With a closely watched live stream to consider, Coachella generally doesn’t allow tardiness.
But the festival made an exception Saturday night for Billie Eilish — in part because there wasn’t another act due on the Outdoor Theatre stage for a while but mostly, one gathered, because folks on the ground (and at home) were willing to stick around to see her.
Last week Eilish’s debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart with the sales-and-streaming equivalent of 313,000 units — the second-largest week of 2019 behind “Thank U, Next” by Ariana Grande (who, as it happens, is due to headline Coachella on Sunday night).
And here that enthusiasm was still strong enough that tens of thousands of festival-goers waited 30 minutes past Eilish’s scheduled start time.
When she finally appeared, wearing her trademark outfit of baggy shorts and hoodie, the 17-year-old Los Angeles native opened her set with the same song that begins her album: “Bad Guy,” in which she makes clear that she’s a different kind of teen-pop star than we’ve seen in some time — darker and weirder, for sure, but funnier and more self-aware, too.
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Billie Eilish on stage April 13 at Coachella 2019.
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Fans cheer Billie Eilish.
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Billie Eilish performs.
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Christine & the Queens on stage at Coachella.
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Fans get caught up in a performance by Tame Impala at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival on April 13.
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Tame Impala performs at Coachella on the second day of the annual music festival.
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Christine & the Queens on stage.
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Coachella fans ride the Ferris wheel as the sun sets April 13.
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Festival fans head for late afternoon shows.
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Fans walk through “Spectra,” a seven-story immersive art installation.
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Billie Eilish on stage.
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A security guard stands watch atop the “Spectra” art installation on the festival grounds.
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Juice WRLD performs during the first weekend of Coachella.
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Rivers Cuomo fronts the Los Angeles rock band Weezer on the Main Stage.
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Rivers Cuomo and Weezer.
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Weezer performs as a barbershop quartet at the start of the band’s Main Stage appearance.
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A hovering astronaut is a 45-foot art installation by Poetic Kinetics.
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The sun sets April 13 at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.
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The “Spectra” installation at the festival.
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Chilean indie electro-pop musician Javiera Mena takes the Sonora Stage at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival.
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Javiera Mena performs on the Sonora Stage on April 13.
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Fans of Chilean indie-electro artist Javiera Mena enjoy the vibe.
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Javiera Mena performs at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival.
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Nigerian singer Mr Eazi on stage at Coachella.
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DJs spin in front of a projection of Mr Eazi.
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Mr Eazi performs at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
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Dancers accompany Mr Eazi on stage at Coachella.
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Music festival security guards take a break from the sun under a large mobile art installation.
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The “H.i.P.O” art installation -- which stands for Hazardus interstellar Perfessional Operations.
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Francis Kéré’s art installation “Sarbale ke” is a set of towers at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) Accompanied by a drummer and her older brother, Finneas (with whom she recorded her album), Eilish ran through tunes from “When We All Fall Asleep” — including “My Strange Addiction” and “You Should See Me in a Crown” — about obsession and domination. For “When the Party’s Over,” huge screens onstage played her creepy music video for the song, in which Eilish cries black tears.
As it is on the record, the music was spare — often just a vocal, a bass line, a beat and various effects. But the minimal arrangements allowed Eilish’s vocals to carry through the desert air, even when she wasn’t doing much more than whispering, as in parts of “Bury a Friend.”
Fans generally sang along with every word, which came in handy during “All the Good Girls Go to Hell,” where she forgot some of her lyrics (or at least pretended to).
For “&Burn,” Eilish brought out a crew of dancers to execute a sequence set on a bed suspended on chains; she also welcomed Long Beach’s Vince Staples to do his guest verse on the song, though his microphone appeared not to be working — another rare technical snafu at Coachella.
Throughout the show, Eilish carried herself with a confidence beyond her years. But she didn’t disguise the fact that her Coachella debut was a big deal.
“I don’t deserve this at all,” she said at one point, to which her fans roared in disagreement.
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Twitter: @mikaelwood