Heartbreak, Revenge and Acceptance all in 11 tracks

JAYNE LOO

Rodrigo’s album is full of heartbreak, healing and acceptance and you do not want to miss it.

Album cover for Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album - SOUR

After 4 months with Driving Licence booming on the charts, Asian American singer-actress Olivia Rodrigo released her debut album, Sour on May 21st 2020 and has been nothing but the most spoken album of the year. The album is perfect, all 11 tracks were full of heartbreak and punk merging together for those who want revenge on broken hearts. Being the longest running debut album in the billboard 200 Top 10, she has also successfully been named the “Woman of the Year” by Billboard.

All eleven tracks give listeners a feel of acoustic, light metal, pop, psychedelic pop along with a hint of indie. Songs like ‘brutal’, ‘good 4 u’, 'jealousy jealousy’ have a little bit of metal bass guitar while ‘favourite crime’, ‘happier’ and ‘1 step forward, 3 steps back’ gives listeners the acoustic side of the album.

We all know how drivers licence was dipped with the cruel heartbreak of her real life with Joshua Bassett. The rest of the album just explains their own definition on how the 7 stages of grief works - Shock, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance and Hope & finally Processing Grief. The album walked us through her life from the alleged breakup to accepting her fate. It just felt like we were writing the album with Rodrigo herself.

Track 11 - hope ur ok is a song where Rodrigo deemed as a signal of possible child abuse and acceptance of being in the LGBTQ+ community. In the lyrics, ‘He wore long sleeves 'cause of his dad’ was a possible memory of her friends getting abused as a child and leading to self harm attempts. The other chorus ‘Her parents hated who she loved’ explains how her friend never got the support from her parents being in the LGBTQ+ community. The track is a sign of support when Rodrigo sings the last part of the song, the song is also a song of acceptance on the 7 stages of grief.

Her producer, Dan Nigro was previously the lead singer for indie band, As Tall as Lions had produced Rodrigo’s entire album and it made his whole career is flipped where Rodrigo managed to achieve her first Grammy for Best New Artist and along with two more awards. He himself got himself an award as one of the songwriters for Rodrigo’s three biggest hit songs, ‘drivers licence’, ‘déjà vu’ & ‘good 4 u’.

Rodrigo and Talia Ryder in ‘déjà vu’

‘déjà vu’ was the second hit that was released after ‘drivers licence’ followed by ‘good 4 u’, written by big time artists like Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff together with Dan, the song talks about how her ex-partner starts doing things that they used to do together. Some of the lyrics in the song touches on her ex-partner mimicking activities that they used to do and are now doing with their new partner - allegedly Sabrina Carpenter which explains why the girl in the music video resembles Carpenter. At one point of the song, Rodrigo secretly wonders if her ex-partner ever called his new love by her name by accident as to how their names were slightly similar. Rodrigo did explain the concept of the song to ‘People’ where she explains that she gets déjà vu all the time and it would be a cool play on using déjà vu as a metaphor for the song.

The album now remains as a global hit in all 180+ countries where the album holds its spots in the top 5 charts in 11 countries. The album is definitely a roller coaster from heartbreak to acceptance. As a young age of 19, Rodrigo has definitely achieved high milestones and we hope she can achieve more in the future.