“In the letter he’s like, ‘I have everything in the world, and I absolutely hate it.’ He was so ashamed that he wasn’t enjoying it. And I get why he was feeling that way,” she adds. “It’s just not what you think it’s going to be.”
But the singer is describing the emotional circumstances that shaped her single, “What Was I Made For?,” in which she sings about having forgotten how to be happy over the saddest-sounding piano chords in the world.
Pop punk’s revival is girl-shaped – think Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish
Pop punk’s revival is girl-shaped – think Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish
Cobain, who died in 1994, comes up as an artist she and her brother-producer, Finneas O’Connell, look to frequently for his understanding of the loneliness of success.
“It’s that existential-crisis vibe where you could be sitting in a room with people you love,” she says, “and you’re like, Oh, my God, what the f*** is going on with my life?”
Should it come as a surprise that this ballad of a young woman’s disillusionment arrived as part of the Hollywood juggernaut that is Barbie?
Most of the film’s songs share its frothy spirit and sleek surfaces; yet “What Was I Made For?” is different: smaller, slower, infinitely more introspective.
Gerwig says she asked Eilish and O’Connell to write “Barbie’s heart song – the song that is deep inside her core that she doesn’t even completely know is there but that she starts to hear more clearly throughout the film”.
We all cried
The director recalls receiving the siblings’ demo, with just Eilish’s vocals and O’Connell on piano.
“It totally wrecked me,” Gerwig says, adding that she immediately played it for her partner, Noah Baumbach, with whom she wrote the movie, and for others involved with the production. Their verdict?
“We all cried.”
They are hardly the only ones with whom the song has connected. A nine-week No. 1 smash on Billboard’s alternative music chart, “What Was I Made For?” has racked up more than half a billion streams on Spotify and YouTube and recently earned five Grammy nominations, including for record and song of the year.
Now it is in the running to compete for original song at the 96th Academy Awards in March.
Accepting the prize that night at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, the singer looked genuinely thrilled to have earned one of the highest honours in show business – “We promise not to lose these,” O’Connell joked as he hoisted his statuette.
“2019, that period of my life when I dyed my hair green, I was completely unstoppable,” the Los Angeles native 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 had 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.’”
Eilish thought she had devised a plan for contentment by going blonde-bombshell around “Happier Than Ever” – a dramatic shift from the edgy goth look that helped make her such a sensation.
But the hair began to feel like a costume in which she lost her identity. “I completely had no idea who I was,” she says. “I came up with this whole aesthetic, and I just got swallowed up into it.”
She cut the blonde hair short, which registered as an improvement, then she went brown for a spell. “I look back at that and I’m like, ‘Who is this brunette?’” she says. “A brunette! That wasn’t me.”
Finally going back to black restored her creative mojo to the point that she could funnel her thoughts of disappointment and futility into music – into a song inspired, as it happens, by one of culture’s most iconic blondes.
Eilish, who recently weathered a high-profile break-up with singer Jesse Rutherford of the LA rock band the Neighbourhood, has been thinking a lot about maturity as she and O’Connell wrap up work on Eilish’s third LP.
“It feels somehow very different from the rest of what I’ve ever put out,” says the singer, who is turning 22 on December 18. “Like, now I’m in my 20s – oh, my God, that’s so weird – and I’ve never been an adult putting music out before.”
Does she feel a kinship with Rodrigo, who was born 14 months after Eilish and who similarly rocketed to pop stardom as a teenager with her monster 2021 ballad “Drivers License”?
“I think everybody’s experiences are so individual,” she says. “Nobody has had anybody else’s life, you know? But I do feel a protectiveness over Olivia. I have a song called ‘Goldwing’ from my last album that’s kind of about her.
“I’ve never said that to anyone. It’s not only about her. I was just thinking about her when I was writing it. She was coming up, and she was younger than me, and nobody had ever been younger than me,” she adds with a laugh.
“Goldwing” opens with a few lines from a hymn that Eilish sang as a kid in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus; later, she sketches a portrait of looming exploitation that Barbie might recognise:
“They’re gonna tell you what you want to hear/ Then they’re gonna disappear/ Gonna claim you like a souvenir/ Just to sell you in a year.”
“Olivia was getting big, and she was just, like, this little dainty child,” Eilish says of the performer who got her start in the Disney universe.
“I felt so nervous. I was worried about her. She came up in that acting world, and people are so weird. I don’t know – I just felt very protective over her. And I feel that way to everyone.”
She mentions Ariana Greenblatt, who plays a crucial role in Barbie as a moody middle-schooler. “She’s 16, and I literally want to cry about her sometimes,” she says.
“I just see myself in all these young girls. And it’s the girls, man. Boys can handle themselves. They’re dudes – they don’t have to deal with it like we do,” she says with a sigh.
“I just want to hold everybody in a little glass box and never let anything touch them.”
If you have suicidal thoughts or know someone who is experiencing them, help is available.