Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell have another hit on their hands with “What Was I Made For,” a track from Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie that has already snagged a Golden Globe nomination and five Grammy nominations including record and song of the year.
On Thursday night in the desert, the song propelled them to the stage to pick up a Chairman’s Award during the Palm Springs Film Awards and Eilish took the opportunity to dedicate the trophy to a target audience while also revealing emotional truths about her life and when she wanted it to end.
“I would really like to say that this award and any recognition that this song gets, I just want to dedicate to anyone who experiences hopelessness, the feeling of existential dread and feeling like, what’s the point, why am I here and why am I doing this?” Eilish explained while standing next to her brother at the podium inside the Palm Springs Convention Center following a tribute by Gerwig (making them the first musicians to ever receive the honor). “I think we all feel like that occasionally, but I think if somebody like me, with the amount of privilege that I have and the incredible things that I get to do and be and how I have really not wanted to be here … sorry to be dark, damn, but I’ve spent a lot of time feeling that way.”
She then had a message for those who find themselves in a similar state: “I just want to say to anyone that feels that way, be patient with yourself and know that it is, I think, worth it all.” The superstar singer said “it’s good to be alive now” even though she didn’t feel that way for “a very long time.”
When the pair was approached to contribute to the Barbie soundtrack, Eilish recalled that she “was in a dark episode and things didn’t make sense in life. I just didn’t understand what the point was and why you would keep going. [I was] questioning everything in the world.”
Then she and her brother sat in a theater to watch about 35 minutes of footage that Gerwig had compiled. “Basically I was just watching Barbie say and feel things that I really, really, really resonated with and felt so close to. I felt so seen, and I did not expect that,” said Eilish, who then collaborated with her brother to translate those themes and questions into a powerful set of lyrics that have resonated with film fans and music fans, alike. “I think that this movie is the most incredible, most empowering and beautiful and funny and just unbelievable piece of art in the world, and I’m so honored to be a part of it.”
Eilish then turned the microphone over to her brother, who focused his comments on their parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell.
“Our parents were theater people before they were our parents. They met on a flight to Alaska to do regional theater in 1984, and in the ‘90s they got married to each other and decided to start a family. They decided that it might be a good idea to move from New York where they were doing plays to Los Angeles to maybe do some things that would make some residual income like film and television,” he said. “That didn’t work out at all, and I think it underscored as children that it was okay to have dreams that didn’t pan out the way that you thought they might. And it also underscored that the entertainment industry, like all industries, is fairly unfair.”
However, he continued that despite having those dreams derailed, “we weren’t raised by bitter people who hadn’t gotten to achieve their dreams. We were raised by people who did nothing but encourage us to believe in ourselves and pursue the dreams and passions that we had. I don’t particularly know how they were able to do both of those things, but they were, and we’d be nothing and nowhere without our parents, and I love them so much.”
