Billie Eillish is one of the new musicians that have made a huge impact in the industry. She’s known for her unique way of singing and has produced various hits that you can find on charts like billboard.
Billie’s singing style sounds like whisper singing and this is one of the things that separate her from every other singer that you’ll hear today.
Many people often wonder why she sings like that, which is why I’m going to address that in this post.
It’s good to understand any self-expressive art as a musician because it offers new perspective.
With that said, why does Billie Eilish whisper sing?
Billie Eilish’s singing is often described as ASMR sounding. Her signature whisper-style singing is to give the listener a cool and calm effect.
Her distinctive singing style sounds like voices in your head. This makes you connect with her music at a deeper emotional level.
Singing style and Tone
In Billies live performances she’s known to sing in a deep expressive way, with some vibrato, but she never pushes it beyond her natural voice to ‘belt’ .
Belting is when a singer carries their ‘chest’ voice above their break to really force the sound.
Her sound cannot be undermined when compared to other trained singers who sing at a high level. Her tone colour is brilliant because she’s figured out a way to sound subtle but nuanced enough to touch her audience.
If you want to get a closer listen to her tone, you can listen to songs like “everything I wanted”.
She does an excellent job of sounding polished and well adjusted to her Singing style which is something you’ll get from listening to most of her songs.
Timbre
Billie Eilish’s pop style vocal timbre is authentic, beautiful and fragile.
Her voice is breathy and wispy but still strong and confident.
Just as with her tone, she doesn’t stretch into big contrasts when it comes to the timbre, by which i mean the overall quality or the style, of her singing voice
If you what understand and get to know her vocal range better then listen to songs like “copycat”.
You’ll hear that her vocal range goes well with gentle, acoustic guitar where it’s characterised by soft, muffled textures.
Certainly an interesting combination.
Is Billie Eilish a good singer?
Billie Eilish is an excellent singer. An effective way to tell if pop or rock singers or any singers who usually use microphones and perform with an amplified band are good at singing, is to strip it all instruments back to just their voice.
Listen to Billie’s vocals with no amplification or boosts or anything that could alter her voice.
You’ll notice that her tone is pure, perfectly pitched, and decorated with her unmistakable distinctive breathiness plus well-controlled vibrato. You’ll basically hear that she has impeccable control over her voice.
She understands musical phrasing, and approaches it as a classical singer would in concerto solo in classical music.
You can note this by the way she’s able to control her breathing while adding certain nuances of colour and emphasis where needed.
The truth about Billie’s singing
Let’s get into the truth about Eilish’s singing because it has often times been questioned online.
People often thought she couldn’t sing outside of her usual way of singing but she’s obviously disproven those notions.
So let’s get into why Billie is great at what she does despite being called out by various people.
Whisper singing also requires skill
Before you start to look down at whisper singing, you need to understand that it requires a very specific skillset.
One needs to be able to have control over their voice. Which we notice with Billie.
All the claims by online fans saying she can’t sing are wrong.
She’s a great singer, it’s only her style that such people probably don’t like which is okay.
You don’t have to shout to sound good
This is actually something that Billie said in response to an interview question of why she sings in whisper-style.
She says “you don’t have to shout to sound good”.
Which is true, people that can sing well or at high level have control over their voice. They can sing well calmly and they can sing well loudly.
Her style is not new
Eilish’s style is certainly not new as many people make it out to be.
There’s many other musicians put there that don’t necessarily sing like Billie but sing in a calm whisper-style way.
For example, the musical Artist Lorde is also known to embrace this style of singing to an extent.
She caters to her audience
Billie Eilishs style is an accepted style which caters to her audience.
If it were that she couldn’t sing, she wouldn’t have amassed a huge following.
