Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas wrote "What Was I Made For?" for the feature-length film, Barbie. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, it stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken.
The songwriting process started in January 2023 when Greta Gerwig showed Eilish and Finneas a rough cut of the film at Warner Bros. Studios in California. Deeply moved, the siblings wrote almost the entire song that night at their home studio in Los Angeles. Mark Ronson, who oversaw the Barbie soundtrack album, and his colleague Andrew Wyatt then added extra production.
Barbie dolls are perceived as mere playthings, swiftly acquired and discarded by children. But in the film, these dolls emerge as distinct individuals in the utopian Barbie Land. After being cast out from their idyllic homeland, Barbie and Ken face new challenges. No longer part of the plastic world, Barbie undergoes an existential crisis.
"What Was I Made For?" parallels the movie's plot and plays during pivotal moments in the film. Accompanied by Finneas' piano, Eilish delves into Barbie's struggle as she ventures into the real world.
In the opening two verses, Barbie grapples with mundane tasks, finding even simple movement a challenge, before questioning her identity.
Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real
Just something you paid for
What was I made for?
The chorus becomes a yearning for self-discovery, as Barbie longs to embrace genuine human emotions:
Can't grasp these feelings,
But perhaps, just maybe,
Someday, I'll find my way.
Barbie looks to find her purpose. Though she grapples with sadness, her ultimate aspiration is to reclaim happiness once more.
Think I forgot how to be happy
Something I'm not, but something I can be
"What Was I Made For?" marks Eilish and Finneas' second song recorded for a major movie. They previously wrote "
No Time To Die" for the 2021 James Bond film of the same name. That one earned them an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Billie Eilish's music has a brooding nature, making her an unconventional pick for the vibrant Barbie franchise.
Entering the studio, Eilish grappled with a sense of apprehension, concerned that anything she did for the Barbie project would fall short of expectations. "I thought about like 'No Time To Die,'" Eilish explained to Apple Music's Zane Lowe. "That was months of thinking and talking and coming up with different melodies and stuff, and that was also one of my favorite processes of all time but very different, and I was like, 'We can't recreate that, like how are we gonna do that?'"
Once Eilish and Finneas started working, her anxieties dissolved into thin air. "We truly sat down, and Finneas started playing piano and those first couple lyrics, 'I used to float, now I just fall down,' just came right out," she recalled.
It was only after she'd written the lyrics that Eilish realized she's expressed some personal feelings related to Barbie's plight. "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. I did not think about myself once in the writing process," she told Zane Lowe. "So that's full first verse, pre-chorus, chorus, maybe second verse, all in one night. Didn't think about my own life. Didn't think about how I feel. Didn't think about anything. I was purely inspired by this movie and this character and the way I thought she would feel and wrote about that."
In the subsequent days, as she listened back, Eilish had a revelation about her own connection to the song. "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. 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.'"
In the video, directed by Eilish herself, the singer unboxes doll-sized clothing that are outfits from the singer's past. As rain and wind pummel the clothes, they succumb to the elements until Eilish ultimately gathers the pieces and leaves the room.
Billie Eilish performed the live debut of "What Was I Made For?" during her Day 1-closing set at Lollapalooza in Chicago on August 3, 2023.
"What Was I Made For?" climbed to #1 on Australia's ARIA chart. It marked Eilish's second visit to the summit Down Under, following "
Bad Guy" in 2019.
"What Was I Made For?" was Eilish's second UK #1, after her 2020 James Bond single "
No Time To Die."
Billie Eilish nailed her vision for "What Was I Made For?" with wispy, heartbroken vocals, deliberately ditching belted notes for a rawer intimacy. "I feel really proud,"
she told Vanity Fare. "If I can be honest, I feel like it's one of my best vocal performances I've ever given."
Finneas playfully countered her self-assessment, reminiscing about Eilish's late-night studio revisions when she was striving for microscopic vocal perfection. "She'd go home for the night, come back the next day and say – I need to re-record this line, this line and this line," he recalled.
"What Was I Made For?" won Best Original Song at the 2024 Golden Globes. Other nominated songs it beat were fellow
Barbie tracks "
Dance The Night" (by Dua Lipa) and "
I'm Just Ken" (by Ryan Gosling).
"What Was I Made For?" took Song Of The Year at the Grammy Awards in 2024, which seemed to genuinely surprise Eilish, who performed it with Finneas earlier in the ceremony. In her acceptance speech, she said she was "shocked out of my balls" to win. Viewers were surprised to: "
Anti-Hero" by Taylor Swift or "
Vampire" by Olivia Rodrigo seemed most likely to win.
"What Was I Made For?" won the Oscar for Best Song, an award Billie Eilish and Finneas won two years earlier for "No Time To Die" from the James Bond movie of the same name.
It was one of eight nominations for Barbie ("I'm Just Ken" also got a nom for Best Song) but the only win. Voters preferred Oppenheimer, which won seven awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
"What Was I Made For?" picked up the award for Video For Good at the VMAs in 2024.
Finneas revealed on The Kelly Clarkson Show that he began writing songs at just 12 years old, before he had experienced many of the emotions he was writing about. To fuel his creativity, he often drew from books and movies, placing himself in the shoes of fictional characters. This early practice of stepping into different roles helped him develop the skill of writing for big projects like the Barbie and James Bond movies later in his career, when he continued to create music from the perspective of characters like a plastic doll or a British spy.
