Billie Eilish Brings a Master Class in Intimacy to the Arena Stage

A few songs into the first night of Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour at the Videotron Center in Quebec City, Billie Eilish challenged the sold-out crowd of 18,000 to play the quiet game. “It’s literally the only time in the entire show I’m going to say this,” assured the superstar, 22, who sat cross-legged on the floor at center stage, “because I don’t want silence, ever.”

But there was a practical reason for the request: Eilish was about to record looped layers of her voice, so she could harmonize with herself while singing her hushed early hit “When the Party’s Over.” “I love doing my own vocal production,” she told the obliging audience, “and I thought I would bring that to the stage.”

“I love you!” cried an ecstatic fan, who was promptly shushed by the entire arena.

As Eilish built a lush bed of backing oohs and ahhs layer by layer, this hypnotic moment served a few purposes. It was a casual way to prove that she was singing live, and a clever means of bringing the intimacy of the bedroom recording studio — a fabled setting in the mythology of Eilish and her brother, the producer Finneas — to a massive, buzzing arena.

But it was also a canny way to replicate a quintessential element of Eilish’s recordings — a whispery, ASMR-inducing hush — that can be difficult to evoke on an arena stage, where impassioned fans obscure the nuances of her voice by screaming every lyric back to her.

Both ends of the dynamic spectrum are important to Eilish’s sound, a fact she underscores in the title of her adventurous third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” In this accompanying live show, she modulated them expertly, suddenly transforming acoustic numbers into arena-rocking power ballads and playing the adoring audience like a well-tuned instrument.