Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘You Seem Pretty Sad’ Is a Great Album, If You Don’t Look Too Hard at the Lyrics
Rodrigo’s career highlights have often been preceded by her reference points, from the Taylor Swift and Paramore credit fiasco with her debut album Sour, to the Riot Grrl and Avril Lavigne-heavy Guts, to the discourse about her baby-doll dresses—which she pointedly and effectively called out in her Popcast interview—dresses she said were intended to be odes to Courtney Love or Kathleen Hanna, in the lead-up to this record.
Rodrigo has mostly been able to keep these reference points, real and imagined, from overwhelming her music and public performance. She is not a mere copy-paste of another artist; she has a distinctive voice with a distinctive perspective. The issue, though, is that this perspective is blurry on You Seem Pretty Sad. It’s possible some of this is intentional. The obsessive, all-consuming love that the album traces has erased some of what made her her, at least temporarily. (Think: “I had big dreams ’til I tied myself to you” on “Purple.”) There is something sort of lost when you give yourself over to someone else so entirely. Some of the light goes out of you.
But a song like “Honeybee” tells on itself a bit, with the chorus lyric, “And it’s too hard to describe this / In a way that feels honest.” That is the job of a writer, to put into words what feels abstract or overwhelming. Plus, Rodrigo has already used this trick in a more playful way on Guts, with the cheeky “Can’t think of a third line, la la la la la la” on “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.” She also re-uses some cliches: For instance, her female object of jealousy on this album also “lingers in the air like bad perfume,” as did the subject of “Lacy” on Guts. These get played by the fandom as Genius annotations, proof she’s making some kind of intentional callback, but maybe they’re more signs of the lyrics being kind of an afterthought to the overall energy on this album.
Perhaps it’s because of Rodrigo’s reputation as a certain type of songwriter that the stakes feel a bit higher here (and, of course, there are innumerable ways to be a good songwriter that don’t involve complex, highly detailed lyrics). Maybe it’s the continued effects of child stardom, that weird phenomenon in which kids learn early that playing adult, and assimilating into some level of respectability, is a survival tactic. But on You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love, it’s hard to conceptualize Rodrigo’s worldview outside of a few moments scattered across songs, like on “Begged,” or the excellent “Maggots for Brains”—“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.” The line in “Cigarette Smoke” that has her admit, “I regret you and what I let slide.”
