Billie Eilish. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty
Billie Eilish is revealing how she suffers for her art.
The singer said she spent six hours underwater with a weight strapped to her body to capture the cover of her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, released on Friday, May 17.
“That is very real,” Eilish, 22, said of the cover image on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, May 21.
“This was the day after this last Grammys,” she continued. “I had gone to sleep at 7 a.m., I woke up, I dyed my hair black … and then I went to this random place in Santa Clarita. There’s a tank in this giant place and it was like 10 feet deep, and I popped my little ass in there. And I was in there for six hours.”
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Eilish said that she was “fully clothed” the entire time, wearing “big long pants, giant Pro Club shorts, a thermal — long-sleeved, a button-up flannel, a tie, rings, arm warmers and a weight.”
“I had a weight strapped to me,” she added, explaining that the weight was to ensure she stayed in the water to capture the perfect shot.
‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ album cover. Universal Music Group
“I didn’t have a nose plug, so I was basically waterboarding myself for six hours,” Eilish said.
The “What Was I Made For?” singer confirmed that it was her idea to do the risky photo shoot, telling host Stephen Colbert that she’s “almost died” during photo shoots “so many times.”
“I need to suffer,” she said. “Honest to God, yes. It’s not like, ‘What can I do that’ll be the most uncomfortable that I could possibly dream of?’ It’s more that I think about the visual before I think about how it’s going to make me feel. I’m like, ‘I wanna be fully dressed underwater, eyes open, upside down,’ and then I deal with how horrible it is.”
On her new album, Eilish opens up about her attraction to women on the song “Lunch.”
“I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah, she dances on my tongue / Tastes like she might be The One / And I could never get enough / I could buy her so much stuff / It’s a craving, not a crush,” the nine-time Grammy Award winner, 22, sings in the first verse.
In an April interview with Rolling Stone, Eilish spoke about how writing the track helped her embrace her sexuality.
“That song was actually part of what helped me become who I am, to be real,” Eilish told the outlet. “I wrote some of it before even doing anything with a girl, and then wrote the rest after. I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina. I was never planning on talking about my sexuality ever, in a million years. It’s really frustrating to me that it came up.”
Eilish first said she was “physically attracted” to women in an interview with Variety last November.