Billie Eilish seems to have fully shifted her attention to her upcoming sophomore album, one that her fans hope they won’t have to wait too long for before it arrives. The singer recently released her “Therefore I Am” single, one that was paired with a video that found her enjoying the space in an empty mall.
The track also followed her “My Future” release from this past summer. Before moving forward with any other new releases, Billie and her brother Finneas stopped by Song Exploder to deconstruct the creation of their 2019 single, “Everything I Wanted.”
The song was Billie’s first official release since she dropped her critically-acclaimed album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in spring 2019. The duo brought listeners on a journey through the song’s creation by letting listeners know that the song came as a result of second-guessing the completeness of Billie’s debut as they were putting the finishing touches on it.
“We were at the tail-end of working on Billie’s debut album and we were having that sort of second-guessing moment where we thought, ‘Do we have every song for this album?’” Finneas said. “‘Should we try writing one or two more?’”
The “Bad Guy” singer then revealed that a dream where she dies after jumping off a building inspired the “Everything I Wanted” track. “The whole dream was me watching how everything went after I’d died,” she said. “I was there for it and I could see everything. I remember in the dream there were newspapers that said, ‘Problematic 16-year-old Billie Eilish has finally killed herself.’” She added, “My best friends were doing an interview and they were like, ‘Oh, we never really liked her.’”
After telling her brother about the dream, Eilish said that Finneas “didn’t want to write about it.” “I think it was actually really scary to me to hear her articulate her depression in a way that was more obvious than she was making it on a day-to-day basis,” Finneas said. “So that was kind of alarming. I got pretty flipped out – and told her so.”
The duo concluded the episode by saying that despite the song taking an additional half a year to finish because of the intensity of Billie’s dream, they were able to revisit it while they were on tour after she saw improvements in her mental health.
You can listen to the full episode here.