Billie Eilish has recalled a fight she had with her brother, the music producer Finneas, over writing a song about dying by suicide.

In an interview, the singer said she once dreamed she “jumped off a building” when she was “in a really bad place mentally” and approached Finneas with the idea of turning it into a song.

Eilish told The New York Times that Finneas grew “insanely concerned” by the opening line – “I had a dream I got everything I wanted” – before pulling the plug.

“We had this big argument,” she says. “Because I admitted something that I was, uh… It wasn’t a physical thing I was admitting. I don’t know how to put it without actually saying it, and I don’t want to actually say it. But it was me admitting to something that was very serious about my depression. A very serious step that I was admitting that I was planning on taking. And Finneas said, ‘I don’t want to write a song about you killing yourself and how that’s everything you wanted.’”

Finneas added: “It was a period where I was really worried about my sister, and I felt like an enabler in helping her write a song as bleak as that song was. Like the musical equivalent of giving an alcoholic another beer.

“A lot of songs are written in retrospect, but this one felt like it was being written in real time, and I was like: ‘This is something we’ve got to write on the other side of this hill. We have to go through this in real life. You can’t always solve your problems in a song.’”

Eilish said they haven’t spoken about the argument until the interview.

The singer is the latest to perform the James Bond theme track, which will be heard at the beginning of No Time to Die when it’s released in November.