After almost three years of waiting, fans are finally receiving the long-awaited third studio album from Olivia Rodrigo, titled You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love. Announced on April 2, the album cover and title made their debut on an Instagram post, captioned, “my third album ‘you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ is out June 12th. I am so proud of this record, and I can’t wait for you to hear it. available for preorder now!”
Following the success of both her first and second studio albums, SOUR and GUTS, fans speculated that a third album was in the works. Suspicions were confirmed when fans started finding pink, heart-shaped locks on fences in major cities such as London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and Hoboken in March of this year. The locks each had their own word on them; when put together, they formed the sentence, “drop dead, April 17th”, confirming the first single to come from the album. That being said, this clue was only one of the very obvious hints at an album.
In Los Angeles, residents awoke to a mural painted on a wall on Melrose Avenue. The wall had been transformed overnight into the classic Olivia Rodrigo purple color with her new logo in black. Each night, the wall was painted a lighter shade of purple until it was eventually a shade of light pink with the word love painted in the same font as her logo. Many people thought that because the word love had shown up on the wall, that would be the name of the album, reinstating her four-letter-word rule that she had with her previous albums. Along with the word love, others took to social media to make their guesses about the album’s title. With theories of titles such as “Love”, “Luck”, “Star”, or “Kiss”,these ideas were quickly shut down with the official mouthful of a title. On the day the album was announced, the mural had been painted to look like the album cover of Olivia Rodrigo wearing a pink dress on a swing, posing some resemblance to the infamous painting, The Swing, as some have pointed out.
As it stands, the wall is still a bright shade of bubblegum pink. This specific shade of pink is not only a nod to her album’s theme, but also in reference to a lyric in the lead single, drop dead, where she says in the second verse, “‘Cause I got chewing gum, and a bunch of stuff I’d like to know”. With how emblematic this lyric has become, a pop-up recently took place at the wall where fans received a limited edition collaboration with Olivia Rodrigo and Hubba Bubba Bubblegum; fans were then encouraged to stick their chewed pieces of gum onto the wall.
Something about the promotion of this album that really stuck out to me was the music video released for the lead single. The entire video was shot in one night in the Palace of Versailles. This is such a major achievement because directors have not been allowed to record inside the palace for movies, TV shows, or music videos since Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette. When asked on Bruontheradio about filming in that location, Olivia Rodrigo expressed her initial idea. “When I wrote the song, I immediately was like ‘Oh, it would be so cool if we could film in Versailles.’ Because the song to me just feels like running. Like whenever I listen to the song, it just feels like running through a garden,” she said.
“It’s just sort of about, like, I wanted to feel like that feeling when you come home and you, like, first kiss someone for the first time and you close the door, and you’re like ‘Oh, my God! This is amazing!’ And so that was just the energy that I embodied, just running around Versailles. Just that first crushy feeling,” Rodrigo said.
