Eilish, who as a SAG-AFTRA member was barred from discussing “Barbie” on this day weeks before the actors’ strike was resolved, contends she didn’t have herself in mind when she wrote “What Was I Made For?” earlier this year. “I was thinking about a character from her point of view,” she says — Barbie, in other words, who over the course of Gerwig’s film comes to realize that perfection isn’t real (and that she wouldn’t want it even if it were).
Says Gerwig of the song: “It became a theme for Barbie’s whole awakening.”
“But then I was listening to it with a friend, and she was literally sitting there side-eyeing me — like, ‘Dude, this is your life,’” Eilish says with a laugh. What the singer can see now is that the external validation she received as a celebrated teenage phenom did a real number on her sense of self-worth after an adolescence marked by depression.
“2019, that period of my life when I dyed my hair green, I was completely unstoppable,” she says. “I felt like I was on the moon. And I remember at the time being like, I’m finally happy. I’d never been happy before, and I just wanted to stay happy. Then a couple years happened. COVID happened. Another album happened,” she continues, referring to 2021’s “Happier Than Ever.” “I got older and fell back into being a human and not being happy all the time — having good moments and having bad moments. Last year got really bad. And I just kept being like, ‘God, I miss 2019 so much. When can my life feel like that again?’”
Through talks with her brother and her friends she eventually grasped that she’d been “basing all my happiness on all these things in the material world that you have no control over and that will inevitably change.” She shrugs. “This song has a lot to do with that. ‘I used to float’ — that’s what 2019 felt like,” she says, quoting the first line of “What Was I Made For?” before dropping the next one: “‘Now I just fall down.’”