In a recent installment of the podcast Appetite for Distortion, Hall of Fame songwriter Desmond Child spoke about his upcoming memoir as well as the one song he wishes he wrote. Child has credits on songs like KISS’ “I Was Made For Lovin’ You,” Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” various Bon Jovi hits including “Livin’ On a Prayer,” and some for Aerosmith including “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).”
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“I am jealous of Billie Eilish‘s song in Barbie, ‘What Was I Made For?,'” Child said on the podcast. “I mean, that’s gonna win the Oscar, hands down. When that song is so touching, and deep, profound and as existential — she got it just right there, with her brother and everything with that song. And, you know, I was surprised how that song hit me. So I’m jealous, jealous, jealous of Billie Eilish and her magnificent song from Barbie.”
High praise from one prolific songwriter to another. Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, wrote the song together after a bout of writer’s block, according to a report from Billboard in July. The two were shown a rough cut of the Barbie movie, and as Eilish shared, “Barbie and Greta [Gerwig] just pulled it out of me.”
She continued, “I did not think about myself once in the writing process. I was purely inspired by this movie and this character and the way I thought she would feel, and wrote about that. And then, over the next couple days, I was listening and I was like, girl, how did this … honestly, and I really don’t mean this to come off a conceited way at all, but 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.”
That unique introspection and existentialism of “What Was I Made For?” perfectly mirrored those elements in the Barbie movie, which premiered on July 21 and broke numerous box office records. Eilish was heavily involved in almost every element of the song, from writing and performing to directing the music video.
“It is one of the most incredible things I get to experience in my life,” Eilish explained. “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.’ It was truly the trippiest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I was like, oh, I absolutely was writing about myself, but I was thinking about myself from a third person.”
Eilish has often credited her success to her commitment to being her authentic self. “I have to give credit to the person I’ve always been,” she told Allure recently. “I did not give a fuck at all.” Billie Eilish not giving a fuck led to, arguably, one of the best songs of the year. Or, at least one of the best songs of the Barbie movie.
Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame
