Billie Eilish Says Writing for ‘Barbie’ Soundtrack Pulled Her Out of Self-Doubt

Hannah Dailey
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You might just have Barbie to thank for Billie Eilish‘s next album. In a new interview following the release of the 21-year-old pop star’s Barbie film soundtrack single “What Was I Made For?,” Eilish confessed that the project, which dropped with a self-directed music video on Thursday (July 13), pulled her and brother/producer Finneas out of a brutal writing slump plagued by self-doubt.

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“Honestly, we were in a period of time where we were both… like through this last winter, we’ve both been incredibly uninspired,” Eilish told Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1. “And we’ve still been working and trying to make stuff. And honestly, that song was the first thing we’d written in a minute. Even though we were coming up with ideas and coming up with this and that, I remember after we wrote that first half, I go, ‘I think we still got it.'”

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The “Bad Guy” singer also shared that the writing process began with director Greta Gerwig treating her and Finneas to a special viewing of a rough cut of Barbie at the Warner Brother Studios. The very next day, the brother-sister musicians weren’t having any success in writing music independent of the film — but when they on a whim shifted into writing what would become “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie’s perspective, their writer’s block immediately dissipated.

“We were really in a zone of feeling like we lost it and feeling like, man, I don’t know if we can do this anymore,” she added. “Barbie and Greta just pulled it out of me, I don’t know,” Eilish said. “Those first couple lyrics, ‘I used to float, now I just fall down,’ just came right out.”

One of the most inspiring things to come out of the writing process, Eilish added, was how a song written strictly from the point of view of Margot Robbie’s titular character in Barbie somehow came full circle, with the “Happier Than Ever” artist realizing that she related to the lyrics without even trying to.

“I did not think about myself once in the writing process,” the Grammy winner explained. “I was purely inspired by this movie and this character and the way I thought she would feel, and wrote about that. And then, over the next couple days, I was listening and I was like, girl, how did this … honestly, and I really don’t mean this to come off a conceited way at all, but I do this thing where I make stuff that I don’t even know is … like I’m writing for myself and I don’t even know it.”

“It is one of the most incredible things I get to experience in my life,” Eilish continued. “Dude, the next week I was playing it in the car all day and playing it for everybody. And I was like, ‘This is exactly how I feel. And I didn’t even mean to be saying it.’ It was truly the trippiest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I was like, oh, I absolutely was writing about myself, but I was thinking about myself from a third person.”

Watch Billie’s interview with Apple Music 1 above.

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