Billie Eilish Reveals How Her Parents Put the Finishing Touches on New Rosalía Song

Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell enlisted the help of their mom and dad, as well as Finneas' girlfriend Claudia Sulewski, when writing the last verse of their new Rosalía song, "Lo Vas A Olvidar."

By Lindsay Weinberg Jan 21, 2021 9:26 PMTags
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Billie Eilish loves to keep it in the family.

Of course, the record-breaking Grammy winner famously collaborated with her older brother Finneas O'Connell to produce her smash debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. 

But for her latest project, Billie reached out to some other members of her family tree for a little bit of help. This time, she turned to none other than mom and dad for some songwriting inspo. 

On Jan. 21, the 19-year-old singer told Apple Music about her experience co-writing her new song "Lo Vas A Olvidar" ("You Will Forget Her") with Rosalía over the past year. The Euphoria song and its music video finally dropped on Thursday. 

Billie told Zane Lowe how she and Rosalía originally wrote the first verse up until the chorus all the way back in January 2019. About six months later, they came back to it and the "Con Altura" artist wrote the second verses.

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"We didn't get back to it until literally last year, 2020. And so that was mid-quarantine. We're just like, 'Yeah, let's work on this song.' Because in our heads, we were going to put it out in the summertime," Billie explained. "I just was like, 'It needs something else... We wrote it was the whole song was done, except we needed this last line."

The answer came to her during one of her family's movie nights. During quarantine, Billie and Finneas, along with his girlfriend Claudia Sulewski, meet up with their parents Maggie Baird and Patrick O'Connell for dinner and a movie every Friday night.

Though Billie admitted their hangouts "got old pretty quick," during one particularly "good one," she and her bro offered to play "Lo Vas A Olvidar" for the fam.

She recalled asking, "You guys want to hear this Rosalía song we've been working on?" adding, "We all came down to the studio, and we listened, and me and Finneas were like, 'Should we just write this line right now?' So I was sitting in the room with my entire family."

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She then revealed how her own parents helped her finish the last verse. "We both, all of us, including my dad and my mom, they were like, 'What if it was like...' We were all giving ideas," the fashion icon said. "So technically, they should have a writing credit, because we all wrote that line right at the end."

The savage line in question: "You say it to me like it's something I have any choice in/ If I wasn't important, then why would you waste all your poison?" 

Clearly, she and Finneas got their creative genes from their parents, considering their mom is a screenwriter and actress, while their dad is an actor who has scored minor parts in Iron Man, The West Wing and Supergirl.

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During her interview, Billie also gave a behind-the-scenes look at her creative process with Rosalía as they worked on "Lo Vas A Olvidar." 

"It's so not something I feel like I've done," the "Bad Guy" singer said. "Rosalía opened a little channel in me that I hadn't tried out before."

She noted that a lot of the track is in Spanish, which she called "so important." As Billie put it, "When were writing the song, I remember her saying something about, 'It should be in English.' And I was like, 'No, no, no. It should be in Spanish. It's so beautiful.'"

It turns out Billie is a longtime fan of non-English music, including songs in Russian, Spanish and French. She shared, "I like tons of music from languages I don't even speak... I've been really intrigued by it pretty much my whole life."

When Rosalía told her the meaning behind the lyrics, Billie said the track took on an even greater meaning. "I was like, 'That's beautiful, and the delivery is beautiful, and the emotion is beautiful.'"

Take a listen above.

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