Don’t worry, our grungy, rock-pop icon Olivia Rodrigo is still giving a salute to her two previous eras’ color schemes—‘purple’ getting its own pink-washed track listing on her latest album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Working again with Dan Nigro, aka the best 20-something-and-40-something friendship in the music industry, the 15-track diary musing is the before-and-after polaroid of falling in love when your entire socials timeline has a front-row seat. But if you thought she was just using her pen as a weapon, you’ve thought wrong—she’s graduated to a knife. On the Target deluxe album, Olivia’s back in that gorgeous baby pink doll dress, posing next to a tree (handmade by her team, because why let nature do the work when you can art-direct it?) with a gigantic love heart carved into it and the album’s name sliced through for good measure—very “your name + your crush’s name,” if vengeance was on the agenda.
Well, because we’re in the mood to deface nature some more, take a scroll down to your favorite song, and we’ll let you know which lyric is about to get the knife treatment.
‘drop dead’
Our Versailles princess! There’s nothing quite like imagining ourselves running through the palace with our pink headphones on, pretending we’re the main characters alongside Olivia in the ‘drop dead’ music video. And how can we not choose the lyric that reads like a screenshot of our search histories? Obviously, it’s “One night I was bored in bed / And stalked you on the internet,” because Mother Earth’s got feminine intuition—she knows she’s about to be enraged with this one.
‘stupid song’
Next is ‘stupid song,’ AKA, both the song that’s about to be shouted at drunk karaoke when you’re trying to get over your stupid situationship and the one some lucky bride is going to walk into their ceremony with, arm-in-arm with their person over a gorgeous piano serenade. Olivia, you’re always of two minds. If this is your favorite track off the album, be ready for Normal People‘s Connell Waldron to sit under your tree—he once said something strikingly similar to Marianne, and emotionally unavailable men do love a grand gesture when it’s too late. The lyric is “And if there is a god, he’s the bond that’s between us two.”
‘honeybee’
By now, we’re not only stalking people on the internet—we’ve got our faces buried in our TikTok FYPs on the regular, and this song is ruining people in the worst way possible. Our girl knew what she was doing when she named the album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, because ‘honeybee’ is tragic hours personified. Be ready to flex your ability to write in really small font, because you’re getting: “And I hope I never see what your face looks like going / A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing.” Long, we know. But Olivia told Hits Radio UK it’s her favorite lyric on the album, so how can we not choose it? We love group therapy.
‘maggots for brains’
So Olivia’s just making us pull up Urban Dictionary mid-listen now—in case it’s not in your everyday vocabulary yet, “maggots for brains” is basically when you act completely irrationally when it comes to matters of the heart. Aka, all of us. And if you say you haven’t, queue the tapes—we know your friends have them stashed somewhere. There’s something beautifully ironic about defacing a tree with “Everything feels moldy like the fruit that’s in my fridge,” because trees have gifted us with so many gorgeous fruits—juicy apples, citrus lemons—so it perfectly plays into the metaphor Olivia’s stitching together. The fruit in the fridge is just as moldy as her own feelings of stagnation, rotting in plain sight while she pretends not to notice.
‘u + me = <3’
We almost feel called to throw you some crayons for this one rather than the standard Olivia Rodrigo tree kit (aka, a knife) when we listen to this song. Through both the title and the inflection of her voice, she’s reverted to an almost childhood naivety—that stage where you’re looking past every red flag because you want this one to work, even when your friends are fully tapped in and staging an intervention. We’re making demands with this lyric choice, but we’re not sorry: “So buy me silver jewelry and all my favorite Cadbury.”
‘my way’
Olivia’s giving us Speak Now Tour flashbacks with this one—our other favorite girlie pop, Taylor Swift, picking up and throwing a chair when someone’s played with her relationship during ‘Better Than Revenge’—and we love it. We’re going with “And the girl is me, did you get that hint?” because just like mother-to-daughter, Olivia scattered lyrics across the shirts she wore at gigs like Easter eggs planted in our garden, and we just didn’t know it yet. This particular lyric made its debut at her GUTS World Tour: Spilled show in Manchester.
‘purple’
The official color scheme of this album might be pink, but our girl’s clearly got attachment issues—purple having painted her debut and sophomore albums like she couldn’t quite let go of the palette. The concept of this song comes from a love letter given to her by her ex, in which he’d drawn a diagram of two separate lines representing their paths—very red string of fate (unraveled, anyone?)—intersecting to form a circle. Later, she returned to it with a much darker lens, seeing how obsessive it had become. Channel all of that feminine rage into: “I had big dreams ‘til I tied myself to you.”
‘the cure’
Yep, we’re totally picturing the defaced tree somewhere in Nurse Olivia Rodrigo’s hospital wing—very Grey’s Anatomy of us, given that show has an infamous indoor tree where so many iconic confrontations have taken place. “It’ll never be the cure” is very dystopian of us, but it’s also exactly the kind of thing anyone would carve into a tree when they’ve finally given up on a dead-end relationship and want the bark to know about it.
‘begged’
In hot-girl style, Olivia debuted ‘begged’ on Saturday Night Live, and then we obviously cried our way through every minute of it—because whether it’s a relationship or a friendship, there’s been at least one time where we’ve sacrificed bits of ourselves just to make someone else stay. How can we escape the poetry of “I’m a penny in a fountain / Just waiting on my luck to change?” Obviously, this tree would be planted in some Italian vineyard, because duh.
‘what’s wrong with me’
Only Olivia would go from having a lyric about The Cure to represent how loved-up she was on a first date with her ex, to then having the lead singer himself, Robert Smith, appear on that very album in another song once she realizes she’s depressed in the relationship. Very full circle, but add your favorite artist into the mix. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep / I think you’re what’s wrong with me” is the kind of warning you’d find carved into a tree years later, making you fully convinced the place is haunted.
‘less’
So, raise your hand if you’ve been victimized by an angsty ship edit to ‘less.’ Not just us, clearly. Sometimes, even when a relationship doesn’t work out, the two people are still so in love that it would be easier to wish the other person just didn’t care—both so you could move on a little easier, purely through hate, but also so it would be easier on them, too.
Another long lyric, so we hope our small-font writers have their steady hands ready, but we can’t let go of this contradictory imagery: “If loving me means crying on the curb at LAX / Well, then I guess / I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less.” Airports are the one place full of love—love when someone’s returning, love when you’re jetting off on a romantic holiday, love because even our favorite movies and TV shows have airport scenes, from Love Actually to Friends—but this is the very opposite of that sort of love. It’s only a one-way trip to heartbreak.
‘expectations’
Olivia put something into this song because we’re obsessed with it—probably our favorite track off the record. We mean, The Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ influences in the bridge? We see them, and the lower backing vocals are done by Dan Nigro, so thank you for your service. Of course, there’s some Madonna ‘Material Girl’ in there, too. “I won’t settle for a guy with a fake job” is the clear winner for defacing a tree here, based on Olivia having briefly joined Raya, the celebrity dating app—except picture less swiping right on Harry Styles and more obscure job titles like “creative director.”
‘cigarette smoke’
The closing tune of the album, tapping in at her longest-ever song, too—exactly five minutes and forty seconds. What can we say? Our girl loves to write a tearful ballad. ‘cigarette smoke’ is the perfect metaphor: no matter how hard you try, you’re just unable to stop thinking about a person, unable to stop wanting them even though you know life would be easier if you could. Verse two is taking our hearts—“Some nights can be / So f*cking lonely / But it’s better than begging for you to stand up for me, honeybee.” Obviously, ‘honeybee’ was a previous track, and bringing the word back here easily parallels to it, except now there’s a heartbreaking twist—she’s no longer with the person, and the pet name is no longer full of the adoration it once had. It’s just an echo in an empty room.
So, which lyric are you currently stenciling into your own backyard tree? Maybe it’s one we haven’t even listed, and you’ve gone completely rogue on us with something more personal—in which case, we respect the vandalism and demand to see it. Show us your handiwork on our socials—Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—or, if you’re still undecided, give you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love another loop until the right lyric finds you (and your nearest unsuspecting oak).
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