Album Review: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love by Olivia Rodrigo
Olivia Rodrigo writes love as poison in the blood and a doctor who finds nothing. On her third album, the diagnosis runs from the first kiss to the empty driveway.
In a bar that closes at eleven, Olivia Rodrigo is praying the stranger across from her will never finish his beer. She’s stalked him online, convinced herself she has intuition, imagined the two of them pressed together in a bathroom line, and decided he looks like an angel frescoed on the walls of Versailles. Then comes the punchline, which is that this close together is the most alive she’s ever been, and will probably kill her too. It does not reach for the soft, grateful register that pop usually wants for songs about love. Rodrigo spent two albums (SOUR, GUTS) translating the body’s worst sensations into hooks and now uses the same machinery for happiness: “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love she’s turning that machinery to happiness.” Her crushes bring nausea, a pulse too fast and the suspicion that she invented the boy standing in front of her.
The sickness permeates the first half. On “drop dead,” the dizziness is obvious enough that it can function as a joke. “I feel like I might throw up/Left hook, right punch to the gut” and “You’re so so pretty boy/I’m paranoid I made you up.” “stupid song” continues this fever, and gets much more direct about it, Rodrigo calling herself “a speeding car on the boulevard, no brakes, a wax heart melting under the sun” before the chorus lands on “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane.” By “maggots for brains” the high has completely flipped to a deep, pervasive rot. There’s a pot of coffee, a blank page, a party she only attends on principle, and then a chorus, “I’m a zombie in my body/I’m a train off of the track/I feel dirty, I feel rotten, and the colors are all flat.” This is depression told in the language of a crush, with guitars biting that the softer songs of the first half avoided.
What stops the first half from reading as pure histrionics is that so much of it is furniture. Rodrigo writes love through the tiny, banal things two people collect. In “u + me = <3,” names are carved into car-seat leather, promises of silver jewelry, “All my favorite Cadbury,” a section about charming her big sister over with cynical jokes and boat rock taste. “purple” slides into the long middle of a couple, his mom getting out baby pictures of his buzzcut and scraped knees, a town the narrator has been to only as a tourist now that it contains “A local grocery store and a favorite florist,” a toothbrush and a coat and a pair of shoes that now come in twos. Even the woozy flirtation of “drop dead” happens within the language of running errands, of trivial facts and conversation, of chewing gum in her pocket and questioning if he’s ever been to Japan or taken the Eurostar to France.
The only thing that breaks the spell of being wrecked over someone is the “my way.” This is Rodrigo being pissed and defending herself from an ex still posting pictures and sending poems, “And here’s the part where the girl gets pissed/And the girl is me, get that part?” The bridge gives up the melody entirely for a bland kiss-off—“Last time that I checked, I won”—and then, “That’s it, I win.” This is the best she can do comedically and the only place in the first half of the record where she has the upper hand.
Everything changes at the end of “purple”—the crooning gives way to an outro that keeps asking, “Are we so in love? Are we too attached?” and transforms the swooning into “’til it just feels sad.” From then on, the leaving begins, and it is not her making the exit. In “less,” her boyfriend can no longer stand to see her crying, so “You do the noble thing and open up the door.” Her response is one of the album’s oddest wishes, “I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less” as though more restrained love could hold him back from leaving. On a recreation of a date at Big Sur, “Only confirmed/This isn’t what it should feel like,” the break-up plays out, “Cryin’ on the curb at LAX.” In “cigarette smoke,” he is long gone, his lingering scent in her clothes and her house quiet with the shower running and the second car missing.
In “the cure,” the illness gets a name, and the song lists its symptoms in bland, medical terms. Poison in the head, doubt in the heart. Toxins in the bloodstream that the partner will continue to try and suck out. A love that mimics medication and is a failure to cure. “But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore/It’ll never be the cure.” That last word becomes a litany. On “what’s wrong with me,” the duet with Robert Smith, Rodrigo sees a real doctor, “Went to the doctor and she said I was fine,” and gets no explanation for the weight in her chest, spinning head, inability to eat or sleep. So she blames herself: “Say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit/I think you’re what’s wrong with me.” Smith offers his own brand of anxiety: “Head just keeps on pounding with/The simple thought/What if this isn’t what I want.” Two people staring down the same terror from opposing ends.
The place the writing gets loose is “begged,” a statement of feeling that doesn’t land in any physical space. So many of the other songs are populated by a florist, a beer, a buzzcut. This song keeps referring to itself: “my endless well of needs,” “I’m an anchor in the ocean,” “A penny in a fountain, just waiting on my luck to change.” All of these images are sweet and can more or less be swapped out. The shame the song is trying to access stays an idea, not a story.
That fracture occurs in “expectations,” where Rodrigo sounds both the most assured and the least. She blocks a man she convinced herself to want. He has the right apartment, and his parents bought the car, and she can tell herself that this is what a clean slate at age twenty in a Vegas bar looks like: mini dress, vodka cran, and the firm belief that she’s secured herself an exit. The hook is identical to the predicament that contaminated “the cure” and made her visit the doctor on “what’s wrong with me”: A man will be the cure. She’s still searching for that man, in a bar in Silver Lake this time, confident he’ll do the job.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “drop dead,” “the cure,” “what’s wrong with me”