Sometime late last year, Billie Eilish released a track called ‘everything I wanted’. But this is no ordinary track, even by Eilish’s measure. Here’s a first look into what she had to say about the song and the lyrics of a very poignant number: “Pretty much that whole song is about me and Finneas’ relationship as siblings. We started writing it because I literally had a dream that I killed myself and nobody cared and all of my best friends and people that I worked with basically came out in public and said, like, ‘Oh, we never liked her.’ In the dream, the fans didn’t care. The internet shit on me for killing myself, all this stuff, and it really did mess me up.”
A song that could easily be mistaken for a love song goes something like: “So I stepped off the Golden / Nobody cried / Nobody even noticed”.
The trappings of fame and a commitment to the world of music brought out a side of the 18-year-old we are forced to look in the eye and realize what the human condition can look like in such pressured environments. When you hear the lyrics of the song — really hear it — you’ll find her crooning but also almost crying: “I tried to scream / But my head was underwater / They called me weak / Like I’m not just somebody’s daughter”.
Oof! The intensity, the rawness that we are familiar with since ‘wish you were gay’ becomes evident here. The conversations surrounding mental health have kicked off in the circles surrounding Eilish and it is high time indeed that they did. And they’re just about to get more real as Billie revealed that the song was about to be much darker than she previously revealed – it was actually going to be about her going through with her suicidal tendencies. Finneas, her brother, eventually intervened and pushed Billie to make the song about “being on the other sde of the hill”