Photo by JMEnternational/JMEnternational for BRIT Awards/Getty Images
Olivia Rodrigo released her debut album SOUR last week and it’s poised to make a big debut on the charts. While her single “Good 4 U” currently sits at No. 1 on the Hot 100, fans are also taking in the album’s other cuts. In an interview with Nylon, Rodrigo broke down how both Instagram and Fiona Apple helped inspire her song “jealousy, jealousy.”
“In this time period, I was super obsessed with social media,” said Rodrigo of “jealousy, jealousy,” adding it was one of the first songs she wrote for the album. “I would look for things that would hurt my feelings all the time and compare myself to everyone. I felt like my life was only what I showed to others. I didn’t feel like my life was any deeper than my Instagram feed. That’s a really troubling mindset to be in as a teenager. And so I guess I wanted to write a song about that. It isn’t sad or ‘Oh, I don’t feel like I’m enough,’ it’s ‘Oh, God, I’m so jealous.’ It’s tongue-in-cheek, and a little funny to me.”
Rodrigo is not alone in feeling an Instagram obsession can be bad for your mental health. A 2017 survey with 1,5000 teens and young adults revealed they considered Instagram to be the social media app the most detrimental to their well being, associating it with feelings of anxiety, depression, bullying, and FOMO. The app recently moved to remove likes in order to reduce the pressure many users feel.
Rodrigo’s lyrics on “jealousy, jealousy” touch on the insecurities brought on by social media:
All your friends are so cool, you go out every night
In your daddy’s nice car, yeah, you’re livin' the life
Got a pretty face, a pretty boyfriend, too
I wanna be you so bad and I don’t even know you
All I see is what I should be
Happier, prettier, jealousy, jealousy
Instagram is not the only social media platform to inspire a song on SOUR. In an interview on YouTube’s Released, Rodrigo claimed scrolling through “breakup” TikTok inspired her song “enough for you.”
“I wrote ‘enough for you’ entirely by myself which I’m very proud of,” she said. “I wrote it literally on my bedroom floor. I actually was on ‘breakup’ TikTok for a while, which is really funny. I was literally scrolling through TikTok, and I found this really hopeful breakup video. It’s so embarrassing that this inspired this really emotional song, but I really was very inspired by this TikTok.”
During Rodrigo’s Nylon interview, the magazine compared how she sang the word “slowly” on “jealousy, jealousy” to Fiona Apple. Much like Rodrigo, Apple rose to fame in her late teens, and her first album, 1996’s Tidal, was inspired by a breakup. The “driver’s license” singer explained how Apple is an inspiration to her.
“I love Fiona Apple,” said Rodrigo to Nylon. “I’m obsessed with her new record and she is definitely a big inspiration of mine. I remember thinking that I wanted to make jazzy music like her when I was younger, so I would play these jazz chords, and be like, ‘Nobody can do it like her. I’m not going to be able to do anything even half as good as [1996’s] Tidal was.’ But yeah, she’s so incredible. I’m obsessed with her lyricism. She has such a good vocabulary, too. She wrote Tidal when she was 19, which is crazy to me. Just the words that she uses, she’s like, ‘sullen girl.’ I’m obsessed with her.”
Read the full Nylon interview here and read all the lyrics to Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR on Genius now.
