Ever heard a song on the radio and thought, ‘If only I had written that masterpiece’? Well it might comfort you to know that even your chart-topping, Grammy-winning songwriting idols aren’t immune to those moments.
In a new interview with BBC Radio 1, Billie Eilish – whose new album Hit Me Hard and Soft arrived last month – takes us through her personal list of “songs that saved me”.
Among those that made the cut were Avril Lavigne’s Complicated – which Eilish says was “always playing in the car when I was a little girl”, Spooky Black’s Take The Blame So I Don’t Have To, Runaway by Aurora, Sexy Boy‘s Air and Sufjan Stevens’ Fourth of July.
The singer-songwriter also names the Beatles’ track Julia, from The White Album, as the song she wishes she’d written.
“The Beatles are my biggest inspiration and the main thing that was in my ears when I was a child and for my youth” Eilish explains. “And this song is just incredible.”
Also in the chat, Eilish looks back on the making of the track Lunch on her latest record. Prompted on the song’s origins, the musician admits that “It’s hard to even remember.”
“I think it started with the little beat. It’s kind of fun to think about the making of a song – you can’t even remember; it kind of, just, ‘happened.’”
She adds that one of the first steps was her brother and producer FINNEAS taking out the electric guitar and “doing a bunch of crazy stuff” on it.
“He went so hard on it. He killed it with the guitar,” says Eilish. “I remember going home one time and he just sent me that little ending part where it’s like [sings] ‘feels like she might be the one’, and then I just remember being like ‘you did this without me?!’ But I feel like he felt like he had to – he was like, ‘no, no, no – I got to compete with your fun lyrics’. mean, he also wrote the lyrics with me but, yeah, he came in strong on the production.”
