Billie Eilish has released a two-song EP titled Guitar Songs, featuring new tracks “TV” and “The 30th”.
In an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Eilish said “The 30th” was written last December, and was the first track she wrote following Happier Than Ever.
“That’s why it’s called ‘The 30th’ because something happened on November 30th, and it had just been the most indescribable thing to have to witness and experience. I had been writing down all these thoughts that I was having,” Eilish said. “I was with Finneas, and I was like, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you were planning on doing, but we need to write this song about this right now.’”
The song details an accident, with Eilish questioning, “What if it happened to you on a different day?/On a bridge where there wasn’t a rail in the way?/Or a neighbourhood street where the little kids play?” before breaking into the tender hook: “You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive”.
The second track “TV” debuted during a Manchester concert last month. On the track, Eilish sings, “And I’ll be in denial for at least a little while/What about the plans we made?/The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial/While they’re overturning Roe v Wade”.
“We wrote that line a few weeks before it was officially overturned. It was a placeholder of doom. I mean, it was the day of Glastonbury that it happened,” she told Lowe. “We were at this house, and I was sitting with the dogs in the grass. My mom came out, and she just stood there, and she went, ‘They overturned it.’ We all were just like… God, it was like a curtain of doom.”
Listen to the tracks below.