Olivia Rodrigo has revealed that she revisited the love songs on her upcoming album and tweaked them after splitting from her boyfriend Louis Partridge.
The pop star’s upcoming album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, chronologically charts the rise and fall of a relationship.
During an appearance on Popcast by The New York Times, Olivia confirmed that she wrote the songs in real time as the events were happening and went back and edited the love songs after splitting from the Enola Holmes actor.
“Dan (Nigro, co-writer and producer) and I, after writing breakup songs and stuff, we had the fun challenge of going back and actually tweaking some of the love songs that are on the record and making them a little more honest and more sad and creepy,” she shared.
“I was really happy with the way it turned out… We kind of like, postmortem, we went in and changed things and made it a whole body of work rather than, you know, like little moments.”
She explained that the first six songs, including the lead single Drop Dead, are love songs and the track Purple marks the midpoint in the album before the breakup tunes.
“The song Purple was originally a love song,” she continued. “It’s like six songs and (then) it’s Purple and that’s when the doubt creeps in and then (second single) The Cure.”
The 23-year-old declined to call her third record “a concept album” because she thinks it would be “a disservice” to the genre, however, she considers it “a capsule” of her life at that particular time.
“I’ve never been a person who’s like, ‘I’m going to make a concept record,'” she said. “I write songs to process my feelings so every day when I come and I sit at the piano, or I get the guitar, I go to the studio, it’s like, ‘What is burning in me to say right now?’ It also comes from the heart and it’s not super calculated in that way.”
Olivia and Louis reportedly split up in December after two years of dating.
Earlier this year, the Drivers License singer shut down rumours that she scrapped her entire album after the breakup.
You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love will be released on 12 June.
