You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Billie Eilish started releasing music when she was 14 years old. Her debut album came out last year when she was 17. It debuted at number 1 on Billboard. It went triple platinum and won 5 Grammys.
Billie made that record with her brother and creative partner, the producer and artist Phineas. While working on that album, they also started writing this song, Everything I Wanted, which came out as a single in November 2019. It was Billie's second top 10 hit and it went double platinum too. I spoke to both Billie and Phineas about how the song was made and in this episode you'll hear the original voice memo they made while writing and the two of them explained why the song was almost never finished.
I had a dream, I got everything I wanted, but when I wake up I see you're with me. My name is Billie Eilish. My name is Phineas, I'm a co-writer and producer on this song. So the first night that we wrote it was I think September 2018. 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? Should we try writing one or two more?
I literally had had a dream the night before that I had jumped off like a building or something, I jumped off something in my dream and I basically had died in my dream. The whole dream was me watching how everything went after I died. I was there for it and I could see everything and I was looking at my life through my non-existence to seeing how it was going.
I remember in the dream there were newspapers that said problematic 16 year old Billie Eilish has finally killed herself and my best friends were doing an interview and they were like, we never really liked her, we're pretty glad that she died. So it was definitely one of those dreams that was like everything you've been thinking put into a horrible, horrible reality.
I couldn't think of anything else, it was the only thing that was on my mind. So I was very, very caught up and distracted and distant the entire day and I couldn't stop thinking about it, I couldn't stop feeling it and being so happy. I was feeling it and being scared and worried and so we just sat down and I told Vinnie's about it and we just had to write about it. I don't know, it just needed to be said.
Billie has been not only my primary collaborator for the last five years but my most intertwined creative relationship. It's like my best friend in the world and has been and I definitely would have talked about it with Vinnie's even if we hadn't been making music at all. Having Vinnie's listen and also know me in a way that I don't know me has really been important for our creative process.
I think one of the benefits of Billie being such an assertive person and having such a clear cut vision is that when I am working on music production for her, I know the color palette that something should be. So I crafted what became almost the entire instrumental of this song. What I try to do with instrumental is like have something that feels organic and human and then put it on its edge and play it in a way that might be a little atypical.
So just a piano for the first 20 seconds of the song, how can I make that unique? And so that was when the side chain compression idea came to me. And then the side chaining in this song's case, it's a compression plugin put on the piano and then configured to react not to the piano itself but to the information of another track in this case, a kick drum. And so you get this sort of un-delating like tied going in and out feeling on the piano without even having to hear the kick drum.
And then it comes in halfway through the verse. The piano is so beautiful. It just drew me in like right away. 95% of the time, Billy is there the entire time I'm working on production because she is so informative to it and she'll save me a ton of time. If she's not there, I could really quickly go off the depend into an area that she wouldn't like. And so Billy's kind of always there to guide it.
There's this kind of like tonal snare to the song, which is actually just a synth layer, but it only plays on the twos and fours. It sounds like the snare is like snow white in the seven dwarves, like an ice pick hitting a gold mine or something, right? It has that like ping sound, which I just thought was super interesting. And that combined with the side chain compression of the piano, those were the two things that got us excited. And then we were just writing to that.
This was all in the bedroom that I had in my parents' house in Highland Park. The best thing that I had in my childhood bedroom is my granddad's beat-up upright Everett piano. I mean, that piano sitting there just as an acoustic instrument in the room is such a huge help in terms of writing songs because you play the loop, but the loop on your computer can like drive you crazy.
And so just sitting there and playing the piano and going as slow as you want and picking up a chord change if you want it to be there is so vital. Wait, my brother and I have voiced memos on our phone and we record everything we do and we record all types of stuff. That audio file is essentially us doing what we always do when we write songs, which is just make believing them into existence.
And I think it is also one of the many advantages of working with your sibling is it's a very vulnerable process to be just singing gibberish and bad melodies over stuff for an hour to get the right thing because it's too scary. You know, luckily Billy is not intimidated by me at all. I have a dream, I've got everything I've wanted, but it's not what you think. She's perfectly comfortable to sing any idea that comes into her head until she comes up with the perfect one.
I had a dream, I got everything I wanted, not what you think. And if I'm being honest, it might have been a nightmare. It's a crazy dream, dreams are so weird. I was also really depressed at the time and had been suicidal in the past and it was weird telling Phineas about the dream I had because I was like, well I had this dream that I kind of got what I wanted, which is, you know, dying, which is ridiculous.
And when I think about it, now it's like Jesus Christ, that's dark, but to be honest with you, it was real. You know, Billy is the person that I love most in the world. So hearing the person that you love most in the world, talk about something that's so clearly bleak was an upsetting experience. In the actual dream, when I jumped off, there were fans standing there at the bottom and they just filmed me jump off and nobody did anything.
I thought I could fly, so I stepped off the golden, nobody cried. Nobody even noticed I saw them standing right there. Kind of thought they might care. Phineas got mad because he didn't want to write about it. You know, he didn't like to think of me as in this headspace. I think it actually was really scary to me when we were writing this song to hear her articulate her depression in a way that was sort of more obvious than I think she was making it on a day-to-day basis.
And so that was kind of alarming. I got pretty flipped out and told her so. I remember it became like an entire family argument. Like my mom came in and tried to be, you know, the mediator. And then it was just a lot of yelling from me pretty much because I couldn't believe that they were telling me that I shouldn't be writing about this. And I realized in the middle of it that they just didn't understand that it was actually how I felt. They didn't see that.
So I went into my room and I locked myself in my room. And it was so intense. And because of that, we didn't write the rest of it for like probably half a year. We were really stuck for like a second. We didn't really know where to go with it because it was such a downer of a song. The song definitely wouldn't have been the same song that it ended up being. Had we written every word of it that day.
I think sort of life had to move on. And the place that Billy was in and the place that I was in when we ended up finishing the song was a really different mental state. In March 2019, Billy's debut album came out and it was an instant hit by June. It had sold over a million copies in the US alone. But everything I wanted wasn't on it. We didn't finish it in time for the album, but we liked everything that we had for it. And in August or something, we kind of opened it back up.
Over the summer, we toured a bunch and every time I had a guitar in a green room for the next year, I would play those chords and try to pick out the next line. So there was like line by line, it would come together in places like Victoria, Australia. And then we'd get another line in Berlin, Germany. And because I was getting better mentally and I was working on my mental health, I was like seeing it from a new perspective and also wanting it to be a different perspective.
And I remember we were sitting in Phineas' room and we were like, well, what is the end of this song? Like, where does it go? It's talking about a horrible thing that happened. How do we make that better? What do we do that can help people that feel that way too? And we just kind of both, I feel like, realize at the same time that the two of us, meaning me and my brother Phineas, were that.
And that we were going to make the chorus about us and our relationship with each other and how we both pull each other out of dark places in our lives. We were parsing our way through the chorus and we were trying to figure out how to change the narrator. Because obviously the verse is in first person and the chorus is also in first person, but they're playing different roles.
And so I thought if we introduce the chorus with end you say that recontextualized everything and then it allows it to be a conversation as opposed to one person. When you say as long as I am here, no one can hurt you. Don't wanna lie here, but you can learn too. I think is a great billy expression, which is just like you can deal with it, like you can deal with essentially what we all do throughout our lives at certain points, which is like exist because others need us to sometimes.
I think there are days we've all had in our lives where we would check out that day. We'd go upstairs and put the covers over us for the entire duration of that 24 hour period because we do not have the drive or the motivation, but you're called upon by other people in your life to be there for them.
And so the song essentially became a song about our own relationship with each other, which was that we'd ride or die, that we'd be there for each other through terrible experiences and the greatest experiences. That's the two-way street of having a sibling as you have this person who is just interwoven into your life, especially in our case just because we've made a career together. And then, especially because this song is about him and I, it just made sense to have his voice in there.
As long as I'm here, no one can hurt you. Don't wanna lie here, but you can learn too. Because I put out music on my own and produce music for other artists, there have been a few articles written about me that have titles that are like, you know, Phineas is more than just Billy Eilish's brother. And my counter to that is always like, I don't care if I'm anything more than that.
Like, that is plenty to me. I think that really became part of the narrative of this song was that it was not a romantic love song. It was a love song written by like a family member that loves you. Now, if I could change the way it just is so, you wouldn't wonder why here they don't deserve you. Once we just got the vibe of where it was gonna go and how it was gonna play out, that's kind of when the song clicked.
And I don't think we would have been able to write that had I still been in that really, really dark headspace because I don't think I would have been able to find a light in that, you know, whole that I was in. So we came home from that tour in September and finished the song in the next couple of weeks. Second verse, architecture in songs is like all about reintroducing the same ideas in a compelling attention grabbing way.
And I felt that the piano's presence had become kind of taken for granted. And the way to get someone to pay attention to something is to take it out and put it back in. So I pulled it out. I introduced this kind of like low, cordal base arpeggio. I tried to scream. But my head was undue, I've always been a huge fan of sort of like literalization of lyrics. So I loved the idea of pulling out all of the high end on her voice when she says my head was underwater. Just her kind of muffled sounds.
But my head was undue, I've called me weak. There's so many vocals that you would never even notice if somebody didn't play them isolated. Weak. I thought I could fly. So I stepped off the golden. If they're harmonies, if they're like a little whisper, if they're like just repeating the word. It really changes the song. I did so many vocals. It's just so fun to see what your brain comes up with without you even thinking. Feels like yesterday was a year ago, but I don't want to let anybody know.
Because everybody wants something from me now, and I don't want to let them down. That like space between you just got big and then you have to make something else is a very scary place. All you want to do is satisfy. And because my album had come out, and because I was having this really big moment, but I had been touring all summer, and I hadn't really put stuff out, all you're thinking about is like, how do I make them still care about me? Which is something I never thought about before.
I didn't give a damn who cared about me, but because of that little space between like first album and the next thing you put out, it's a big deal. And this was when I was doing good. I was happy. I was living my life. I was doing really good. But at the same time, I was very aware of the fact that there were a lot of people that I could let down. Because everybody wants something from me now, and I don't want to let them down.
And then there's the outro, which is if I knew it all then, what I do it again. That's like the epitome of what that dream was. Talking about fame, and you know, if you were to commit suicide, and you could see how life went after that, would you do it again? If I knew it all then, would I do it again? Would I do it again? If they knew what they said would go straight to my head, what would they say instead?
You said that line is also about fame. And to the extent that it's about that, do you have an answer if you knew it all then, would you do it again? It's, would I, for a while there, I thought, no, I would not. But I think now, I would do it again. I never, ever thought that I would be able to say that I got out of that dark place. Since then, yes, I have changed so, so much, and I worked on my life, and I held on, and I just basically was patient, and got out of it.
And I can't even believe that, and it doesn't mean that I'm always going to be happy for the rest of my life. Now, I'm going to have times where I go back into a dark place. But it is important to remember that you do get out of that, and it's just going to happen again, but you're going to do it again, and you're going to be okay again.
I think more than anything, it made the song more interesting to me to go there, to start in a place of like this hopelessness, and to arrive at the sort of destination of like companionship and love. Because that is the truth of my life, and of Billy's life, is just that we are both there for each other, and our parents are both there for us, and we're just really lucky in that sense.
It's interesting, because that's like one of the only songs we've ever written, where half of it was written in a super different place than the other half. I fully can listen to it and not relive it, and I think that it's because of where we took the song. That's what it needed. It needed that, because that's what I needed. You need somebody that's going to be like, I am here for you.
It's nice to look back and have gotten better and happier in life, but it's important that I think we remember how we did feel so that we're grateful for how we feel now. I think now when I listen to it, it almost feels like better to listen, because it shows me how much I've grown. And now, here's everything I wanted by Billy Eilish in its entirety. I think that I'm not what you think, and if I'm being honest, it might have been an nightmare to anyone who might care.
I thought I could fly, so I stepped off the golden, nobody cried, nobody even noticed I saw them standing right there. I kind of thought they might care, I had a dream, I got everything I wanted, but when I wake up I see you with me. And you say as long as I'm here, no one can hurt you, don't wanna lie here, but you can learn too. If I could change the way you'd just see so, you wouldn't wonder why here, they don't deserve you.
I tried to scream, but my head was under water, they called me weak, like I'm not just somebody's daughter, it could have been an nightmare. But if I'd liked they would write there, and it feels like yesterday was a year ago, but I don't wanna let anybody know, cause everybody wants something from me now, and I don't wanna let them down, I had a dream, I got everything I wanted, but when I wake up I see you with me.
And you say as long as I'm here, no one can hurt you, don't wanna lie here, but you can learn too. And if I could change the way you'd just see so, you wouldn't wonder why here, they don't deserve you. If I knew it all then would I do it again, would I do it again? If they knew it they said, we'll go straight to my head, we'll listen to that. Visit songexploder.net for more on Billie Eilish and Phineas.
You'll find links to buy or stream everything I wanted, and you can watch the music video for it, which Billie herself directed. Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKit. If you're an independent artist, DistroKit is a great way to get your music distributed. You get unlimited uploads, and you get to keep 100% of your royalties and earnings.
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Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of creative independent podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can get a song exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at songexploder. My name is Rishikesh Herway. Thanks for listening.