Billie Eilish said she’d thought it was a wrap for her songwriting talents prior to releasing “What Was I Made For?” — a tune for the “Barbie” soundtrack that would earn multiple Grammy nods.
Eilish, in a roundtable discussion published Thursday in The Hollywood Reporter, revealed that she was feeling uninspired before director Greta Gerwig asked the singer to make a song for her film about the titular doll.
“I honestly was concerned that it was over for me,” Eilish said.
“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?’”
The singer said she and brother Finneas were experiencing a “day of nothing” creatively before trying to come up with a song “just for shits and giggles.”
Eilish said her brother sat down at the piano and “immediately started playing.” The two talked about Barbie’s perfection and “floating elegance,” along with the juxtaposition of her “suddenly falling” and no longer doing things 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,” she recalled.
She continued: “It was like it was God. It was just the most perfect example to me of true inspiration and connection.”
You can check out more from Eilish’s discussion at The Hollywood Reporter.
Eilish’s comments come a week after “What Was I Made For?” received five nominations for the 2024 Grammy Awards, including in the category for Song of the Year.
Ahead of the track’s release in July, she warned her Instagram followers to “GET READY TO SOB” and added that the song meant “THE ABSOLUTE WORRRRLLLD” to her.
“THIS MOVIE IS GONNA CHANGE UR LIVES AND HOPEFULLY THE SONG WILL TOO,” she wrote at the time.