Billie Eilish admits in a new interview that she was “concerned” that she “hit my peak” before co-writing the Barbie smash “What Was I Made For?“
Speaking at a Hollywood Reporter artists roundtable that gathered the favorites for the Academy Awards’ Best Original Song — Eilish, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo, Cynthia Erivo, Jon Batiste, and Julia Michaels — Eilish said she was struggling to write songs following her Happier Than Ever album. But then she was handed a “homework” assignment: Writing a song for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
“I honestly was concerned that it was over for me,” Eilish said of her writer’s block to the roundtable. “We’d been trying, and it wasn’t doing what it usually would do in me. I was honestly like, ‘Damn, maybe I hit my peak and I don’t know how to write anymore?’”
However, following an unproductive day in the studio, Eilish and her brother Finneas went to see Barbie months before its release with the hopes of penning a song for the movie.
“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,” Eilish recollected. “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.’”
Struggling on the new album, the duo instead shifted gears to Eilish’s Barbie song… and the creative floodgates reopened.
“The start of writing this song, the first day of writing, Finneas and I, especially me because it’s from my perspective, we were purely only thinking about Barbie,” Eilish said. “I did not think about myself once in the writing process. So that’s the full first verse, pre-chorus, chorus, maybe second verse, all in one night.”
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Eilish added, “Greta saved me, really, honestly. It brought us out of it and immediately we were inspired and wrote so much more after that.”
“What Was I Made For?” is perhaps the frontrunner for the Best Original Song at the Oscars, where it will likely compete against its Barbie soundtrack mate “Dance the Night” by Dua Lipa, and potentially Rodrigo’s “Can’t Catch Me Now” from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.