Olivia Rodrigo’s stellar discography grew on Friday, June 12, with the release of her third studio album, “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.”
The album was set to stand out the minute the title and cover were revealed. Rodrigo, known for her four-lettered album titles and purple eras, completely shifted gears. She started teasing the album title and the new era’s color almost three weeks before the official album announcement using a wall in Los Angeles. The wall was painted each day, starting as purple and eventually making its way to a shade of pink.
Fans were astonished at the changes, and excitement brewed for the album’s release.
The album begins with the iconic lead single, “drop dead,” which perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being intensely smitten at the beginning of a new romantic connection or crush. It is the perfect lead single for a cohesive and chronological story, as the following songs grow deeper with despair. “drop dead” reminds me of “Don’t Delete the Kisses” by Wolf Alice, which has a similar dreamy instrumental and a talkative verse. “drop dead” is completely different from her past lead singles, “driver’s license” and “vampire.”
“This record is a time capsule of a relationship in all of its highs and lows,” Rodrigo wrote on Instagram the day her album released. “It’s my attempt at capturing love from both sides of the coin.”
During early promotion for the album, Rodrigo appeared on “On Air with Ryan Seacrest” on April 22. She told Seacrest that she “started writing this album at a time in [her] life where [she] was experiencing real romantic love for the first time.”
Although Rodrigo expected to have an album full of love songs, the tables quickly turned.
In a newsletter to fans, Rodrigo wrote, “no matter how much I try to write love songs, they always end up coming with a touch of melancholy.” Luckily for us, Rodrigo makes melancholy hurt so good.
The first half of the album is described as the “girl so in love” section while the second half is the “you seem pretty sad” portion, reinstating the beginning and end of a relationship throughout its course.
The second track, “stupid song,” tricks you at first by starting with a piano instrumental and with Rodrigo singing about how “New York City’s never looked so blue.” It continues to build, and you’re left with urge to run for miles while yelling the lyrics about insanely wanting someone. The guitars and drums catch up with Rodrigo, and by the bridge, it’s a classic Rodrigo song that you can totally picture her screaming on tour.
By track three we slow down again, this time staying there. “Honeybee” is a heartfelt love song lyrically, but you can’t help but feel the melancholy Rodrigo slips in. It’s dreamy and hopeful, and it sounds like a huge promise to forever. The string section toward the end of the track is heavenly and feels like being in a fairytale and dancing in a big ballroom. She sings, “I hope I never see what your face looks like going / A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing,” and even though it’s lovely, it almost breaks your heart. You can’t help but wonder if any of these are truly love songs.
“Maggots for brains” is where the major red flags in this story start to seep in. Sonically, it’s vibrant and has made its way to my top three of this album. Notable lyrics, such as, “Empty, look at me,” “I’m a sad shell of a woman” and “But that’s just the thing that happens when my baby goes away” begin to make me worry that perhaps this relationship is blossoming into some form of codependency. Nonetheless, the repeating melody of “What can I do / But think of you?” at the end of the song is sure to stick into your head and, like many other lyrics, be ones you want to yell along to with Rodrigo.
My favorite song off “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love” is track five, “u + me = <3.” The guitar picking immediately pulls you in, before leading into an instrumental similar to “Just Like Heaven” by The Cure. Rodrigo’s musical influences always linger. As the song went on, all I kept thinking was that it would fit on the soundtrack of a 2000s romantic-comedy. Here, Rodrigo is hopeful again as she sings, “I know everybody changes / But I hope that we don’t.”
When talking about the highs and lows of love, you can’t forget the ugly. Rodrigo explores such with track six, “my way,” where she gets openly jealous and angry over a girl getting too close to her partner: “But you linger in the air just like a bad perfume / It’s getting to me, embarrassingly.” With the bluntness and feistiness the song possesses, it’s the most pop-rock song on the album and probably could’ve fit well on the deluxe of Rodrigo’s sophomore album, “GUTS (spilled).” “My way” is another classic Rodrigo maneuver and, boy, does she do it so well.
Things settle down again in “purple,” the final track of the “girl so in love” section. At first, it seems sweet, like it would be fitting for this section. One of my favorite lyrics Rodrigo sings is, “I used to visit your town like a tourist / Now I got / A local grocery store and a favorite florist.” I think it’s a beautiful way to speak on how much life can change, especially having to do with love. Who would’ve thought? Further into the track, red flags appear again: “And we fight / Over who I’m hanging out with like a real couple.” Rodrigo seems almost thrilled about this, like it’s something to romanticize, but it made me unsettled. She later sings, “I had big dreams ‘til I tied myself to you,” which brings us back to the earlier signs of codependency. Rodrigo keeps repeating “Melt with you” throughout the song and by the end of “purple” she sings, “Melt with you ‘til it all turns black / Melt with you ‘til I just feel sad.” Around this time, you realize you’re done with the “girl so in love” section, and you have to brace yourself for what will follow.
We open the second half of the album with track eight, “the cure,” where Rodrigo explores her personal issues within a relationship. When this song was released as the second single prior to the album’s release, I found it monumental. Not many pop girls speak about heartbreaks and look within, letting us into their own warped difficulties. “I thought I found the antidote with you,” Rodrigo sings, as if somehow this love would fix everything. The topic is something many audiences seem to believe in, which is why I think this song was important to release and explore. Rodrigo acknowledges, at the end of the day, “It don’t matter how your love feels anymore / It will never be the cure.” The song is laced with sorrow and stays acoustic while building on Rodrigo’s strong and desperate vocals. A career highlight.
We then make it to “begged,” which Rodrigo first performed during her Saturday Night Live double duty as host and musical guest on May 2. The song is simple: just a girl, her guitar and some layered vocals that make it even more heart wrenching. Rodrigo sings about accepting a love that isn’t good enough for her needs but that isn’t all bad either, so she chooses to keep it around. “They say it’s a virtue to not let good love slip away.” Then, she also acknowledges, “Nothing’s quite enough, when I know that to get it, I begged.” On a recent visit to iHeartRadio, Rodrigo said about the song: “It’s basically me coming to the conclusion that all the big romantic gestures and amazing trips mean nothing if you had to beg.” Rodrigo wanted someone who’d take initiative, and it’s clear she wasn’t getting it. Everyone has different needs, and it seems like these two people weren’t compatible.
Speaking of more career highlights, imagine saying your first collaboration is with Robert Smith of The Cure. Track 10 is titled “what’s wrong with me” and features Smith. At this point, it seems Rodrigo is in some kind of depressive episode. “My head is spinning and my stomach is sick / Say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit,” she sings, feeling guilty for her negative feelings despite being in something seen as “good.” She continues, “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep / I think you’re what’s wrong with me.” I find these lyrics to be very clever, as the title at first read either like a question or like a song that would be similar to “the cure,” which looks inward. I didn’t expect the figure of what was wrong to be the relationship itself. According to BBC Radio, “what’s wrong with me” was originally written about missing someone so intensely that she felt listless and depressed. Rodrigo revised the lyrics post break-up after realizing that the relationship itself was the source of her sadness. Smith’s haunting vocals fit the song very well, and his voice with Rodrigo’s sounds like a dream come true … or more of a nightmare, considering the theme of the song. I can’t imagine the song without Smith’s eerie and beautiful presence.
“Less” feels like a vulnerable look into Rodrigo’s diary. No matter how many times I click play, I still feel as though I should not be listening to it. Another simple track sonically, just vocals and piano. Many people joke that they’re afraid of Rodrigo’s guitar, as a reference to her song “scared of my guitar,” but I’m more afraid of her and that dang piano. It has brought me to tears multiple times, and I’m not even in a break-up headspace. It’s quite powerful. After “the cure,” “begged” and “what’s wrong with me” and all the evaluation within the songs, “less,” to me, marks the realization of the end. The songs before had been building up to this moment and inevitable doom – finally it arrived. She ends with: “If loving me means saying, ‘Babe, I think this is the end’ / I guess / I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less.” Her songwriting always stuns me. The way Rodrigo’s voice slightly breaks during the chorus is so heartbreakingly beautiful.
After barely recovering from “less,” track 12’s funky beat takes over, and you’re left to just suck it up. “Expectations” explores the hilarious aftermath of thinking you’re ready to explore love after heartbreak. Fans say the song reminds them of how “Sex and the City” feels, and I think that’s a perfect way of putting it. After all this bad luck, Rodrigo sings, “Past mistakes are just new information / These days, I’ve got expectations.” I wonder whom she’s trying to convince: the audience or herself? This is the song you play to hype yourself up while getting ready to go out with friends like you weren’t just sobbing into your pillow an hour ago. The bridge sounds like mimicking vocals with a 1980s disco edge. The track’s unique sound shows growth and a new side of Rodrigo we had yet to explore.
Then reality hits again in the album’s final track, “cigarette smoke.” We celebrated for a bit, but it’s back to sobbing into our pillows. The painful guitar strums at the track’s opening, and Rodrigo’s fragile vocals come in. “I regret you / And how long I stayed,” she sings. What makes this track very tragic, besides the obvious, is that it’s the final one. There’s no healing, really; she just wants her time back from this person, and that’s how the story ends. I find it gut wrenching that that’s what it came to instead of an “oh, I grew” or a “thanks for doing this for me.” Instead, Rodrigo serves us real life, and sometimes when you look back at a connection, you do wonder what it was all for. Did it even make me better? Rodrigo says now nights can be lonely, “But it’s better than begging for you to stand up for me, honeybee.” The repeat of honeybee in this context feels like being let down from how hopeful we all were on track three – including Rodrigo. She asks to be told “something honest so the memories turn dark.” The concept of asking for something brutal so that it shuts down whatever good the person did in a relationship is a heavy ask. By the end of this album, no matter where you are in your life, your heart gets broken too.
The growth and artistry Rodrigo shows in just three albums is astounding. If you’re a fan you always think “how will she top this one?” and then she does, with ease. “You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love” has received mass critical acclaim, with multiple sources citing this as her best album. I would have to agree.
It’s clear that each song was tweaked to perfection and taken care of very vigorously. There is a specific story here, and Rodrigo immensely delivers. She does this while giving us a new sound but also staying true to herself and what makes her stick out. This is an album you hear and you know will be a classic for years to come. If you haven’t been paying attention to Rodrigo, this is the album where you sure as hell will.
** Lyrics and lyric breaks were cited from genius.com
