


It’s been amazing and an intense and insane feeling. Stuff like that was priceless in its weird way. I wasn’t expecting to get such a reaction, and some of the crazy headlines - like, Yahoo said, “68-year-old Elfman and 20-year-old Eilish make festival history.” And I just thought that was hilarious, Billie and I being the wunderkind and the elder statesman of Coachella. I read a lot of tweets and stuff where people were kind of confused and rattled and startled and like, “What’s going on?” - and ultimately that’s what I wanted. Everything else came together really well. But in the end, the one thing that I really wasn’t planning on was a dust storm, an actual sandstorm, in my face. That was a joke, but it’s no joke.” There were a hundred things to go wrong. What can possibly go wrong?” And then I’m sitting there before we went on, thinking, “Fuck, man. I was joking to a friend before the show, “Look, we have 30 minutes to set up a show that’s never been performed before with 50 musicians on stage. I was just relieved to have made it through in one piece. How are you feeling about it now that the first of two performances is under your belt? We discussed the possibility of this last year, when already so much time had passed since you first coming up with the idea of planning to do this Coachella performance in 2019 and then having been on the verge of it before the festival was canceled in 2020. Variety spoke with him Monday about how he felt coming off the adrenaline, with a repeat performance scheduled for weekend 2 of Coachella in five days. Elfman’s appearance would have inevitably have been one of Coachella’s most talked-about even if it hadn’t been gleefully received as a fast-forward tour de force - by untold millions watching the livestream at home as well as the thousands on hand.
