"Bad Guy" is the biggest hit from Billie Eilish's debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, and now the pop star gave Rolling Stone a peek at its creation for a new video.
Together with her brother and producing partner Finneas, Eilish outlines how the song was pieced together over a year. Work on the track officially began, Eilish explains, when she composed the distorted outro that appears on the final version of "Bad Guy." She stopped writing the song for a year, then she and Finneas picked back up work on the eventual No. 1 hit.
The meticulousness behind the creation of "Bad Guy" is impressive: Eilish recounts how long it took to get everything just right, from the harmonies down to the pronunciation of "duh." Also notable is their conscious desire to subvert pop traditions on the song's hook, which doesn't contain any lyrics. "If you go to pop songwriting school, that's the part where you go Yeahhh!" Finneas says. "We could have done that, but we did not," Eilish agrees.
Watch the video above, and read Billie Eilish's FADER cover story here.
