Billie Eilish, Finneas O’Connell Win Song of the Year Grammy, Thank ‘Barbie’ Director Greta Gerwig For Making “Best Movie of the Year”
Billie Eilish and her brother and principal collaborator Finneas O’Connell won the award for song of the year at the 2024 Grammys, for “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie soundtrack.
After Lionel Richie announced the winner, Eilish was visibly shocked. “Yikes… Damn, that’s stupid guys,” the singer said when taking the stage.
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Eilish said she was sure there was “not a chance” they would win. “I just want to say, everybody in this category — like that was a crazy list of incredible people! Incredible artists. Crazy right now,” she added, referring to her fellow nominees, including SZA, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus.
She went on to thank members of the Recording Academy and O’Connell who she called her “best friend in the world and makes me the person that I am today.”
Eilish also gave special thanks to Barbie director Greta Gerwig for “making the best movie of the year,” a pointed shout-out after the headline-making Oscars snubs for Gerwig as director and star Margot Robbie as best actress.
“We’re so lucky — we just continue to be just deeply, deeply privileged, lucky people,” O’Connell said. “It’s hard to feel deserving ever but we certainly don’t right now. We feel very humble, very grateful.”
Eilish’s ballad earned five nominations at this year’s ceremony, including for record of the year, best pop solo performance and best music video. Eilish and O’Connell took the stage earlier in the show to perform the emotional track. Ahead of their performance, they had already won the Grammy for best song written for visual media.
Eilish has won a total of 7 Grammys with 25 nominations. This Grammy marked Eilish and O’Connell’s third in the song of the year category.
“What Was I Made For” was also nominated for an Academy Award for best original song. Eilish and O’Connell previously won the Oscar for original song in 2022 for the title track to the James Bond No Time to Die.
Backstage Eilish admitted that prior to writing the song for Barbie, they had been “writing absolutely nothing.” “We had been working three days a week and not coming up with stuff, and even if we were coming up with stuff it just didn’t feel right, didn’t feel good, didn’t feel real,” she said. “And I got really worried, I got nervous, I felt like it was going to be over a little bit. I was in a real dark place, really, really dark place, it’s kind of hard to think back to it.”
Eilish credited Gerwig for offering the “life-changing” opportunity, also noting that she and O’Connell wrote the song within 24 hours after seeing the film. “We wrote it under two hours, if not one hour, and honestly from then on we were just creative again. I don’t know, it just woke us up and got us on our thing and it was really special and powerful and I hold it deep and dear to my heart and my chest,” Eilish said.
Other songs nominated in the category included: “A&W” (Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey & Sam Dew), “Anti-Hero” (Jack Antonoff & Taylor Swift), “Butterfly” (Jon Batiste & Dan Wilson), “Dance The Night” (From Barbie The Album, Caroline Ailin, Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt), “Flowers” (Miley Cyrus, Gregory Aldae Hein & Michael Pollack), “Kill Bill” (Rob Bisel, Carter Lang & Solána Rowe) and “vampire” -(Daniel Nigro & Olivia Rodrigo).
For this year’s Grammys, female acts make up seven of the eight nominees in the top three categories — with SZA leading with nine overall nominations followed by Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Eilish, Miley Cyrus and boygenius with six nods a piece.
The Grammy Awards telecasted live from L.A. on Sunday on the CBS Television Network. It also streamed live and on-demand on Paramount+. Trevor Noah hosted.
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