Olivia Rodrigo has The Cure for sadness
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What is Olivia Rodrigo's new album about?
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My mayor's Muslim. My bagel's Jewish. My jazz is bebop. Olivia Rodrigo's got a brand new album we're going to break down on Switched on Pop. Whoa.
Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, Olivia Rodrigo is back with her third studio album. It's called You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl in Love.
It's a good title.
It's produced by Dan Nigro, who worked on all of her previous albums with her. And many of the songs were written with him and Amy Allen. Otherwise, this is a really intimate affair. And it sounds like a deeply personal album. It's got these moody soundscapes supporting hyper detailed lyrics with soul wrenching specificity. It's also a meditation on desire and maybe more intriguingly, a meditation on what happens when desire is fulfilled. Meditation with a bottle of wine, you mean? Yes. I don't know if that's approved, you know, Zen behavior, but don't think so. The beats were probably into it. This album is also an extended homage to a certain band whose name rhymes with demure. Okay. The cure. Yes. And finally, it finds Olivia honing an approach to songwriting that I think she's been developing over her entire career.
And I am finally ready to identify and name today, Charles. What's that? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Save it. Save it. I'm not going to give it to you. This is a meditation on desire unfulfilled, Charlie. I'm not just going to give it to you right out of the gate. I'm going to make you wait for it. You're going to make me feel how this album is trying to make me feel? All right. Exactly. Exactly. And now, are you ready to get sad? Yeah. I'm sad. I'm ready. We kick this album off with a track that we've actually already broken down on the pod. It is Drop Dead. So good.
I know that the bar closes at 11 I hope you never finish that beer Suspended animation.
We're waiting for the love to happen. A couple important things in this track that set the tone for the whole album. Again, this word I'm going to keep coming back to, desire. Wanting to be with someone so badly that you feel like you might drop dead. And an important reference to the band that haunts this album, The Cure.
We have a shout out to their song, Just Like Heaven.
And this song also introduced us to a concept that we identified as the reverse or maybe the voltaverse. A second verse that doesn't return to the music of the first verse, but actually introduces something entirely new.
Bye. Bye. Bye.
Got that chewing gum just flirting away. We speculated that this Volta reverse might stem from Olivia Rodrigo's musical theater background. Yeah. It's also maybe a larger trend in some of the artists of the moment, such as Chapel Roan. Yeah. But what we didn't know at the time, Charlie, was that this single, Drop Dead, was actually going to be part of a larger treatise on love and desire. And when Olivia teased the album on Instagram a few weeks ago, she actually divided it up into two parts. Girl in Love is actually going to be the heading for the first seven songs on the album.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is Olivia Rodrigo's new album about?
0:00–9:56
2
How does Olivia Rodrigo explore desire in her lyrics?
9:56–11:08
3
What role does The Cure play in Olivia Rodrigo's album?
11:08–11:45
4
How does Olivia's songwriting technique evolve in this album?
11:45–15:34
5
What themes are explored in the song 'Drop Dead'?
15:34–42:20