Being asked to write and perform a theme song for a James Bond movie is a double-edged sword for an artist. The upsides of it are obvious. You get exposure on a grander scale than you could ever possibly have imagined, and your work becomes immortal. Bond movies are repeated every week on television somewhere in the world, and an audience of millions love them. The songs become part of the movie, and so long as the movies keep playing – which they almost certainly always will – you’ll always be remembered.
The other side of the sword is that you’re on a pedestal the moment you record a Bond theme, and it’s easier than ever to throw things at you and try to knock you off. Nobody in history has written a Bond theme that everybody’s been happy with. Sam Smith’s breathy ‘The Writing’s On The Wall’ for Spectre was too high and too reedy for some, and even the usually-untouchable Adele was criticized for Skyfall.
In making a Bond theme, you’re being exposed to an audience who would never usually listen to your music, and some of them are going to say unpleasant things about you.
Having taken all of the above into account, we still think that there are some Bond themes that stand out and survive the test of time more than others. Rolling Stone Magazine says that Shirley Bassey’s ‘Goldfinger’ is the best Bond theme song of all time, and it’s hard to disagree with that notion. Bassey is, after all, the only artist who was ever invited back to perform more than one song for the world’s most famous movie franchise.
Having said that, Rolling Stone also thinks that Chris Cornell’s epic ‘You Know My Name’ from Casino Royale belongs in the bottom five Bond themes ever recorded, and you’d have to have completely taken leave of your senses to believe that. We’d also like to give an honorable mention to Duran Duran’s ‘View To A Kill’ (great song, terrible movie), and Garbage’s swirling ‘The World Is Not Enough.’
At the other end of the scale, it’s hard to look past the horrible squawking mess of ‘Another Way To Die’ by Jack White and Alicia Keys, which graced Daniel Craig’s second Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace.’ Madonna’s stuttering ‘Die Another Day’ is another one that’s generally agreed to be awful, and Lulu’s 1974 theme for The Man With The Golden Gun wasn’t that well-received either. At their best, Bond themes are incredible. At their worst, they’re downright unlistenable.
It’s into this maelstrom of uncertainty that Billie Eilish has stepped, and she’s done so with grace and confidence. There was a lot of talk (until recently) that the ultimate successor to Craig’s James Bond would be a woman. A female Bond has been the subject of countless pieces of fan fiction, and also on more than one game on online slots websites like UKOnlineSlots.com. The popularity of the first ‘Agent Jane Blond’ online slots game was such that a sequel was released at the start of 2019. The enthusiastic reception to the online slots hasn’t moved the Broccoli family, though, and they’re insistent that Bond should remain male. That’s a shame because if 007 were to be female, we can’t think of a better candidate to be the moody, brooding female Bond of the 2020s than Billie Eilish. We have no idea if she can act, but we suspect that she can. She seems to succeed at literally everything else she turns her hand to.
If Eilish’s Bond theme ‘No Time To Die’ (named, of course, after the film) surprises us in any way at all, it’s in the fact that it has such a classical arrangement. Elish’s sound is usually on the fringe of indie and electronica, but she’s chosen to pay homage to the traditions of writing Bond themes by including strings. Anyone who feared that her vocals would be drowned out by such an arrangement got a shock the first time they heard the track – when she pushes herself, she’s every bit as powerful as anyone else (which the exception of Shirley Bassey) who’s stood behind a microphone and recorded a song for a James Bond movie. She doesn’t scream, and nor does she warble, but at the same time, there’s no mumbling, and every sentiment expressed in the song is easy to hear and given time to breathe.
Lyrically, the song appears to be a farewell to the whole Daniel Craig era. There was a time when every James Bond song was either a lecture on how many ways he was going to kill you and how little he would care about it, or a warning about his incredible good looks, charm, and appeal to women. Billie Eilish was never likely to risk her integrity as an artist by going down either path. Instead, she speaks of remorse, resignation, and betrayal. Some people have even taken the repeated references to betrayal as a potential spoiler when it comes to the content of the film – which isn’t due to be released until the end of the year now – but it’s understood that Eilish still hasn’t seen the movie. She’s just very good at picking up on themes. The occasional line (‘the blood you bleed is just the blood you own’) could probably be accused of venturing into what the kids call ‘emo,’ but for the main part, it’s very much on-message with the whole Daniel Craig era.
Billie Eilish’s James Bond theme isn’t romantic. It isn’t glamorous, and it isn’t a singalong favorite. It’s a little cold, a little dark, and more than a little melancholic. It is, however, memorable – and that’s far more important when it comes to writing a track that’s going to be immortalized whether it deserves to be or not. When you take into account that it was written and performed by an 18-year-old who was barely over four years old when Daniel Craig made his first appearance as Britain’s premier secret agent, it’s nothing short of astonishing.
