The queen is back! Billie Eilish is gearing up to release her second album, titled Happier Than Ever, over a year after her award-winning record When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? dropped in March 2019.
“It’s much better. I mean listen, it’s a lot of work. Also, when you want to give your album a life, and a big one, and you want people to listen, you got to do stuff to make that happen,” she explained to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 in July 2021. “You got to do shoots and shoots and shoots. And all of the things. And it’s been a pretty punishing couple of weeks, I got to tell you. I have cried probably 30 times. Probably I’ve cried more in the last two weeks than I have my whole life. But it’s OK, because life goes on and things pass. But the whole process overall has been much better. I feel so much more confident and happy in my life and my personal life, and my brain and my creatives. It’s just promo is tough. It’s tough, but it’s worth it though.”
She also told Vanity Fair in January 2021 that the album “feels exactly how I want it to. There isn’t one song, or one part of one song, that I wish was this or that I wish it was that.”
During her Official Vevo interview, which dropped days before the album, Billie explained, “I wanted to make a very timeless record, that wasn’t just timeless in terms of what other people thought, but really just timeless for myself.”
“I don’t want to get too specific because I really think it’s for the listener to decide,” Billie said of the song’s meanings. “I don’t want to put the ideas in their brains. I want them to feel 100 percent that their interpretation is the right interpretation. … There was so much self-reflection in the making of this album, that I think really comes through the songs.”
While talking with Zane Lowe on Apple Music in November 2020, she also explained how the ongoing coronavirus quarantine inspired her new music.
“That’s what we’ve been talking about for months, about how this year has sucked for a lot of people, and as much as I wished that I had been able to have the year I was planning on having and tour and blah, blah, blah, we would never have made this album. I mean, we would have made something, but it would have been completely different,” she explained. “It’s not like we’re making songs about quarantine, we’re just in a different mindset than we would be otherwise. And that’s just how everything is. It’s the butterfly effect. It’s like if you hadn’t done this three years ago, maybe you wouldn’t be doing this three years later. It’s just the way that it is. At the same time, this is the most time off I’ve ever had in my life, first of all. And especially since this all started like five years ago.”
Scroll through our gallery for everything you need to know about Billie’s second album.
Love J-14? Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for fun, exclusive videos with your favorite stars.