Billie Eilish says Barbie song “What Was I Made For?” is “about me”

Billie Eilish‘s latest hit “What Was I Made For?” was written specifically for the Barbie movie soundtrack, but the singer tells Allure that the song hits much closer to home.

Billie and her brother, Finneas, saw 30 minutes of Barbie footage ahead of writing the track. She tells Allure for the magazine’s October Best of Beauty issue, “We wrote it in a period of time where we couldn’t have been less inspired and less creative. That day we were making stuff, and were like, ‘We’ve lost it. Why are we even doing this?’ And then those first chords happened, and ‘I used to float/now I just fall down’ came out and the song wrote itself.”

“We wrote most of the song without thinking about ourselves and our own lives, but thinking about this character we were inspired by,” she explains. “A couple of days went by, and I realized it was about me. It’s everything I feel. And it’s not just me — everyone feels like that, eventually.”

That appears to be true: Billie says, “The way the song has been heard and seen by women is so special to me. All the videos are devastating. I go on TikTok, and it’s video after video of how hard it is to be a woman, with that song playing.” 

Billie also tells Allure that she still struggles with how hard it is to be a pop star.

“I’m starting to do better, but I’ve not been doing so great, to be honest. For a while. I have impending-doom feelings most of the day,” she reveals. “When I think too much about it, how I can never have privacy again, it’s enough to make you want to do all sorts of crazy things. But you have to let it go.”

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