Harrowing truth behind Billie Eilish’s hit track

Billie Eilish’s producer-songwriter brother just wants his sister to be happy.

Finneas O’Connell, 22, revealed that he and his family were “insanely concerned” if they first heard the Grammy winner’s dark song Everything I NEEDED.

“It was an interval where I was really concerned about my sister, and I felt as an enabler in assisting her write a song as bleak as that song was,” he told NY Times magazine. “Like the musical equivalent of giving an alcoholic another beer: ‘I’m not likely to support this.’”

The song was reportedly inspired by a dream Eilish, 18, had in September 2018 in which she found herself jumping off a building.

“I was in a really bad place mentally,” said the THEIF singer. “Therefore the lyrics - ‘I had a dream I got everything I wanted’ - are literal.”

Eilish has been open about her struggles with depression and has spoken previously about how Everything I NEEDED was inspired by suicide. However, the singer explained the song’s inspiration in-depth to the magazine, which featured the song in its total annual “25 Songs That Matter Now” list, ranking it at No. 7.

“We'd this big argument,” Eilish said of her brother. “Because I admitted something that I was, uh. It wasn’t a physical thing I was admitting. I don’t discover how to put it without actually saying it, and I don’t want to actually say it. But it was me admitting to something that was very seriously interested in my depression. An extremely serious step that I was admitting that I was thinking about taking.”

“Finneas said, ‘I don’t want to create a song about you killing yourself and how that’s everything you wanted!’ It became this huge thing,” she continued, “and I locked myself in my room, and I was within, just drawing on my wall.”

In her own fashion, Eilish insisted on staying true to herself.

“We haven’t really discussed this since, but Finneas was like, ‘I don’t want to keep making these songs that are only sad and they never progress,’” she said. “He wished to make songs that resolve ultimately. I was like: ‘But Finneas, that’s not how things work in life. And I’m not going to lie in a song and talk about how exactly I’m feeling good when I’m not.’”

That’s when her parents intervened - and the songwriting siblings decided to put the tune on hold.

“A whole lot of songs are written in retrospect, but that one felt like it had been written in real-time,” O’Connell said. “And I was like: ‘This is something we’ve surely got to write on the other hand of this hill. We need to go through this in real life. You can’t always fix your problems in a song.’”

Everything I Wanted was released as an individual in November 2019, after being rediscovered in a cache of voice memos. The pair decided it had been an improved time as Eilish “was in a better place,” after focusing on her mental health and seeing a therapist.

Ultimately, O’Connell got what he wanted, in ways, by creating a song that was authentically Billie but added a glimmer of hope.

“Thought I possibly could fly/So I stepped off the Golden/Nobody cried/Nobody even noticed,” Eilish sings in the verse. However in the chorus, O’Connell harmonises along with his sister: “You say, ‘As long as I’m here, no person can hurt you.’”

“Finneas and I both had the theory to help make the song about one another, rather than just me and how I was feeling,” Eilish said. “We'd a complete block, and just how we got through it had been to make it about us as siblings and what we mean to one another.”

Eilish also told the magazine that she’s struggled with depression since her adolescence, and death is a common theme in her music. In the morose Bury a pal, she croons, “I wanna end me,” and the song Bellyache references thoughts of murdering her own friends.