Credit: Far Out / Harmony Gerber/ Lars Crommelinck Photography
Thu 6 August 2026 3:00, UK
Towards the end of her 2015 album Honeymoon, Lana Del Rey sings on ‘The Blackest Day’ that “All I hear is Billie Holiday, it’s all that I play”, but more recently, she has acknowledged that ‘Lady Day’ is no longer the only Billie whose music she can’t stop listening to.
When Honeymoon came out, the world was in its last few months of pre-Billie Eilish fame. In November of that same year, the then-13-year-old Eilish posted the stunning ‘Ocean Eyes’, written and produced with her brother Finneas O’Connell, to SoundCloud and before long, that ocean was surging and making waves around the world.
‘Ocean Eyes’ is an incredible song, and even though it didn’t give much of an indication as to the groundbreaking, explorative and multitudinous directions Eilish and O’Connell would later take her work, it immediately announced her on the world’s stage as a serious talent, and Lana Del Rey really was paying attention.
Del Rey had almost paved the way for a talent like Billie Eilish to emerge in the first place. Her penchant for writing about the darker and grittier elements of real and everyday life in something of a traditional pop-ballad and songbook-esque style, though underscoring those things with more modern elements of hip hop and R&B, laid the groundwork for Eilish to pick up on a similar thread before taking it off in her own direction.
I spent a little time in 2015 chatting with Del Rey about the artists who had influenced her, and specifically, the album that she was promoting at the time. She told me that Bob Dylan, or as she referred to him, Bobby, is “a real hero” (incidentally, she references his song ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ in ‘Religion’, also from Honeymoon), and that Frank Sinatra was another icon she looked up to and appreciated when putting her own work together, but also added that she was particularly interested in the contemporary hip hop producers working on the scene in Brooklyn, NY.
Elsewhere, she has cited Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Father John Misty and Eminem as lyricists who’s work she has greatly admired, and her covers of songs like ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ (from Honeymoon, again) and, especially, ‘The Other Woman’, shows that she is au-fait with a wide range of styles and has a keen ear for great writing. It is that keen ear that knew that Billie Eilish had huge potential on first listen, as well.
In 2019, around the time that Eilish was releasing her incredible full-length debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Del Rey told the New York Times, “I love Billie Eilish, and I feel like I’ve been waiting for this time in pop-music culture. I personally am very discerning. I can tell if a female pop singer, for instance, has a generosity of spirit or a playful fire in her heart. With Billie, she’s prodigious. I needed to hear one line of one melody, and I just know.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Four years later, Eilish interviewed Del Rey herself, this time for Interview Magazine, and during the course of the conversation, she revealed that the feelings of appreciation were mutual, as the ‘Bird of a Feather’ singer admitted that an image of Lana Del Rey had been the lockscreen wallpaper on her mobile when she was younger.
The pair went on to duet on a medley of ‘Video Games’ and ‘Ocean Eyes’ at Coachella in 2024.
