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Billie Eilish Thanked the Artists Who Paved the Way For Her to Become Woman of the Year

17/12/2019 - 07:00 AM

She didn't have a crystal ball, but in 2014, Taylor Swift [1] predicted the future. While accepting Billboard's woman of the year award [2] at the 2019 Women in Music event, Billie Eilish [3] acknowledged how incredible it is to win this award at such a young age. She thanked the women in her life who helped her get to where she is today, the other winners of the evening, and also paid tribute to the artists who won the award before her, including Swift and Ariana Grande [4]. Crazily enough, during Swift's speech five years ago, she predicted Eilish's success [5] with a line about the younger generation.

"In 2014, she won this award, and she basically said, 'Right now, your future woman of the year is somewhere in a piano lesson, in a choir, and we need to take care of her,'" Eilish recalled in her acceptance speech. "And I was 11 at the time, and I was in a choir and learning to play piano, and you took care of me. Thank you."

Earlier in the night, Swift also referenced her 2014 speech while accepting the first-ever Billboard woman of the decade award [6]. She spoke about her career evolution [7] and the dangers of "toxic male privilege," and at the end, she gave a special shout out to Eilish. "I've since learned that at that exact moment, an 11-year-old girl in California really was taking piano lessons, and really was in a girls' choir. And this year, she has been named woman of the year at the age of 17. Her name is Billie. And those are the stories we need to think about every day as we do our jobs within this industry. The ones where people's dreams come true and they get to create music and play it for people . . . The ones where all of you in this room stand as an example for someone else in the next generation who loves the same thing that we love: music."

With her history-making Grammy nominations [8] and her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? being named the biggest album of the year [9], Eilish undoubtedly was the woman of 2019, and she has so much to be proud of. "It's really weird to be woman of the year at 17," she said. Watch Eilish's speech above, and check out photos from her night ahead.


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https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/billie-eilish-speech-at-billboard-women-in-music-event-2019-47014169