Billie Eilish heads into the upcoming Grammy Awards with seven nominations, thanks to her sophomore album, Happier Than Ever. And no one is prouder than her big brother, collaborator and co-producer, FINNEAS. He spoke with Billboard about how the two created the song after which the album’s named.
“We just knew that it was important to the album,” he said, calling the song “cathartic. We were like, ‘Oh, this is definitely the title track.'”
FINNEAS reveals he and Billie began writing the track in 2019 while waiting to play a show in Denmark and were “super jet lagged.”
“I was sitting around with Billie, and we started writing that melody that was sort of the first chorus, the, ‘When I’m away from you, I’m happier than ever’ part,” he recalled, adding he played on a “little toy guitar” at the time.
FINNEAS continued, “It was correlated to what she was going through in her life at that exact moment. We knew that we liked that idea, but we weren’t in the period of time where we were like crunching down on an album, so we just put it in our back pocket and we’d write a line or two here and there.”
Eight months later, the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a lockdown and the pair found themselves “very devoted to making an album.”
“We revisited that idea and loved it,” said FINNEAS, adding he and Billie finished the title track “in May or June 2020.”
The Grammy nominee noted, “That’s a pretty long writing lifespan for songs — usually, songs are written pretty quickly. I think it’s a testament to how long and winding that song is in and of itself, so it was a really fulfilling process. I’m so happy with the way it turned out.”
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