Billie Eilish and Finneas were starting to think they couldn't write songs anymore.
The movie 'Barbie' came at the right time for Billie Eilish.
The 21-year-old singer was going through a period of low self-confidence before she and her brother Finneas created the song 'What I Was Made For?' for the 'Barbie' soundtrack, which was released on Thursday, July 13.
In an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Billie Eilish stated that the song was born when they faced a "writing frustration".
"And Finneas was always the one who said, 'No, no, no, no, let's write. Let's write." And honestly, we were in a period where we were both… Like last winter, we were both incredibly uninspired,” he revealed.
“And we kept working and trying to do things. And honestly, that song was the first thing we wrote in a minute," he added.
Around the middle of that period, Billie Eilish believed that she and her brother "still got it" when starting a song. But then the questioning would appear.
"We were really in a zone where we felt like we lost it and we were like, 'Man, I don't know if we can do this anymore.' And we were like when I was 15, 16, 17 and he was a teenager, you can imagine my doubts. That 'I can't do this anymore,'" explained Eilish.
Fortunately for Billie Eilish, "Barbie" and the film's director Greta Gerwig simply "brought it out."
Billie Eilish and Finneas watched an early version of "Barbie," with only Greta Gerwig and some Warner Bros. producers.
At the end of the screening, Greta Gerwig asked them to "make something" if they found inspiration. Finneas wondered if they should write a "Barbie song", but Billie Eilish rejected the idea.
He also realized that they should write a different song from their Oscar-winning song 'No Time To Die' for the James Bond film of the same name. Soon the lyrics of "What I Was Made For?" they just "came straight out," Billie Eilish pointed out.
"At the beginning of making this song, on day one, Finneas and I, especially me, because it's from my perspective, we were just thinking clearly about Barbie," explained Billie Eilish.
“I never once thought of myself during the creation. So that's the whole first verse, the pre-chorus, the chorus, maybe the second verse, all in one night,” he said.
Billie Eilish said she was "purely inspired" by the film, her approach to Barbie and how the iconic doll would feel. However, she soon realized that the song was actually about her.
"I really don't want it to come off as cocky at all, but I'm doing things that I don't even know that... I'm writing about myself and I don't even know it," he admitted.
"It's one of the most incredible things I've experienced in my life. Man, the next week I was putting it all day in the car and putting it on everybody. And I was thinking: “That's exactly how I feel. And I didn't even want to say it," he continued.
Billie Eilish claimed that the moment she realized 'What I Was Made For?' she refers to herself as "the craziest thing" she has ever experienced.
"I was like, 'Oh, I was definitely writing about myself,' but I was thinking about myself from a third-person perspective. And I was thinking about myself objectively, which also made me feel really connected to her, to me," she recalled.
Billie Eilish later said it was very "special" that she directed the music video for "What I Was Made For?", in which she appears with platinum blonde hair and a yellow dress as she deals with a box of Barbie doll clothes inspired by her own looks.
“I don't know, I love all my videos and of course some of them don't get better over time, but I still really love them all. But this one, I think, I don't know, I'm really proud of it," she said.
