Olivia Rodrigo - you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love
The structure of Olivia Rodrigo’s sprawling third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, is intentional. This isn’t merely a handful of songs that the singer/songwriter liked and put together to make an album; this is about a woman’s slow descent into sadness as she falls in (and eventually, out of) love. you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is Rodrigo’s most experimental album to date, veering away from the rock-infused pop a la Alanis Morrissette and her 90s contemporaries, going down the rabbit hole of reverb-soaked clean guitar entries that conjure images of rainy nights, chainsmoking cigarettes, and a person falling apart at the seams.
The album starts with “drop dead”, which finds Rodrigo head over heels, more smitten than we’ve heard her on any previous record (Sour or Guts). “It’s feminine intuition/‘cause I always had a vision of us standing like this/all pressed up in the bathroom line/you’re looking like an angel on the walls of Versailles/the most alive I’ve ever been/but kiss me and I might drop dead,” she swoons in the chorus. This is the happiest Rodrigo will be throughout the duration of pretty sad; by the time we get to “less”, the album’s eleventh track, the relationship is ending, and she channels lyricism and musicality into a breakup song that rivals that of “driver’s license”, among one of the best tracks in the category of emotional breakup songs. It baffles me to this day how someone so young was able to write and perform a song that had evidence of so much heartbreak and life lived.
“stupid song” and “honeybee” find her awash in love, opining for her partner, but there are cracks at the seams. “maggots for brains” is a lamentation on the mundane nature of a boring day when their partner is away (“I’m a sad shell of a woman and I’ve got maggots for brains/but that’s just the thing that happens when my/when my baby goes away”). “u + me = <3” finds the obsession with the relationship on full display, and we can’t help but feel that, based on the structure of the album and the tone of the latter songs, that there is someone in the relationship that likes one person more than the other.
The jealous phase of the partnership is on full display in “my way”, but I use the term jealous loosely. The song is clearly aimed at someone who is trying to swoop in and steal away her man, and her patience has worn thin (“man, I wonder what you think is gonna go down/you send him another poem and think that he’ll let me go/or maybe you’re just tryna get me riled up now/you’re posting another pic in clothes that I know are his/well, here’s a map of the lines I drew”).
The crack starts to become a fissure on “purple”; on the surface, it’s a beautiful love song about two people coming together (“your red and my blue/now I see the world in purple”). But the reality is setting in (“now a toothbrush/a coat and a pair of shoes/all come in doubles/and we fight/over who I’m hanging out with/like a real couple”). One of the album’s best tracks, “the cure” follows “purple”, and it finds Rodrigo slipping into her most vulnerable as she slowly begins to unravel (“I got toxins in my bloodstream/you tried hard to suck them out/and it feels like medication/and it’s good for me, I’m sure/But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore/It’ll never be the cure”. “begged” finds her wallowing, questioning the integrity and devotion of her relationshiop before slowly slipping into the aforementioned madness. She’s questioning everything on the aptly named “what’s wrong with me”; the references to Rodrigo’s devotion to The Cure are prevalent on this album, and they all come to a head when the king of sad rock himself, Robert Smith, lends his vocals to the track.
It all falls apart on “less”, before Rodrigo finds herself attempting to date again on the slightly more upbeat “expectations”, her boundaries and hopes for a relationship are more well defined; a passive, unemployed guy just won’t do (“yeah I got hope/yeah I got drive/i will not lose my faith/don’t think my future husband’s at this bar in silverlake”). The album ends with “cigarette smoke”, a final goodbye to a relationship that once was. It notices every creak in the house, every missing item that was once home only months prior, and it acknowledges the gaping hole left in her heart with each passing moment, no matter how hard she tries to get over it.
you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love does not reinvent the wheel; people have been writing about falling in and out of love for generations. But what sets it apart from others is its conceptual structure, its brilliant composition, and the intention behind every song. You can hear every step of a relationship, from the moment that the heart eyes pop out of their sockets on a walk through a park, Rodrigo dropping hints all night that she wants to hold hands, until the moment that the entire relationship has come to pass. It is depressingly beautiful.
