Billie Eilish Just Recalled The Sad Moment She Realized That The People On Her Payroll Aren’t Her Friends

Needless to say, she was officially snapped up by a label soon after, and has enjoyed record-breaking success in the music industry ever since.

At just 22 years old, Billie has nine Grammy awards and two Oscars under her belt, and her career shows no signs of slowing down.

But achieving this level of fame at such a young age did not come without its pitfalls, with Billie revealing during a recent podcast appearance that she lost all of her friends when her career took off.

“I lost all of my friends when I got famous, like, literally all except one — my best friend Zoe, who I have been friends with since I was two,” Billie began. “She’s pretty much the only person that remained, you know? I suddenly was famous, and I couldn’t relate to anybody and it was really hard.”

When asked if she’d tried to maintain her friendships amid her career, Billie admitted: “I think I felt resentful… I was so young; everything I felt back then, I don’t think I would even stand by. Literally, the world was being handed to me on a silver platter, like: ‘Would you like this?’”

“So all of my friends became my employees, which I felt was fine, and I was like: ‘What do you mean? I have friends, I have so many friends!’” Billie continued. “Then it was my 20th birthday, and I remember looking around the room, and it was only people that I employ, and I was like, hmm. And all 15 years and more older than me.”

“Then one of my best friends who worked with me quit out of the blue and didn’t talk to me,” the star recalled. “And it was the worst thing that happened to me, and that made me realize, like, Oh, wait, this is a job, and these are really people that if they left me, they wouldn’t ever see me again. I kind of had this realization, like, Oh, I might actually be alone for real.”

Eventually, Billie made a proactive effort to expand her circle, explaining: “I’ve become very distant in that way from people that I work with, and I have a very weird relationship to being friendly with people that I work with because I’m very freaked out by loss and I have a lot of abandonment problems.”

“Then I worked really hard on friendship and making friends and making new friends and rekindling old friendships,” she went on. “About exactly a year ago, I reconnected with a bunch of old friends, and now I have so many friends; I have a crew now! I could literally cry about it. It’s been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

That same evening, Billie said that she “burst into tears” because she was so happy to have friends at last. 

“I could not go on,” she added. “I couldn’t go on without friends. My friendships are, like, the best part of my life.”

She said: “You have that line that’s: ‘With a little help from my friends, I found the light at the tunnel at the end,’ and I used to want to cry hearing that line because I didn’t feel that way because I didn’t have any friends.”

“I remember thinking: ‘I want to feel that way, and I want to listen to this song that I relate to in every way and hear that line about friends and be like: My friends got me through,’” Billie added. “Instead, I was, like, rawdogging life.”

Thankfully, all’s well that ends well, with Billie concluding: “I feel like I’ve found my people, and I’m going to just keep finding them.”