Buy a print copy of the Billie Eilish issue of The FADER, and order a poster of her cover here.

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Maybe as a kid you pictured the house of your dreams, before your dreams had to do with being terrifically rich. It didn’t have to be too big, but there’d be a yard, and the yard would definitely have a treehouse, and maybe the tree would be strung with lights, a rusted chandelier dangling from one of its branches like a vision from a Lewis Carroll tea party. And inside it’s messy but there’s art everywhere, old paintings alongside baby pictures and scribbled inside jokes, and musical instruments scattered through every room. The attic’s full of racks upon racks of the craziest old costumes from your parents’ theater days, and you’ve got to pull a rickety ladder down from the ceiling to get there, unless you happen to know where the secret trap-door is. (It’s in your brother’s room.)

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Maybe your middle name, also, is Pirate.

I am standing in the backyard of Billie Eilish’s childhood home — which is to say, her home, having only recently turned 17 — and I can’t shake the sense of being on the inside of my dreamiest childhood reverie, the kind of setting where you might imagine you can do anything you put your mind to and actually believe it. It’s a cool midwinter evening in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood, with nearby lemon trees and an outdoor trapeze rig framing a banger of a sunset that looks like an airbrushed t-shirt from the mall. A stocky, good-natured old dog, Pepper, grunts around, doling out five-second increments of attention.

