Billboard

**Billboard** is a media brand publishing news, videos, reviews, charts, and more. Banks did three interviews (two with photoshoots) with them, on 2013, 2014 and 2019. She also did a pocket show on their studio on 2019.

## Written Interview #1

Most music fans understand that some artists do not control their online platforms, and leave their mass-produced "thoughts" to their handlers. Los Angeles singer-songwriter Banks is more up front about this practice than most. "My manager is going to run the Social Media stuff," she writes on her official Facebook profile. But she also doesn't shut herself off from her swelling fan base; the following line on her Facebook page reads, "If you ever want to talk call me," and after a dash, she lists her cell phone number.

That number, Banks tells Billboard, is very real, and fans who have stumbled across her entrancing pop tracks online have spent the past few months calling or texting her.

"I've never really been into social media -- I don't have a Facebook, I don't do Twitter or Instagram or anything," she says. "But I still really want to be able to connect with people and have people make connections through my music, so I figured, 'What a better way than to give out my number?'"

Banks says that she answers every call or text she receives -- mostly texts, since she believes that most people are "too scared to call" -- but that might be difficult if her burgeoning career continues on its upward trajectory. Four months after posting her first song onto Soundcloud, the 25-year-old is being touted as a magnetic writer with songs to obsess over. Her rhapsodic voice possesses a frail vulnerability and recalls singers like Feist and Erykah Badu.

Although her disregard for Twitter updates and lack of commonplace promotion have saddled her with the "mysterious chanteuse" descriptor ("It's like I'm this creature that just hatched as a grown woman," Banks says with a laugh), the blogosphere is starting to listen. "Before I Ever Met You" has garnered 218,000 plays on Soundcloud after being released at the top of 2013, and the video for her newest original track, "Warm Water," has scooped up 189,000 YouTube views in less than a month.

Jillian Banks began writing music at 15 years old, after a friend gave her a toy keyboard while she was "going through a tough time" with her family. When she was feeling helpless, songwriting tapped into something empowering. "I could say anything I wanted -- I could be as graphic as I wanted, I could be as real and as vulnerable and as angry and raw, and it was the most liberating feeling," she says. "I became addicted ever since."

Years past, and the singer kept the hobby close to the vest as a therapeutic outlet instead of a means to stardom. After posting "Before I Ever Met You" online and watching it quickly receive 50,000 plays, however, her outlook started to change. "Work," a collaboration with Lil Silva, was played on BBC Radio 1, and her new label, the London-based Good Years, released "Before I Ever Met You" as an official debut single in February (Banks is signed to Harvest Records in the U.S.).

Since then, new songs like "Fall Over" and "Warm Water" have showcased the stellar song craft that Banks had kept in the shadows for so long. The latter track was produced by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, whom she met in Los Angeles at a meet-up arranged by their managers, and was given a stark, black-and-white music video shot by Dylan Knight.

Next up: Banks' live debut, with tour dates that will hopefully be announced "really soon," and an EP due out in the fall that might be a little darker than her previously issued tracks. "'Warm Water' is such a sweet, gentle song," Banks says, "and the songs on the EP might not be as sweet and gentle."

## Written Interview #2

Imagine the middle bit of a Venn diagram between socialite Olivia Palermo and 1990s model Bridget Hall – if both were in mourning – and you’d get breakout alt-pop star Banks. The 26-year-old singer, born Jillian Banks, is almost always shown in videos and photos dressed in all black, glowering from behind a sheet of glossy dark hair. And her songs sound just as brooding.

“I found music when I was very dark,” says the Los Angeles native over a fittingly austere cup of iceless tap water at Andante Coffee Roasters in Hollywood. “I felt unheard, with inner dialogues that I didn’t know how to express.”

But now, in the run-up to the Sept. 9 release of her debut album, Goddess (Harvest), her inner dialogues can be heard everywhere. “Before I Ever Met You” and “Change” were featured in Grey’s Anatomy; “Waiting Game” lent smolder to a scene in the film Divergent and a Victoria’s Secret ad (“You make me feel all sexy, but it’s causing me shame,” Banks murmurs, as a model struts down a Parisian street). In 2013, she opened for gloom&B star The Weeknd, a kindred spirit, and appeared on the cover of V magazine with fellow alt-pop princesses Lorde, Haim and Say Lou Lou. This year she sold out theaters on her own headlining run and played a packed Coachella set.

It’s a happy career launch with heartsick beginnings: Banks found music at 15 almost accidentally, fidgeting with a toy keyboard as a salve for the anger she felt over her parents’ divorce. “It wasn’t like, ‘Today I will start writing music,’ ” she recalls. “All of a sudden, my fingers were twiddling on the keys and I didn’t know what I was playing. But a weird melody would come out and it was like unnngh.” Banks widens her dark, oversize eyes. “Ten pounds – just all this weight lifted off me,” she says.

Music was therapy for Banks, who majored in psychology at the University of Southern California – it wasn’t meant to be public. “It released more frustration than talking to anyone did,” she says. “I kept it private because it was the most vulnerable part of me.”

It wasn’t until a friend passed some rough iPhone voice memos to Trevor McFedries, a DJ/producer who has worked with Katy Perry and Sky Ferreira, that Banks relented. McFedries signed on as her manager and arranged a trip to London, where the singer worked with tastemaker favorites like Sohn and Lil Silva. They helped mold her distinctly British sound, and encouraged her to bare all on two 2013 EPs, Fall Over and London. “I wrote so many songs, I felt empty – in a good way,” she says.

The result of all the anguish and hard work is Goddess, a beautiful 14-track set that carries a cavernous, almost mentholated quality, as if you’re listening from underneath a capsized rowboat. Like Banks herself – on this day, she’s wearing a dark Helmet Lang bolero jacket and tailored trousers – it’s glammed-up gloom.

“You should’ve seen me at Coachella,” she says, tilting her head and pretending to wipe sweat off her brow, “just skulking in the shade.”

**Banks Bio:**

**From:** Los Angeles

**Signed to:** Harvest

**Sounds like:** An after-hours indie-pop blend of Aaliyah, Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey

**Fan army:** 67,000 Twitter followers; 78,000 Instagram followers; 247,000 Facebook likes

**Me Time:** Banks unwinds with three-hour walks. “It just feels good to be alone with your brain,” she says.

## Written Interview #3

Two years ago, Banks suddenly retreated from her flourishing career. Now she’s emerging with her most confident album to date -- and finally feels at peace.

In the artwork for the single “Gimme,” Banks’ first solo release since 2017, the synth-pop singer gazes into the distance as she clutches her bare breast, which is just out of frame. The provocative image, which inspired the cheeky #TitsOutForBanks Twitter campaign among her dedicated fans, mirrors the directness of the song: “You can call me that bitch,” growls Banks in the first verse. The artwork was a move she now calls “a little bit risky.” But after being out of the spotlight for two years – during which the dark, alt-pop aesthetic that she, Lorde and Halsey helped popularize exploded even further into the mainstream through the likes of Billie Eilish – a risk was exactly what Banks, 30, needed to take. The new single, she says from her Los Angeles home in the hills, “slaps you in the face. It’s a part of my personality that is fearless – I wanted to come back with that.”

Born Jillian Rose Banks, the Orange County, California, native started writing songs at 15, though it wasn’t until she had graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in psychology that she started posting tracks on SoundCloud, including “Before I Ever Met You,” which she uploaded in February 2013. With the help of DJ Yung Skeeter, who connected with Banks in college and offered to manage her, the song made its way to Zane Lowe, then at BBC Radio 1. The following month, Banks landed a record deal with London-based label Good Years Recordings, and six months later she signed stateside with Harvest Records. Her 2014 debut full-length, Goddess, hit No. 12 on the Billboard 200, led by the electro-pop single “Beggin for Thread,” which peaked at No. 11 on the Alternative chart. The album’s 2016 follow-up, The Altar, also entered the Billboard 200’s top 20. She has since garnered 513 million on-demand streams in the United States, according to Nielsen Music; landed synchs on shows like Girls and Power; collaborated with 6LACK; and, on her last tour, booked 3,000-capacity venues.

But years of nonstop promoting and touring left her feeling rootless, and Banks was ready for a timeout. Since graduating in 2010, she had put all her time and energy into getting her career off the ground. And once it did, maintaining a rapid-fire pace was a necessity. But as a result, Banks never had the chance to process her trajectory. As she approached 30, she realized she needed to carve out time for herself. “It was very necessary,” she says of her break. “I never really had time to digest how much my life had changed. I needed to rediscover how to live in one place, reestablish a nesting place and be a little more grounded. I purposely told my management, ‘I don’t want to leave for at least a year.’”

She didn’t. Free from touring, she wrote nonstop; the results make up her third album, III, out in July on Harvest. Hunkering down in L.A.’s Westlake Recording Studios, she gathered an intimate circle of collaborators, including Buddy Ross (Frank Ocean’s music director), BJ Burton (Bon Iver, Francis & The Lights) and Hudson Mohawke (Kanye West, Drake). And though she says she’s usually possessive of lyrics and melodies, she opened the door to songwriters she had never worked with before: Trey Campbell (Ella Mai, Bebe Rexha) and Kevin Garrett (Beyoncé). She kept things tightknit outside the studio as well, working for the first time entirely in-house with Capitol Music Group.

Starting with the bite of lead single “Gimme,” the songs on III are more fiery than ever, with lyrics about desire and pain sung over driving bass. Banks nearly named the album Eros, after the Greek god of love – which would have fallen in line with her other divinely inspired album titles – but felt the word wasn’t strong enough to encompass the breadth of what she had written about. Her new album, she says, covers a richer chapter in her life, and the number three, with its definitive simplicity, more effectively conveys a beginning, middle and end. “I was going through a major growth spurt when I made this album,” she says, including moving on from a breakup. She now describes herself as a “wise woman” instead of a “naive girl.” Rather than giving in to bitter or jaded lyrics, she tapped into the early assurance heard on the Altar track “Fuck With Myself” and her 2017 one-off “Underdog.” On III’s closing track, she replaces her lost love with a new one: Her 4-year-old niece’s voice saying “I love you” fills the album’s last few seconds.

On Banks’ last tour she introduced movement into her sets, which featured elaborate goth-inspired costumes and veiled backup dancers. When it comes time to hit the road again, she promises her delivery will be even “bigger and better” than before -- largely because, she says, she kept in mind how new songs would translate live while making them in the studio.

But until then, she’s entirely content to stay put in her “quiet little retreat” of a home a while longer. She’s far removed from the always-on-the-go Banks who in 2013 was eager to jump-start her career, and she couldn’t be happier about it. “I’m in a very peaceful place,” she says now. “What a relief.”

## Video Interview

BANKS Recalls Her Best Fan Encounter & Reveals Her Childhood Love For Justin Timberlake Billboard

## References

<references>

1. ↑ https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/1568655/banks-quick-rising-pop-starlet-explains-why-her-fans-have-her-cell
2. ↑ https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6244033/banks-pop-star-interview
3. ↑ https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8512881/banks-iii-new-album-interview