There are some songs you are simply grateful for. I wrote “What we want and need from love” on my bedroom floor in January 2026, taking something that felt frustrating at the time and turning it into a song that celebrates the softness and sensitivity I carried through heartbreak. Writing it helped me look back with tenderness, becoming more accepting and kind towards the way I love, and the things that I want and need.
“What we want and need from love” narrates the emotional arc of heartbreak from denial to cathartic acceptance. It is the shocking realisation that you cannot convince someone of your worth, and the frustration of loving someone who is guarded. More than anything, though, it is a song about accepting that love is a multi-headed beast. We are all trying to love outwardly and inwardly, often while still figuring out what we want and need for ourselves. Those things can change and contradict each other, but there is something beautiful in being kind through that uncertainty. Sometimes, all you can do is know what you want and let that guide you.
This is my favourite song I have ever written. What a magical thing it is that something I once wanted to forget has become something I am now proud to remember.
Like I said, the song began on the floor of my bedroom, on my old carpet with my back against my bed frame. I was tinkering with a riff in my favourite guitar tuning, DADF#AD, and began to sing that riff over and over: “baby go”. I wrote the song about an experience I had the November before, and I guess the song had been boiling and bubbling since then, finally erupting into “What we want and need from love” on January 12th. I didn’t know what I was making as I was making it, but the song flowed in succession. After I’d written it, I played it from front to back and went, “well shit! I think that’s the best song I’ve ever written!” I don’t say that often…or at all. I’m not the kind of person who listens to their own music, and I overthink all of it. But I raced downstairs into the kitchen and played the song to my parents. They asked to hear it again twice. Score. Maybe this is something special.
Slowly, the song became what it is now. A lot has changed since I released “Laughing track”. I am privileged in that I was gifted the painful process of having toxic people slowly leave my life, and have gained the most beautiful community since January. In fact, since January, my life has been a TV show. I posted a few videos of my songwriting from my bedroom floor in Singapore, filmed on my half-broken podcast mic, and it somehow opened a portal to Los Angeles. I was reached out to by people I’ve spent my entire musical journey looking up to, and am now lucky enough to call them my team. It’s really fucking weird, I’m not gonna lie!!! I’m still a bit confused and whiplashed!!! I mean, what the hell?
Also, everything I’ve released thus far has been outdated to the MAX. I somehow got caught in a cycle of releasing music I’d written around two years before I put it out, and as you can imagine, it’s really frustrating to evolve past the outside perception of you. “What we want and need from love” is me NOW. And I am so grateful. There is something really miraculous about knowing that this song started with me, alone on my bedroom floor, messing around with my guitar because I had something I wanted to say…and it somehow ended me up here.
I am lucky enough to have gotten to fly halfway across the world to make music. I made WWWANFL with Dan, who, as we all know, is insane and a genius at songwriting. His thesis for the song was to record it like a performance, the way I’d been singing it into my shitty podcast mic. He wanted to protect the song and encapsulate it exactly like the song I wrote in my bedroom in Singapore. I am so happy with this song. I LOVE “WHAT WE WANT AND NEED FROM LOVE”.
Okay, this brings me to the Beast. I’ve decided I’m going to draw one per song, and I’ll explain why later! She is multi-headed and has a very big heart. Her skin is incredibly soft and I think she is a little confused sometimes. Each head wants something different, and they don’t always agree on which way to look. But hey, they all belong to the same heart, and maybe that’s what love is.
Pre save What we want and need from love here: https://drop.cobrand.com/d/MilaBea/WWWANFL
With collateral,
Mila Bea
