397. Billie Eilish, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?"

 

Even though you may not know it's called this, you're no doubt familiar with the concepts of primacy and recency as they apply to memory.  The basic and uncontroversial idea is that you tend to remember best the first thing you heard and the last thing you heard.  So you remember the first episode of a series and the last one you saw, but not so much the middle 23.  In music, this means the Beatles and Chuck Berry get a lot of attention, along with the latest things like Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.  I strongly suspect that in future iterations of this list, this album will either fall dramatically or disappear.

Which is not to say that I didn't like it because I surprised myself and did!  It's a haunting, dark, moody collection that sounds like a young woman deep in her feelings singing to herself in her bedroom and that's pretty much what it actually is.  It was literally recorded in her fellow teen brother's bedroom in their house in Highland Park.  I have to stop here and say that I spent a fair amount of time in my early 20's recording in an apartment and nothing we did ever sounded anything like this and it is just amazing how home recording has been revolutionized in the past 20 years.  We were literally recording onto cassette tapes, and now with a computer and an Apollo 8 interface you can make something that sounds like this.  Amazing.

The obvious reference point is stuff like Lorde's Pure Heroine, but I kept thinking about how much of it is like torch songs for a generation that thinks Low is classic rock.  She does have an amazing voice and is way more skilled at using it to effect than you'd expect from someone who was - dear God - 17 when this was recorded?  Just listen to "when the party's over" and see if that doesn't fit.

I don't know what's going to become of Billie Eilish.  Making such a huge splash at such a young age seems hard to sustain, and I hope she has good people around her who care about her.  She's already won multiple Grammy awards and she's obviously making a lot of money for a lot of people and it just seems like a lot.  I hope she's ok.