As though firmly on the Ariana Grande track when it comes to releasing albums in rapid succession, Billie Eilish has just released her first single since her debut full-length record, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. Entitled “Everything I Wanted,” the song feels like a rather direct response to her meteoric rise to fame–even if she was quoted as saying, “This song is one my brother and I wrote about each other. No matter what happens, we always have been and will be there to make it better.” The bro in question is of course Finneas O’Connell, her constant collaborator and she his Freudian girlfriend.
Recorded at their studio in Highland Park, in between working on the track whilst Eilish has been on tour, the controlled, almost whispery song offers Lorde vibes in spades. Something rather in the vein of “Liability,” in fact, another lamenting rumination on the pratfalls of fame, and a dream coming true transforming all at once into a nightmare. Or, as Billie puts it, “I had a dream/I got everything I wanted/Not what you’d think/And if I’m bein’ honest/It might’ve been a nightmare.” Considering her long-standing inspiration from a somewhat hellish dreamscape–hence the title of her record and various allusions to monsters under the bed that just won’t go away–it’s no surprise that she should turn to dream imagery once more to come up with yet another eerie and affecting composition.
One that again implements suicide visuals as it did on “Listen Before I Go,” yet another instance of standing on a bridge with her back turned to her loved ones who don’t seem to care what she’s about to do. Specifically name checking San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge (the emblem of which also serves as the impressionistic album artwork), Eilish stated of the song, “We started writing it because I literally had a dream that I killed myself and nobody cared and all of my best friends basically came out in public and said ‘Oh, we never liked her.’” So it is that she rues, “Thought I could fly/So I stepped off the Golden, mm/Nobody cried/Nobody even noticed/I saw them standing right there/Kinda thought they might care.” Speaking to this fear and anxiety about not being relevant in her most relevant of states is indeed a very “Drowned World/Substitute For Love” move, for what pop star hasn’t occasionally dreamed of trading in their fame for just one more minute of anonymity among friends who haven’t slightly backed away because of this newfound spotlight (also a theme that appears in Spice World)?
Eilish mentor Lana Del Rey has examined much the same phenomenon of fulfilling the ambition of becoming a singer without fully realizing the extremity of the by-product: no privacy. This most succinctly captured on 2017’s “13 Beaches” from Lust for Life, a roving track about the impossibility of finding a secluded beach from with to avoid the proverbial paparazzi click (though one would think money could surely secure some sort of private situation).
The pressures of being exalted like another pop culture messiah is not without its drawbacks, to be sure, with Eilish bemoaning, “Everybody wants something from me now/And I don’t wanna let ‘em down.” The unremitting burden results in the memorable lyrics, “I tried to scream/But my head was underwater/They called me weak/Like I’m not just somebody’s daughter.” The thread of a Kafkaesque eternity is the direct result of Eilish’s relationship to her dream world, vocal about her sleep paralysis and other elements of her dream life with such comments as, “Dreams are a really intense part of my life. I’ll go through a month where I’ll have the same nightmare every single night—a dream that’s so bad that the whole day is off, or a dream that’s so good that none of it’s true.” Ah, but this fame thing, it is very true. And it’s only going to grow larger than that imagined monster under her bed.
In addition to continuing to tour in 2020, Eilish also announced another upcoming video for “xanny” and two more new tracks. So once again, it’s clear she can’t jump off a bridge just yet, she still has too much spotlight glow to bask in.
