Two years before Celeste Rivas Hernandez disappeared, the singer D4vd recorded a song called “Romantic Homicide.”
That song, and its lyrics, are in the spotlight now that the body of Rivas Hernandez, 15, was discovered inside the trunk of D4vd’s Tesla. A series of other troubling details have emerged in the death, including reports that D4vd also recorded a song called “Celeste.” His real name is David Anthony Burke, and he has millions of listeners on Spotify. The singer has not been accused in connection with the death of Rivas Hernandez, who vanished form her home in 2024.
D4vd explained the lyrics to “Romantic Homicide” in an interview with Genius.
D4vd’s Song ‘Romantic Homicide’ Shows a Bloodied Woman in a White Dress
According to US Weekly, D4vd first broke through in 2021, the year before he recorded “Romantic Homicide.” The video for “Romantic Homicide” on D4vd’s YouTube page has more than 179 million views since being uploaded in 2022.
Despite claims that the song was released on Rivas’s birthday, her actual birth date is not known. In the interview with Genius, D4vd explained, “So how I created ‘Romantic Homicide’ is basically like every other song in my sister’s closet. With the Apple earbuds…Just going through instrumentals and letting them tell me what needs to be said on them. And basically just going from there, and then I write to contextualize the stories I tell.”
He then sang some of the verses from “Romantic Homicide.”
“Everything has a meaning behind it. I think that’s what poetry is. It’s like an interpretation, and another person can read the same thing and take something else out of it, and find new things every time… all of my songs, I think, are poetry,” he added.
The lyrics include the lines, “In the back of my mind / I killed you / And I didn’t even regret it. I can’t believe I said it / But it’s true / I hate you,” US Weekly reported.
He said he took stories from graphic novels and Japanese manga and put them to music.
“So what inspired the hook, ‘in the back of the mind you died,’ is kind of like the storytelling aspects of the lyrics that came before it in a way that it builds up to,” D4vd said in the interview. “The big moment where she died in the back of my mind. I didn’t kill her physically, but in the back of my mind, she died. I didn’t even cry, not a single tear.”
“I’ve seen people online taking different meanings and interpretations from that one part of the song where it’s their past selves that are dying,” he added, “And they’re not even crying about it because they’ve evolved and they’re becoming better people or have killed addictions and other different stuff like that. So I think it’s very powerful in that way too.”
He added, about the lyric, “I hate you,” “I wanted you to feel the emotion in this part of the song.” He said the thought of the woman is gone.
D4vd Said the Lyrics in ‘Romantic Homicide’ Are ‘Figurative’
“It’s really more of a figurative I killed you…It’s all in the mind because that’s the most secure place you can be,” D4vd said in the Genius interview.
“If you can expel that thought from your mind, then everything else will come together,” he said.
Since Rivas Hernandez’s partial remains were found in D4vd’s Tesla, people have filled his YouTube thread with comments about her death.
“This song couldn’t have aged any worse,” wrote one person in the comment thread.
“Celeste Rivas Hernandez, may you live forever beautiful girl. Such a young soul, I am so sorry your story ended like this. You did not deserve this,” wrote another comment writer.
The music video for the song starts with a lightning storm at night and the scene of a man dragging a suitcase down a sidewalk. It then switches to the singer lying blindfolded on the ground in the rain and then walking along a chain-link fence, with scenes showing a woman and other images flashing by quickly. A woman in a red-stained white dress then appears standing still. A bed with red streaks on the comforter is shown. He then stands at the end of the bed, where the woman, bloodied and still, lies with a white rose. A bloody knife is shown, and a bloodied white rose drops to the ground.
“When you view love, it’s all ups and downs. It’s never a solid, flat line. If it’s all straight, that means you’re dead,” D4vd later told Atwood Magazine in an interview about his album, Withered.
“It’s gotta fluctuate. It’s gotta have life. It’s gotta have some moments where you think it’s over. It’s gotta have moments where it sparks up again. I want the album to feel like that, especially when it dies in ‘Afterlife.’ It’s kind of like a send off to me instead of the actual relationship or lover — whatever people want to call it. It’s the closing of a chapter.”
