Artists like Billie Eilish are so inherent to our zeitgeist, there’s not a whole lot more to be said. Without having been there, you know her show at Wells Fargo Center last Saturday night was special. But what I found to be the most delightful part of being at Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour,” surprisingly, was the intimacy. Despite the elaborate stage setup, pyrotechnics, and thousands of screaming fans, I felt closer to Eilish’s music in that arena than if I were just listening on headphones in a quiet room. She’s a generous pop star, sharing her meteoric rise to fame with her loved ones and mirroring the audience’s idolization back at us, the fortunate twenty-one thousand of us.
To start, I’ll point out that Hit Me Hard and Soft is a natural foil to the summer’s sensational hit Brat in its brooding vulnerability and sparkling beauty. And that’s no shade on Queen Charli, only that it’s impossible to speak pop music in 2024 without mentioning one of the genre’s four pillars: Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, and Billie Eilish. The latter star has heartbreak on lock in the all-consuming way only someone who’s 22 years old could write. But she’s multi-faceted, of course, mixing aching sentimentality with club beats, emo visuals, and a powerful “bad bitch” streak.
Though all this has been in the Billie Eilish canon since her debut in 2016, we’ve learned even more about the young star in the past couple years, like how she has the power to wrangle up and neatly express our culture’s existential crisis like in “What Was I Made For?” the theme to Barbie, her passion for sustainability as exhibited in her tour practices and record pressings, and even her sexual orientation: her song “LUNCH” became an anthem of Pride ‘24.
At Saturday’s show, Billie Eilish brought brothers Nat & Alex Wolf, musicians, actors, and close personal friends of Eilish’s, to open the show. And this wasn’t the only example of Eilish’s loyalty: her backup singers were friends she had from childhood. Noticeably, her longest partner and collaborator, her brother Finneas, was missing, but the whole crew still felt like a large extended family for Eilish, and one can easily get the sense that’s how she prefers it.
Eilish was full of energy throughout her hours-long performance, coming down on a cage lowered to the stage, sprinting the length of the basketball court, and encouraging the crowd to jump up and down. Like a great album, her set had fast and slow points. The fast ones being the ground-shaking bass and pulsing energy for songs like “LUNCH” and “bad guy,” that featured blasts of fire from canons below the stage that warmed the whole arena. And the slow ones being Eilish silencing the crowd to record live looped vocals for “when the party’s over” (no one dared make a peep) and the pop star swinging her feet over the edge of a rising platform, stopping at the top for the climax of “THE GREATEST.”
Her stage movements were amplified by different effects like a rolling ocean displayed on crystal-clear LEDs for a medley she performed of “Lovely,” “idontwannabeyouanymore.” and “Ocean Eyes,” plus a seemingly pressure-sensitive floor following her footsteps with resounding, seismic waves on…was it “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” perhaps? Either way, that song was a standout. Eilish even shocked the crowd by performing “Guess” live, chiming in with her verse of the Charli XCX song.
Though there’s been a dialogue proliferating recently about stan culture and the threat that celebrity poses on especially pop stars’ mental health, Eilish was not afraid of her crowd. Over and over, she expressed that it means the world to have so many people following her journey, and that her fans specifically have been wonderful. If only every public persona could be that lucky. As Eilish ran around the borders of the crowd, touching everyone’s hands and pausing to smile in iPhone camera videos, I was glad she felt safe. After all, the intimacy with one of the biggest stars in the world is what made this show so magical.
