In the summer of 2023, the world was swept up in the “Barbie” craze. The blockbuster film, based on the iconic fashion doll, influenced culture and won many accolades, but there’s one aspect that has stayed in the zeitgeist.
Billie Eilish‘s “What Was I Made For?” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and it has continued to resonate with listeners outside of the film’s context. The pop singer and her brother, Finneas, were chosen by director Greta Gerwig to write the “heart song” for the movie’s main character. They were shown several scenes from “Barbie,” but the assignment quickly became personal for Eilish.
“When we were writing this we were very much writing about a character…and it wasn’t until two days later that I was like, ‘This is me,'” she told Vanity Fair.
“What Was I Made For?” is another example of a song that proves you don’t have to labor forever to find something special. Eilish and Finneas wrote the song in a flurry of inspiration.
“It was one of the fastest songs we’ve ever written. Once we got that first verse and that line just ‘What was I made for?,’ I think we were both like… It was a good vibe. And it was honestly a half hour that it took to do that.”
Writing may have been difficult, but recording was another story. Eilish describes it as one of the top three hardest songs she’s ever tracked. “It’s not even that it’s high,” she admits. “It’s about the delivery. I was trying to do a very specific thing with my voice, which was this very soft, held-back, upper-range falsetto… almost like you were just crying and now you’re singing.”
The song has a simple chord progression that moves from Cmaj to Fmaj with an E minor in the middle as a passing chord. The end of each verse exchanges the C with an A minor chord. The chorus begins on a Dmin7 – the ii chord in C major – followed by a G7, which is the V chord. Its limited harmony puts focus on the heart-wrenching melody, but it also opens the song up to have more interesting elements.
Finneas used a piano as the song’s main accompaniment, but he builds out the texture with some interesting elements as things progress.
“I think of sound in a very physical way. A perfect production is a perfectly balanced set of scales,” he says. “The fantasy is that your vocal is unbelievable, and the one instrument playing along to it is great, and it’s just that. The art of production to me is just to enhance the emotionality, it isn’t to gild a lily.”
The magic of the track is from instruments that are somewhat hidden in the mix. For example, Finneas gave Eilish a toy keyboard and ran it through a plugin called Sketch Cassette that gave it an even more lo-fi vibe. That sound doubles the melody, adding to the drama and melancholy. He also used his own voice, arpeggiated organ, and mellotron to expand the palette. Listen closely, and you’ll also realize there are huge, distorted guitars padding the mix.
“No one would ever think that that’s in there, but it adds so much energy,” he explains. “And that’s sort of the physics of it. It would never sit in that song if we had it super loud.”
Watch Billie Eilish and Finneas talk about the process of writing and recording “What Was I Made For?” then follow along with the sheet music below.
