She might reference one of his songs on her new single, Drop Dead, but Olivia Rodrigo says that she didn’t actually play it to The Cure’s Robert Smith before it was released.
Rodrigo and Smith’s friendship was cemented when they shared the stage at Glastonbury in 2025, singing Cure songs Friday I’m In Love and Just Like Heaven, and Smith recently said that they’ve stayed in contact and even spent time in the studio together since.
Given all this, and the fact that Drop Dead specifically mentions The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, you would have thought that Smith would have known about it, but speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Rodrigo said that he only got to hear it when the rest of the world did – last Friday.
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“I played him a bunch of other songs on the album – I don’t know why I didn’t think to play this one,” laughed Rodrigo, before revealing that Smith actually made his presence felt in another, previously unknown way during her Glastonbury set.
“One of my favorite memories is, I wore a T-shirt for the encore that said, ‘You know all the words to Just Like Heaven,’ because I knew that the song was coming out and I wanted to do a little Easter egg. And I walked backstage ready to do the quick change and I found out that Robert took a Sharpie to the bottom of my shirt and wrote, ‘Or do you?’”
Rodrigo says that, at the time, she was slightly thrown by the prank, but now cherishes both the memory and the shirt.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, he graffitied on this shirt. There's 100,000 people out there. Am I going to go out in this shirt that has this thing on it?’ And I was kind of freaking out and then I was like whatever, I'm just going to put it on. And honestly, it's like my favourite outfit I've ever worn. I'm so happy that he wrote in Sharpie on it and now it's one of my most prized possessions.”
Looking at the photos of the performance, you can clearly see what we now know is Smith’s scrawl, and Rodrigo says that she now plans to put the T-shirt in a frame.
Elsewhere in the interview, Rodrigo says that releasing Drop Dead as the first single from You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love, her upcoming third album, felt like the right choice as it’s about a first date and marks “the first step on this journey.”
“I think the feelings start to ebb and flow and arc from here but this is like the jumping off point,” she explains.
Another unexpected jumping-off point for the record came at the second weekend of the Coachella festival, at which Rodrigo made a surprise appearance during Addison Rae’s set to sing Rae’s song Headphones On and then Drop Dead. Get your bets in now on her headlining next year…
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