“The Beatles are the main thing that was in my ears when I was a child": Billie Eilish names the Beatles song she wishes she’d written

Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas have been getting props from their songwriting chops from all quarters over the past few years - Paul Weller was the latest respected artist to praise them when he covered What Was I Made For? Now, though, it’s Eilish who’s been discussing the songs and artists that have inspired her.

Speaking to BBC Radio 1, Eilish was asked by host Jack Saunders to choose ‘the songs that saved me’. Tracks by Avril Lavigne, Spooky Black, Aurora, Air and Sufjan Stevens were among those that made the cut, but she finished by naming the Beatles’ song that she says she wishes she'd written.

“The Beatles are my biggest inspiration and the main thing that was in my ears when I was a child, and this song is just incredible,” explains Eilish, the song in question being Julia, from The White Album.

Written and performed by John Lennon in tribute to his mother, Julia features just vocals and guitar, with Lennon showing off his newly-learned finger-picking skills.

Elsewhere in the chat, Eilish was asked about the writing of Lunch, one of her new album Hit Me Hard and Soft’s biggest hits.

“It’s hard to even remember,” Eilish says of the song’s origins. “I think it started with the little beat. It’s kind of fun to think about the making of a song - you can’t even remember; it kind of, just, ‘happened.’"

Eilish goes on to say that all she had to begin with was the main vocal hook: “Finneas took out the electric guitar and started doing a bunch of crazy stuff,” she adds.

Much has been said and written about the meaning behind Lunch’s lyrics, but Eilish admits that, originally, there wasn’t a great deal to decipher. “It wasn’t going to be anything but ‘oh, I could eat that for lunch,’” she explains, before adding, “and then it turned into… more.”

Praising Finneas’s work on the track, Eilish says: “He went so hard on it. He killed it with the guitar. I remember going home one time and he just sent me that little ending part where it’s like [sings] ‘feels like she might be the one’, and then I just remember being like ‘you did this without me?!’ But I feel like he felt like he had to - he was like, ‘no, no, no - I got to compete with your fun lyrics’. I mean, he also wrote the lyrics with me but, yeah, he came in strong on the production."