Pink To Billie Eilish: 5 Songs To Provide You Hope In Moments Of Strife

I often wonder, “If they knew what they said would go straight to my head, what would they say instead?” I love Billie Eilish. She is the tranquility before the thunder, the calm before the chaos, the soothing silence before the storm. I can’t count the nights I have spent listening to her enchanting voice. But, there is this one song of hers, “Everything I Wanted” that takes me somewhere, where I am standing on the edge of the cliff waiting to be swept by the ocean. 

As she sings, “I had a dream, I got everything I wanted”, I close my eyes and dream of a house with no mirrors, a house that’s my home, untouched by the pain of parental plague. 

But, then I wake up and unlike Eilish’s words, I don’t see anyone with me, except my wired earphones still plugged in. Oh dearest earphones, what would I do without you?

To those of you who dream of everything you want, of getting older, of running away, remember you aren’t the only one, you aren’t alone. So what if you wake up alone, look beside your pillow, do you see the earphones? Plug them in and dream of a house with no mirrors. 

Oh, wait! I have a playlist for you…

1. Older by Sasha Alex Sloan

“I used to shut my door while my mother screamed in the kitchen

I'd turn the music up, get high, and try not to listen..”

"Older" delves into the challenges of navigating childhood in a broken family where the parents fight, unveiling the imperfect nature of love. Sasha, shaped by her parents' tumultuous relationship, resolves to break the cycle of strife but matures to understand the inevitable intertwining of love and heartache. Drawing from her encounters with heartbreak, she empathises with her parents' past struggles.

At the heart of its chorus lies the unsettling, yet all-consuming realisation that we are all the same. No one’s a hero, no one’s a villain. You just get older, and things make sense. 

2. Matilda by Harry Styles

“You can let it go

You can throw a party full of everyone you know

You can start a family who will always show you love”

How many of us have felt the estranged feeling of being at home, yet feeling distant? You know, when home doesn’t feel like home. Harry Styles outdid himself when he wrote, “Nothing about the way that you were treated ever seemed especially alarming 'til now. So you tie up your hair and you smile like it's no big deal”. 

Oh, Harry, you have my heart.

In this song, inspired by Roald Dahl’s book Matilda and/or its movie adaptation of the same name, about a girl with telekinesis who was mistreated by her principal and parents, Styles shows how home isn’t a place, but a state of mind. Through his words, he just says, “You, yes you, my love. You are not alone. You will never be alone. You can let it go. You can have a home. You can be happy. So, just let it go and follow the seasons.”

3. House With No Mirrors by Sasha Alex Sloan

You know that famous saying, “When you are not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives.”

In a broken home, love also gets broken, into pieces like other things. What’s left behind is insecurity, self-doubt, and self-sabotaging tendencies. Sasha, in this song, talks about self-acceptance and self-love. It's about really knowing who you are and accepting it, with all your heart because no one else will.

It’s about saying to yourself, “Enough, you can’t keep living your life picking up the pieces shattered by someone else. You are enough. You will be better than ever.”

4. Cleaning Out My Closet by Eminem

Eminem is known for evoking his lived experience in his rap. This song is no exception. The song reveals the rapper's tumultuous upbringing and strained relationship with his mother, his abandoning father, and wife Kim, addressing the psychological scars left by familial dysfunction and the cathartic process of confronting unresolved trauma.

Eminem being Eminem, is ready to fight the war with words, and let me remind you, he is brutal and lethal. 

5. Family Portrait by Pink

“...Can we work it out? Can we be a family?

I promise I'll be better 

Mommy, I'll do anything...”

You see the fight, you hear the scream, and you beg. You beg and beg and beg and try to fix something that wasn’t broken by you. And then you see a family portrait, everybody’s smiling, holding hands and you don’t know what’s real. What’s true? It looks pretty normal until the silence is taken over by the storm, the impending storm of screams hurled, and the portrait, the photograph seems like a blip.

In this song, Pink explores the tumultuous dynamics within a broken family, highlighting the emotional scars left by parental conflict and the longing for a sense of belonging.

You must have heard them, so what? Again. Again. Again. 

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