New album from Olivia Rodrigo: Love is a cruelly beautiful undertaking

Olivia Rodrigo explores both sides of this coin called love on her amazing new album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.” In an interview with the New York Times, the pop star was a little hesitant to use the word “concept album” – but it actually fits perfectly. Their new album tells a love story chronologically, from the first date and the intense initial phase through the first breaks and doubts to the separation and the subsequent reflection on the experience.

Each of the 13 songs opens up a new perspective on this love, which, as Rodrigo said in the interview, was her first serious “big girl” relationship. What’s particularly impressive is how different and interesting the songs sound on the first, seemingly happy half of the record.

Everyone knows that it is harder to write in an exciting way about a functioning relationship than about heartbreak. And it’s clear that Olivia Rodrigo can do breakup ballads since she went from Disney starlet to world-famous pop star almost overnight with “Drivers License” at the beginning of 2021. “Drivers License” was the ultimate teenage heartbreak song that could only have been written by a 17-year-old who is certain she will never love anyone like she loves her ex again.

Influences from the eighties

Rodrigo is now 23 years old, so he hasn’t been a teenager for a long time. You can hear that in their lyrics, which sound much more nuanced and self-critical than on their previous albums.

The sound has also changed, which, like on “Sour” and “Guts” before, was created together with producer Dan Nigro. The two rejected the pop-punk of their previous albums and were inspired by new wave and dream pop of the eighties. But the signature piano ballads in between remained.

Several threads run through the new album, one of them literally: “I’m the thread on your shirt that is coming undone,” Rodrigo sings on the rousing second track “Stupid Song,” which captures the manic, borderline-insanity energy you feel when you’re newly in love and can’t think of anything else.

“I’m unraveled” is what it says a few songs later in “The Cure” – which can be translated as “unraveled”, but also as “completely dissolved”. And in “The Cure,” the album’s emotional and musical highlight, Rodrigo is actually both. She has realized that her true love will not save her from the problems she has with herself, nor will she be a miraculous cure.

She can only patch herself up, not her lover – a realization that breaks her heart. “It’s not enough,” she practically screams at the end of the five-minute song, whose acoustic guitar riffs are reminiscent of the Smashing Pumpkins and which is one of the strongest of her career.

A second thread, fitting the title of this song, is the band “The Cure,” which Rodrigo has long admired. In the opener “Drop Dead” the song “Just Like Heaven” gets a shout-out, musically “The Cure” is also an inspiration, especially in “Maggots for Brains” and the outstanding “u & me = <3” on the first half of the album. The latter song also features the great lyrics “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say ‘fuck it, whatever’”.

A guest appearance from “The Cure” frontman

Frontman Robert Smith even appears on the second half of the album to sing with Rodrigo in “What’s wrong with me” about how the reason for their malaise could be their relationship: “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep / I think you’re what’s wrong with me”. Here Rodrigo turns the vocabulary that in the first part of the album stood for infatuation on the verge of a nervous breakdown into its opposite. These kinds of callbacks run through the whole record.

In the resigned closer “Cigarette Smoke” she reflects on her failed relationship: “Some nights can be so fucking lonely / but it’s better than begging for you to stand up for me, honeybee”, a reference to both the ballad “Begged”, in which she sings about the feeling of not being able to be happy about her partner’s tokens of love when she had to beg him for it before, and to the melancholic love song “Honeybee”. This is perhaps the best example of Rodrigo and Nigro’s art of incorporating a touch of sadness lyrically and musically into seemingly happy love songs, which makes the whole thing multidimensional.

Olivia Rodrigo finally establishes herself as an outstanding songwriter with her third record; Not just “good for her age,” as she sang on her previous album, but good, period. And we now know for sure: Even if she finds a long, stable and happy relationship, which is what we would wish for her, good songs will still come out of it.