5 Takeaways From Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love – Warungku Terkini

I didn’t get “Drop Dead” right away. The lead single from Olivia Rodrigo’s new album was somehow more frantic but way less fun than peppy predecessors like “Bad Idea Right?” or “Get Him Back!” Then I was strolling around Crown Heights at golden hour, a little wine-drunk and hopelessly infatuated with a boy who’d been “pressed up in the bathroom line” next to me at a house party the night before, when I realized: this wasn’t a love song, it was a limerence song, an anxious attachment anthem. The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen once said there’s blood beneath every layer of skin, and barely concealed under the cheer chants and bubblegrunge guitars was a scrabbling, clawing desperation. Here was a girl clinging for dear life to one perfect moment for fear that another may never arrive.

You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is a mouthful of a title befitting the tangled, thorny predicament of “experiencing real romantic love for the first time.” You’re tempted to pick out the single load-bearing word—a Guts or a Sour to fit these songs inside. It could easily be “love,” doodled at the hem of Rodrigo’s underwear on the album cover, as though Eros himself were her Trip Fontaine, or “girl,” considering the horrors and humiliations of girlhood have long been Rodrigo’s bread and butter. But I actually think it’s “sad,” one of those words you step into assuming it’s a shallow lake, only to find yourself treading water in open ocean.

Of course, this is a fun exercise that also defeats the entire purpose. You Seem Pretty Sad is meant to be indulgent. At 51 minutes, it splashes just over the lip of what a single vinyl LP can hold. Besides, feelings this big can’t be so easily contained.

…And This Is My Other Half

One surefire way to my heart is an album with a thoughtful side-A, side-B divide. On physical editions, You Seem Pretty Sad’s tracklist is split into two halves: “Girl So in Love,” which spans “Drop Dead” through “Purple,” and “You Seem Pretty Sad,” the lovelorn second act that kicks off with “The Cure.” There’s a palpable tonal shift between the two, but Rodrigo is clever enough (she learned from the best, after all) to litter the front half with all the clues and warning signs you need to guess how the story ends. On “Stupid Song,” she’s skipping meals and comparing herself to “a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake.” And you shouldn’t feel like a “zombie in my body” when your boyfriend’s out of town, right? “Purple,” co-produced by Jim-E Stack, is the hinge point, the moment of most intimate connection (“I melt with you, your red and my blue/Now I see the world in purple”), and the moment when things irrevocably plummet off the edge of the cliff.