What did Billie Eilish win an Oscar for? How Barbie singer overcame self-doubt to create hit song

Billie Eilish's song What Was I Made For? was a part of the 2023 movie Barbie. The song won the Best Original Song award at the 96th Academy Awards in Mach 2024, which Eilish shared with her brother Finneas.

Before the awards and following the July release of Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Billie Eilish spoke about the song and how she and her brother wrote it. Billie said that she and Finneas had been feeling "incredibly uninspired" when they received the proposal for a song for the Barbie movie.

The official music video for What Was I Made For? was self-directed and starred Eilish. It dropped a little before the movie's release and received wide acclaim. It has since received 133 million views, 2.6 million likes, and over 70k comments.

She is currently awaiting the release of her third studio album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, which is set to release on May 17, 2024.

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Billie Eilish revealed how the Barbie song came when she was experiencing a "frustration in writing"

In an interview with Apple Music, Billie Eilish shared how she and her brother, Finneas were going through a period of self-doubt. She said that it went beyond just writer's block for the two of them.

The Bad Boy singer said that she is usually the one who is frustrated with writing and her brother was the one who told her, "Let's write."

"Usually it's just me with the frustration with writing and Finneas has always been the one that's like 'no, no, no, let's write. Let's write.' But honestly, we were in a period of time where we both... like through this last winter, we've both been incredibly uninspired," the singer said.

Eilish also revealed that the song was the first thing that they had written "in a minute."

In the interview, Billie also discussed how she and Finneas were invited by Barbie director Greta Gerwig to the Warner Bros theater in January 2023. When the siblings went there, they were surprised to find it empty except for Greta and a couple of producers.

The director said that the team had wanted Eilish and her brother to watch the film, even though it hadn't reached completion. After watching the screening, Greta asked them to "make something" if they were inspired.

When they started working on the song, Finneas, a songwriter and record producer wondered if they should make a Barbie song. However, Eilish claimed that she instantly rejected the idea.

"The first day of writing, Finneas and I, especially me because it's from my perspective, we were purely thinking about Barbie," she explained.

In another interview with Allure, Billie Eilish opened up about the struggle the siblings had when they began writing the song, right before hitting the first chords. She said that the two wondered if they "have lost it," questioning why they were making the song.

"That day we were making stuff, and were like, 'We've lost it, why are we even doing this?' And then the first chords happened, and 'I used to float/Now I just fall down' came out, and the song wrote itself," Eilish said.

Billie Eilish also mentioned that she had a video of the duo writing the song, and the first two lines were written within the first ten minutes.

The Bellyache singer admitted how the entire song was written thinking about Barbie's character that inspired them. However, she added that they later realized it wasn't about Barbie but about Billie and everything she felt. She added that she soon realized that it wasn't just her but that "everyone feels like that, eventually."

In the later part of her Apple Music interview, Billie Eilish also discussed her experience of directing the musical video of What Was I Made For? In the video, Eilish is seen in a yellow dress, with platinum-blonde hair, sitting on a chair with a box full of Barbie's clothes on a table in front of her.

Talking about the song's music video, Billie Eilish said that she loves all of her videos. She added that while some "have aged poorly," it doesn't change how she feels about them.

"BUT this one, I don't know, I feel really proud of it," Eilish said.

What Was I Made For? saw immense commercial success followed by Eilish winning her second Oscar. She is currently awaiting the release of her third studio album Hit Me Hard And Soft. The album is a collaboration between Billie Eilish and Finneas and is set to be released on May 17, 2024.