Billie Eilish and Rosalía‘s tag-team efforts on their highly anticipated Spanish-language collab “Lo Vas a Olvidar” included a few additional collaborators: Eilish’s whole family.
Although Eilish and her brother Finneas are already known as a hitmaking team with a boatload of Grammys to their name following last year’s big sweep, their parents Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell semi-officially worked with the superstars on the song too.
Eilish spoke with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on Thursday (Jan. 21) to talk about how her and Rosalía’s song, which Finneas co-wrote and produced, came together in January 2019 and received its finishing touch in 2020 during lockdown. She sat down with her mother, father and brother in the studio after their Friday tradition of dinner and a movie to come up with the final lyric in English: “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?”
“So my mom, my dad, Finneas, me, Finneas’ girlfriend Claudia, we all came down to the studio, and we listened, and me and Finneas were like, ‘Should we just write this line right now?'” she recalled. “So I was sitting in the room with my entire family. We both, all of us, including my dad and my mom, they were like, ‘What if it was like….’ We were all giving ideas. So technically they should have a writing credit, because we all wrote that line right at the end.”
Even though the last line is in English, Eilish convinced the flamenco singer to write and record the song mostly in Spanish because of her appreciation for multilingual music.
“I remember when we 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.’ And I’ve always loved music that isn’t in English,” the “Therefore I Am” singer told Lowe. “I like tons of music from languages I don’t even speak. … I’ve been really intrigued by it pretty much my whole life. There’s so many Russian songs I like, and Spanish, and French.”
Watch Eilish’s Apple Music interview below.