“Lovely” is about feeling trapped in an inescapable, negative, and painful mental state. The lyrics focus on feeling eternally doomed to suffer but also manage to preserve a bit of hope for liberation. The general theme is that when hope and repetitive wounds mix, a person’s mental state can feel like a frustrating prison.
Billie Eilish, Finneas O’Connell, and Khalid wrote this track entirely as a unit. The creative process is said to have flowed very naturally without any pressure to come up with a massive hit. Their creation will forever be tied to the second season of 13 Reasons Why, a massive Netflix series focused on mental health struggles.
In this article, we’ll perform an analysis of these chilling lyrics to decipher their hidden meaning. We’ll also take a look at the songwriting story and the universal themes in the track that give you goosebumps. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
“Lovely” Lyrics Meaning
Since this song features multiple singers, I’ll refer to the point-of-view in the lyrics as “the narrator.”
The lyrics begin by giving us the basic building block of the theme: hope keeps turning into despair. The narrator had hope for a “way out” of their circumstances, but it was in vain. The lyrics then address an unknown entity, blaming it for the pain the narrator feels. This entity seems to “never go away,” which imprisons the narrator in their suffering.
The narrator then switches back to hope. They hope to “make it out” someday, even if it takes “a hundred years.” Why? Because outside of this prison, the narrator could “feel alive” instead of confined. Unfortunately, there’s no “place to hide” from the source of the narrator’s problems.
As this tension builds, the chorus suddenly cuts through the noise and bitterly evaluates the situation. When the narrator says, “Isn’t it lovely,” this is sarcastic. It’s not lovely; it’s very painful. Just so you know, Eilish once confirmed this sarcasm to Zane Lowe.
The lyrics continue and embrace graphic metaphors to describe the pain. The narrator goes so far as to ask the dark entity to tear them “to pieces.” As a result, although the narrator’s heart is “made of glass,” they have a “mind of stone.”
Basically, this means that they’re becoming numb to their own problems. Their struggle hurts them emotionally, but they’ve come to expect the same thing to happen again. Cognitively, the thought patterns are already locked in place.
Who is the song addressing in these lines? Is it a personification of depression? Does it reference a specific person or memory? This is never explicitly revealed, although the lyrics seem to attribute all sorts of powers to this entity. This, combined with the fact that the song was featured on 13 Reasons Why, leads me to believe the entity is personified depression (clinical or otherwise). I’ll call it the Sadness (capital “S”) from now on.
The second verse reveals more evidence for this interpretation. The narrator is once again “looking for a better place,” but we find out that this isn’t literal. The narrator identifies their “head space” as the battleground, which indicates that the song is talking about mental struggle with one’s self. The Sadness exists in the narrator, who is battling with it at all times.
At this point, the song repeats the previous lyrics until the ending. In summary, “Lovely” is about battling your own mental state and struggling not to fall into cynicism. It highlights the cycles that can arise when our hopes are repeatedly dashed to pieces, making us feel like a slave to our struggle. This relatable emotional appeal in the lyrics is a big part of this track’s massive success.
The Story Behind “Lovely”
Khalid, Billie Eilish, and Finneas O’Connell were the songwriters for this creation. Production was handled exclusively by O’Connell, who skillfully used his abilities to highlight the vocal strength of the other two.
As mentioned, this track was initially released as part of the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack. This puts the theme and lyrics of the song in context, as the creative process likely had related sources of inspiration. Even though this was a big release for a big production, the songwriting story is actually very relaxed.
According to Billie Eilish, the social environment when “Lovely” was written was extremely low-pressure and organic. She described it to Zane Lowe as “hanging out as friends” who “ended up writing a song.”
Sometimes, it seems, creativity needs deadlines. Other times, they can prevent songs like “Lovely” from arising naturally. Whatever the reason for their inspiration, the trio produced a massive success by every metric.
The official video for “Lovely” is a YouTube powerhouse with almost 2 billion views. The track reached the #64 spot on the Billboard Top 100 and has been listened to innumerable times. Critically and commercially, this song can only be considered a huge success.
The next time you play this emotional tune, let these pieces of background information make it even more special!