Billie Eilish and Finneas Wrote Their Hit 'Barbie' Song in an "Hour or Two"

If you've been on TikTok, Instagram, or the internet, for that matter, in the last few months, it's been hard to ignore the impact of Billie Eilish's Barbie song, "What Was I Made For?" Radio stations have been playing it on repeat while women everywhere have been sharing videos of themselves crying and resonating with the message of the smash hit. Even the film's creator and director Greta Gerwig raved about the song in a previous interview.

While there's no denying the ballad's power, Eilish just admitted that when she and her brother and musical partner Finneas O'Connell sat down to write the chart topper, it all sort of just poured out of them in "an hour or two."

"It was as if this song was a tiny creature inside of me for years, scratching the inside of me,” she said told Allure in her Best of Beauty Awards cover story. “As soon as we got that prompt, the creature was like, ‘OK, I’m out,’ and we [meaning Billie and her brother-collaborator, Finneas] wrote that song in an hour or two.”

Eilish went on to note that, at the time, the duo were in a bit of a writer's slump. The ease of the song is just a testament to how much the project and music spoke to them. “We wrote it in a period of time where we couldn’t have been less inspired and less creative," she explained. "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. I have the whole video of us writing the song, and the first thing we wrote were those lines in the first 10 minutes.”

"We wrote most of the song without thinking about ourselves and our own lives, but thinking about this character we were inspired by," she continued. "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.”

In addition to the seemingly endless uses on social media, the song has also now amassed more than 300 million streams on Spotify. Eilish told the publication that she is touched by how many women have connected to the record.

“The way the song has been heard and seen by women is so special to me,” Billie said. “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.”