This must sound familiar to any pop star who has toured the world.
I admit that whale songs – “oooooh”, as you imitate them – do not sound like our human songs. There are no beat drops, featured artists, or the dreaded voicemail interlude from an artist’s girlfriend or grandmother. Maybe it’s for the best. And sure, you might find it grating that whales only sing a cappella. But what types of instruments can you play with fins? Whale songs may not sound like symphonies to our ears, but we are of course not the intended recipients of their songs. To one whale, another whale’s song may indeed sound like a symphony, a tune, or even the whistle notes of a Mariah Carey performance. Who can forget the time Mariah Carey sang a whistle to a dolphin and the dolphin collapsed! Perhaps she is the only one of us who can sing to marine mammals on their level.
What would a whale think of “Bad Guy”? What would a whale think of “When the Party’s Over?” We can’t know until we release your discography to a group of patients, but I hope the whales listen with open minds and hearts to your “noises.” As a writer, there are many books I don’t like, books I hate, and even books that I think should never have been written. But I would never stoop to calling the collected literature of humanity “scribbles” or “doodles” or even “the careless and inconsequential scribbles of a madman.” I would never do that.
In fact, the Humpback Whales Roger Payne Met released an album! 1970s Songs of the humpback whale, had five tracks, totaled 34 minutes, and sold over 125,000 copies, which was quite impressive for a nature album at the time. The album and its cetacean singers were snubbed at that year’s Grammys, which increasingly seems to be the mark of a superior artist. Payne’s album helped bring public attention to commercial whaling, which was devastating many species and pushing some populations toward extinction. A sample of a whale’s song was even chosen for the Voyager Gold Record, where it now crosses interstellar space. In 1978, Kate Bush sampled a whale song in her debut album. The inside kickan honor for any musician!
Perhaps what you find most frightening about whales is not their size, or even their sound, but the unknowable wisdom they hide behind their eyes, both similar and different from ours. It is human to fear the great unknown. Your first album, When we all fall asleep, where do we go?, which you say was inspired by lucid dreams and nightmares, debuted at No. 1 on the charts. You may be interested to know that when whales go to sleep, they stay suspended in one place underwater. Sperm whales will nap in groups in the open ocean, where all the whales point their noses towards the surface. They can only sleep for about 20 minutes before needing to breathe, after which they get up to gulp air and come back down to go back to sleep.
After all, we’re all mammals here, so it’s possible that the whales understand you better than you think. In your rolling stone interview, you said you submerged yourself in the bottom of a swimming pool on a cold February afternoon to shoot the cover of your new album. After six hours of diving in and out of the water, you spent 20 minutes blowing your nose in the trailer. “It was just white snot coming out, like my insides were made of white goo,” you told the writer. Is it the spouting whale you’re afraid of, Billie Eilish, or yourself? I invite you, like Beyoncé, to open your eyes and ears to the grandeur, spectacle and mystical wonder of whales. Let your heart and your music be transformed by the whales and their songs. Let the whale you fear become a muse you love! Waaaaoooooooooh! Arrroooooooooeeeeeeaao! Whuuuuummmpwhuuuumpwhuuump!
