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You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Olivia Rodrigo\u2019s hotly anticipated third album, dropped last weekend.<\/p>\n
Garnering widespread acclaim from critics, it’s a concept album divided into two halves. The first covers the bliss of a new relationship, with the second embodying the emotional flux that follows a breakup.<\/p>\n
Featuring a rare contribution from The Cure\u2019s Robert Smith and a more mature sound, Rodrigo\u2019s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love may prove to be the year\u2019s defining record.<\/p>\n
Today on Commotion, music writers Niko Stratis<\/a> and Melissa Vincent<\/a> join guest host Amil Niazi<\/a> to talk about Olivia Rodrigo\u2019s latest album and how she\u2019s evolved since her last release.<\/p>\n We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.<\/a><\/p>\n WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:<\/p>\n Amil: Let’s get into a bit of the criticism because, you know, Olivia Rodrigo can’t ever seem to escape it \u2014 whether it’s the babydoll dresses or who she’s pairing with. Taylor Swift and Haley Williams were retroactively credited as songwriters because of the similarities to some of their past songs on Sour. Courtney Love accused her of plagiarizing one of Hole’s early album covers for the Sour concert film \u2014 that’s kind of what Courtney Love’s whole shtick is. Everyone has copied her, so she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n How do you feel about not just the criticism, but also how she’s navigated some of that criticism?\u00a0<\/p>\n Melissa: I was thinking about that, because she’s taken a lot of it on the chin. But she also is a priority artist on a major label. Before a song reaches the ears of an audience, a lot of people see it, and hear it and interact with it. And it just makes me think of, in the industry more broadly, the way that attribution and crediting influences and sounds seems like it’s changing really rapidly.<\/p>\n On one hand, we have access to more information than ever at our fingertips. But then on the other hand, we have a lot of tools to create content and media that make it really easy to divorce a sound from its source material. And I think that as an artist, she really defined what it meant to be a TikTok artist, and then obviously has built a broader career beyond that.<\/p>\n It seems like she is trying to figure out her own style and approach to how to [give credit] in a way that feels a lot more like a devotional. And on this record, she’s not hiding it \u2014 she’s doing it in the most open, obvious way possible, from having a song called The Cure on a record that sounds a lot like The Cure, [to] having Robert Smith as the main voice that she’s collaborating with\u2026.There’s a way that she is able to give herself a lot of grace \u2014 that, if we think about some of those larger critiques, she’s able to utilize some of those new lessons as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Niko: She has to learn all these lessons in public, too. That is an impossible task, right? We all learn through failure. [It\u2019s] just that her failure happens in front of millions of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amil: Niko \u2026 you mentioned an evolution. I want to get into some of those lyrics that might jump out [to you], where she can take that stuff and take it to somewhere new and deeper, and somewhere richer.<\/p>\n Niko: I don’t know about \u201cricher\u201d necessarily, but there’s a line that starts out [the track] Expectations that I think is a really fun, cathartic moment of casting off all the heavy emotions we’ve heard throughout the record. She starts it by saying, \u201c I met him at a party, I think he was on drugs \/ He wasn’t smart or funny, I convinced myself he was.\u201d<\/p>\n Look, as a trans woman, I have both been this person and met this person at a party. And I just think that this cathartic moment of seeing this person that you’ve been pining over is such an earned moment that happens as you get older, and as you experience love and loss. It\u2019s being able to see through it and see the person on the other side, and saying, \u201cOh, I saw who you were pretending to be this entire time.\u201d<\/p>\n When you’re younger, that is a harder thing to see. And I think when you get to Expectations, you really see where she is in her life now and saying, \u201cOK, I can see the machine. I can see the gears a lot better than I ever could before, and they mean something different to me now. And I have a different reaction to them.\u201d And it’s not bitter. It is growth.<\/p>\n You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen<\/a> or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 5 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":739589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-739588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/739589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}