Billie Eilish on inventing a greener kind of concert: ‘I have to try to make a change’

More than eight years ago, when she was only 16, Billie Eilish set out on her first headlining tour. She was already on her way to becoming one of the world’s biggest pop stars, and the scale and impact of staging major shows were impossible to ignore. The idling tour buses, the generators running at all hours, the innumerable single-use plastic water bottles. Raised by an especially eco-conscious mother, Eilish was accustomed to climate-friendly habits, like using cloth napkins and eating a vegan diet. She was startled in a new way by the ramifications of shows like hers. “I didn't know how bad it could be,” Eilish says now. “The waste involved in live music is really hard to take in.”

Now, a new report from the nonprofit environmental group Reverb, which partners with artists like Eilish to implement sustainability initiatives, is touting her most recent tour as an unprecedented milestone in climate-friendly concertgoing. The 14-month tour, Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour, which wrapped up last year, visited 15 countries on four continents, where Eilish offered reusable water bottles, sold merch made from recycled materials, and adorned venues with signage displaying statistics emphasizing how our everyday behaviors impact the climate. Numbers, her team figured, would hit concertgoers dramatically. “The stats are undeniable,” Eilish says.

As the tour traveled the world, they partnered with Google Maps to help fans get to shows using public transit. They also worked with venues to offer plant-based food concessions. According to the report, more than 30 venues launched or expanded environmental projects in cooperation with Eilish and team. And plenty of good ideas stuck: When vegan menu items proved to be a hit at her San Jose show, officials at SAP Center decided to keep them on the menu.

All in, the tour managed to keep some 103,620 water bottles out of landfills, and led food drives that fed more than 4,000 people. These ventures and their results, outlined in the Reverb report, offer a model that Eilish hopes other artists can replicate. “Climate anxiety is so real,” she admits. “But goddamnit, we can only make a difference if we really do something.” 

While on the road, Eilish was joined by legendary director and National Geographic Explorer James Cameron, who wanted to capture Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour on screen. The experience gave the pair a chance to connect about their shared passion for the planet, allowing Cameron to see up close that Eilish is driven by what he calls a “necessity to battle climate change... and to spread that message to other young people.” Cameron’s new 3-D Billie Eilish concert film, co-directed with Eilish, hits theaters on May 8. 

Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird—herself a sustainability advocate and the founder of the plant-based food nonprofit Support + Feed—remembers being told early in her daughter’s career that there was little use in being concerned about the excessive buses and the wasteful water bottles. “I literally was told, ‘This is how the music industry is, we’re operating on such tight margins and such tight time frames,’” she says. “Everyone was overwhelmed, and the last thing they wanted to talk about was sustainability.”

Today, just as Eilish has refused to accept the conventions of pop songwriting in her music, she’s also embracing disruption in the way her tours operate. “Things don’t have to be done the same way they’ve always been done,” she says. “I make sure that in every single area of my career, and my life, that the first thing I do is ask the question: How can we do this in the most sustainable way possible?”

From the start, Eilish’s career was a family affair. Her brother, the artist FINNEAS, helped produce her 2015 breakout song “Ocean Eyes.” (Eilish was just 13 years old when it was released on SoundCloud). They have worked closely on all her albums since. When Eilish’s pop career really began to take off in 2017, she was joined on the road by her brother and their parents. It’s fitting that Eilish’s environmentalism is also a family project, spearheaded in large part by Baird, a vegan who, as Eilish proudly notes,“ devotes her time and energy to all things environmental.” A Colorado native with a serious nature-loving streak, Baird was always interested in being mindful of the environment. When she had kids of her own, they slipped easily into conscious eating, too. Eilish admires her mother’s conviction, and points out that her mom is not afraid to give anybody “an earful about how animal agriculture is just completely destroying the planet.”

By the time Baird’s teenage children—whom she and her husband had homeschooled in Los Angeles—were pursuing careers in music, the entire family was already many steps ahead of the curve when it came to environmentalism. When her daughter first began touring, Baird shared Eilish’s sense of alarm at what they were seeing. “We were kind of shocked and appalled at everything,” she says. It led them to seek out guidance and insight to ensure that they had, as Eilish says, “the smartest people around, helping to go about things in the most conscious way.”

Ahead of her second headlining tour in 2020, Eilish and Baird consulted with Adam Gardner, a musician who had logged years on the road as the frontman for the band Guster. In 2004, Gardner had co-founded with his wife, Lauren Sullivan, the nonprofit Reverb, which has advised artists like Dave Matthews Band and Lorde on their tours. Reverb and the Eilish camp workshopped a plan for a history-making green tour focused on providing sustainable food, reducing carbon emissions, and minimizing waste. “What I love about the approach Billie and her team have taken is that they don't want these changes made just for her,” Gardner says. “She wants the system to change.”

By 2020, Eilish was a breakout star with a massive platform—and the kind of influence to make things happen. Venues couldn’t brush her off when her team inquired about plant-based food options and plastic usage. “I have a rare situation, which is that I have this huge platform where I can reach people,” she says. “On the one hand, it's like, yeah, nobody wants to hear what celebrities think, and I agree, but what the hell [else] am I going to do? It's all our responsibility to use our voices for good, and why wouldn't I use the large platform that I have to try to make a change and make a difference? If that ruffled feathers I literally couldn't care less.”

Despite the ambitions for that 2020 tour, it was cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic after only three nights. Stuck at home in Los Angeles, Baird’s wheels began turning. Early on during lockdown, she realized that people would be struggling to access food. Baird quickly connected with plant-based restaurants and sourced meals for locals in need. Armed with new information about food insecurity, she launched Support + Feed, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing food insecurity with climate-friendly options.

By the time COVID restrictions lifted and Eilish was ready to tour again, Support + Feed was growing, and the family saw an even bigger opportunity to integrate their work into Eilish’s live shows. They created a plan to install Support + Feed stations across venues, where fans could take a pledge to eat one plant-based meal for 30 consecutive days. Additional booths were constructed to raise awareness about fast fashion. They hunted for more places to make changes big and small. For instance, tour vehicles were strictly forbidden from idling outside of venues.

Anyone who pays attention to the internet understands the symbiotic relationship between pop stars and the audiences who worship them. In the era of the hyper-focused stan—one who catalogs a musician’s every move and every turn of phrase in a lyric and then, in turn, holds them accountable for their actions—both performers and followers wield massive influence. Eilish’s fans, who sometimes refer to themselves as “Eyelashes,” are among the most perceptive and impassioned in the whole world of pop.

They go all in. And Eilish knows they're a receptive audience to the kind of environmental message she’s been sharing. “The amount of times I’ve met fans who have told me, ‘My whole family became vegan because of you. We had no idea it was such an enormous part of the climate crisis,’” Eilish says. “Or when someone says, ‘You know, I work as an activist because of this thing that I saw you posted.’” 

And it’s not just the fans that Eilish and her team are influencing. Her green tour blueprint has reached bands like Metallica and Paramore, both of whom recently sought out Support + Feed to support their respective live tours. “I express as much as I can without shoving it into anybody's face,” Eilish says, “because friends of mine do ask me all the time, and people I work with, and I get so excited.”