“Fingers Crossed” by Billie Eilish

It should be noted that this is the first song Billie Eilish ever wrote. And at the time she would have been just about 14 years old.

She was given an assignment by her songwriting teacher (who was also her mom, Maggie Baird) to basically pen a song inspired by a movie or television show. And as you may have already concluded, in this case her lyrics allude to an event akin to a zombie apocalypse. For at that particular juncture in time, Billie was a big fan of “The Walking Dead” and based this tune on that program. But in the process, as Eilish has noted, “Fingers Crossed” ended up being a love song. So perhaps the best way of describing this tune is indeed as such, though placed in the aforementioned setting.

That’s why for instance for instance in the second verse the vocalist mentions that the addressee is “infected”, isolated and has “gone too far”. This statement would basically point to the idea of him being bitten by a zombie and being in the process of transforming into one himself. Yes, the idea does sound comical for a song coming from a major pop artist (even though she wasn’t at the time). But Billie does a good job in making the lyrics to some degree ambiguous. Indeed unless someone really pays attention to them, they may not even pickup on their science-fiction based underpinnings.

Conclusion

So it can be said that throughout the song the narrator is acknowledging certain realities which would logically be part and parcel of living in a zombie apocalypse if one were to occur, i.e. losing people you actually care for to the plague. Moreover the title of the track, which is never actually mentioned in the lyrics, is likely representative of her active hope that she or none of the her loved ones are bitten. And at the end of the day it can be said that losing her significant other to such a fate has made her realize even more how much he meant to her.

Writing Credits for “Fingers Crossed”

Billie Eilish is the sole writer of “Fingers Crossed”. And the track was produced by her elder brother in the person of Finneas.

Date of Release

This song was released, exclusively onto SoundCloud, as a standalone single on 15 September 2015. It actually predated Billie Eilish’s first official single, which would be the multi-platinum hit “Ocean Eyes” that dropped a couple of months later.