Critic-at-large - Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

I Got My Driver’s License Five Years Ago

Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

First impressions matter. Olivia Rodrigo introduced herself to the world with the late-pandemic smash “drivers license", a beautifully accomplished ballad replete with an eat-your-heart-out bridge where the bottled up emotions of the verse and chorus are spilled out in a gory half-time. If the song up until that point seems a little one-note, that’s largely Rodrigo’s point: she even sets most of it against a repeated pedal in the piano part, musically evoking the reverse signal of a car—only Rodrigo can’t go back. The ensuing details sound heartbreakingly young: “I got my driver’s license last week / Just like we always talked about” she sings to an ex, who she in the next verse has to admit is “probably with that blonde girl / Who always made me doubt.” Ouch. You seem pretty jaded for a girl so seventeen.

The first two records followed quickly, in 2021 and 2023, respectively, and followed too in “drivers license”’s casting of its lyrical vulnerability as nervy, just-held-together musical composure. Rodrigo’s sensibility is equal parts pop-punk and musical theatre, as much expressing (presumably) authentic feelings about her (presumably) real-life heartbreaks as knowingly performing, exaggerating, winking off the stage. Already this is a difficult pitch to strike, aesthetically speaking—and, for me, Rodrigo has always sounded a little overblown and overwrought in this respect. Add to this tendency the more derivative aspects of her songcraft and sound, and you might find yourself raising an eyebrow. There’s the highly-publicised rights dispute everyone’s heard about, where Paramore won songwriting credits on Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” for its similarities to their 2007 song “Misery Business”. Following almost directly in tempo, instrumentation, and melodic voice leading, the similarities are striking whether or not you have a degree in musicology. But there are more subtle cases, too, such as that of Rodrigo’s “1 step forward 2 steps back”, whose piano part is a mimic of Taylor Swift’s gorgeously understated “New Year’s Day”. In Swift’s song, syncopated verse rhythms describe the trembling morning after an epic New Year’s Eve party, and give way to the straight rhythms of the chorus as Swift raises the particulars of the scene to the heights of metaphor and makes a promise, sure and true, to the man she wants to be with: “I want your midnights / But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day”. It’s one of the finest moments of Swift’s entire career, and her first real love song, whose contrapuntal outro overlays two vocal lines, “Hold on to the memories; they will hold on to you” and “Please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognise anywhere”: Swift looks to the future’s uncertainty in the strength of her memories. Rodrigo’s lyric? Well, again, it’s a little bit much, a bit messy, a bit rambly, and it never coalesces into real concrete imagery: “You’ve got me fucked up in my head, boy”; “And maybe in some masochistic way I kinda find it all exciting”; “And I’d leave you but the rollercoater’s all I’ve ever had.” These are real feelings: I get it, and I’ve felt them too. But this is song writing, not diary writing—and Rodrigo is at her weakest when she’s courting comparisons to artists who outpace her. 

So here comes her latest, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, heralded by glowing reviews from even the nonplussed indie snobs like Pitchfork and Anthony Fantano. And like the rest of her discography, it’s pulled off with enough gutsy feeling and musical ambition that you’ll find yourself with an earworm before you’ve decided whether or not the work is actually, you know, good. This is something I find more than a touch frightening about Rodrigo—and more than a touch impressive, especially on this record, which is by far her best. The opening half, which the vinyl gives as a girl so in love, is buoyed up (or weighed down?) by complex love songs that are almost always undercut by a streak of deep anxiety. “stupid song”, for instance, should arrive at a moment of triumph in its chorus—“I love you more than any stupid song could ever say”!!—but the metaphors that precede this announcement shade it differently. “I’m a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake”, Rodrigo sings, and the crash is sure to follow, even if it's something that this song’s crushing infatuation doesn’t yet know. 

The album’s second half, you seem so sad, largely is a slow-motion render of the crash that the album’s first few songs anticipated. Opening with “the cure”, a big and blown out five-minute monster of a single, Rodrigo has to admit “It don’t matter how your love feels anymore / It’ll never be the cure.” A refrain comes later in the phrase “I’m unravelled”—and the genius here is that this phrase literally unravels the structure of the song when it swings back around as a kind of secondary chorus at the three-minute mark. Just when you think the song’s over, the instrumentation picks back up, Rodrigo’s producer-bestie Dan Nigro gives his (adorkable) best go at string writing, and we go for another belch of angst. The song’s binary structure is reminiscent of Swift’s double-chorused “Enchanted”—though the feeling couldn’t be further away. (And if anyone remembers the snooty opinion pieces from a few years ago fearmongering that “Old Town Road” had forever doomed my generation to two-minute soundbite singles which needed to be streamed twice in order to sound formally complete, I present to you this wonderful and wonderfully successful counterexample.)

“the cure” is the album’s stunner, but the later track, “what’s wrong with me” (which actually features The Cure frontman Robert Smith), teeters on the edge of good taste like the Rodrigo of old. Its pop-psychology semantics are just a little too 2026: “symptoms”, "spiraling", “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep”... When you’re speaking in the language of a moody Instagram Reel, I’m just not sure I really believe the feeling that follows. The falseness here is only amplified by the two fine Broadway-via-Chappell-Roan-style cuts that surround this one, “begged” and “less”, which need no commentary from the likes of me, and which prove that Rodrigo’s songwriting standards are actually far, far higher than she always holds herself to. 

“expectations” is perhaps another little falter—although perhaps that’s actually part of its clever effect. In a radio interview, Rodrigo says that she and Nigro challenged themselves to write a “mantra song”: “I’m not kissing any boy that is passive” is what they came up with. And while you and me will try our best to scream-sing this one when it comes on at a gay guy’s pre-drinks, the bridge is what really gives the project away: a glitched-out spoken-word nod to Madonna’s infinitely better “Material Girl”, the song’s painfully obvious sonic model. Still, I love how “expectations” sits in the track listing as a kind of “false ending”, as though its uptempo confidence, worn like a costume but not quite embodied, resolved all the record’s prior woes. It didn’t, of course. Even though it seems to have learned something from all that suffering, Rodrigo’s final wish comes bleaker on the extraordinary closer “cigarette smoke”, whose instrumentation, tempo, and length echo “the cure”—and whose lyrics restate its devastation. “Tell me something honest / So the memories turn dark” is this album’s last statement, because heartbreak, really, isn’t a lesson—and there’s only closure in letting go. In her Zane Lowe interview, Rodrigo laughs and calls this line “so emo”—and damn right it is! Because, by its finale, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love has announced the arrival, three albums into her career, of a very brilliant stylist whose technique at last matches her huge ambition.