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Since becoming a massive pop star, Billie Eilish and her brother/songwriting partner Finneas O’Connell have been branching out to write music for film, and they’ve had some incredible success with it thus far. Their first time around the bend, they had the opportunity to write the James Bond theme for No Time To Die, and it led to the pair taking to the Oscar stage to accept recognition for Best Original Song. Almost two years later, the duo are likely major contenders for the Oscars again for writing “What Was I Made For?” for the Barbie movie, and Billie Eilish is sharing how the song came to be.
How is a hit song as massive as “What Was I Made For?” even crafted? Since Eilish surprised fans in July of the song’s existence, the track has been everywhere this year, particularly as the soundtrack to a host of TikTok videos about womanhood since Barbie’s massive release. Eilish said this about the making of the song:
It was a rainy day in January, and it was the day after we’d seen [Barbie] and it was dark for me in my life. My brother and I were working and trying to make stuff for this album, and it was just a day of nothing. It was just idea after idea after idea of just no ideas. Nothing was happening. It was the least creative. We came up with so many different things, and it was an instance where we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re scratching these. This isn’t even worth our time.’ I think we were doing that for probably six hours. And it was about 8 p.m. and I was like, ‘All right, well, I’m out of here. I’m going to go home. We’re done for the day. We tried.’
Billie EIlish and Finneas O’Connell were asked to screen Barbie amidst writer/director Greta Gerwig crafting the soundtrack for the film that would go on to create a host of massive hits from the likes of Dua Lipa, Nikki Minaj and Ryan Gosling, of course. The songwriters received the potential assignment in January as they were also trying to get creative in the studio again for the upcoming followup to Billie EIlish’s second studio album, Happier Than Ever. As Eilish continued:
And then [Finneas] was like, ‘Just for shits and giggles, what if we tried to write that song?’ I was like, ‘What? You think after the day of garbage we’ve just made, we’re going to make a perfect song for something that needs something really good?’ I was like, ‘I don’t even have that in me.’ First of all, I didn’t know I would have it in me at all. When it was brought up to me, I was like, ‘I mean, thank you for asking, but I don’t know if I can give you what you’re going to need. I want you to have something astounding, and hopefully I can get close to that, but I don’t know.’
What started as a rather uninspiring day for Billie Eilish took a turn when her brother suggested they try to pivot to Barbie. Here’s what happened next:
I was sitting on a little couch with the handheld and he was playing those chords and it was just like (starts singing “What Was I Made For?”). We were talking a lot about the floating elegance of [Barbie] and her ability to be so smooth and beautiful and perfect all the time. And then the juxtaposition of her suddenly falling and [she] can’t do everything perfectly. So it was that, ‘I used to float, now I just fall down.’ We wrote that and then, ‘I used to know, but I’m not sure now.’ And I immediately was like: ‘What I was made for.’ Then we were both asking the question after that and we did that in probably five minutes.
Eilish spoke about how she wrote “What Was I Made For?”, which has already been streamed over 450 million times on Spotify and has remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for 17 consecutive weeks (currently holding the 28th spot), while taking part in a roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter. Eilish was joined by Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo, Julia Michaels, Jon Baptiste and Cynthia Erivo. Eilish also said this:
It was like it was God. It was just the most perfect example to me of true inspiration and connection. It was living in me that whole day, but it wasn’t coming out of me. We didn’t go into it knowing at all what we were going to make or if we were going to make anything. And it was just so clear that we needed to. Like you were saying, Olivia, I love writing for film. Not even just film but for something.
When it comes to songs written for all the 2023 new movie releases, it certainly feels like “What I Was Made For?” could go down in history as one of the most (if not the most memorable. We’ll have to see how Billie Eilish’s Barbie does as awards season begins to take flight with fall movie season.