Olivia Rodrigo’s third record, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, is most definitely an album of two halves. While Side A documents the start of a relationship and its subsequent blossoming, Side B covers themes of doubt and rejection as it starts to fall apart – though there is some optimism towards the end, too.
You could probably argue that the album reaches peak sweetness on track 3, Honeybee, and alongside producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo recently sat down with Mix with the Masters to discuss its writing and production.
“I remember writing it in like, an hour – just feeling like it sort of captured this feeling of intense romantic love and also the fear that comes with that,” says Rodrigo. “This song was just such a piano ballad to me – I wrote it on the piano with these arpeggios and I was so tied to this idea; I just loved how it sounded ‘acoustic’ in my living room.”
This presented Nigro with a slight problem: “The sad part of being a producer a lot of times is the artist coming in and being like ‘I just like my demo. I just like the way it sounds when I’m singing it and you’re not doing anything to it.’”
This being the case, Nigro had to be careful with his production choices, and we’d say that he managed to retain the sense of purity and innocence pretty well.
Honeybee does contain one element that ended up being slightly divisive, though – the synthetic choir backing that you hear in the second verse, which was played on a Mellotron.
In fact, even the person who the song was written about – presumed to be Rodrigo’s now ex-boyfriend, British actor Louis Partridge – didn’t quite get it. “When I played the song for the person who it's about, they were like, ‘Oh my God, I love it so much!’” she remembers. ‘“ But that weird choir bit in the second verse…’”
“It was really polarising to people, the fake choir,” concedes Nigro, but it sounds like both he and Rodrigo fought for it and it ended up staying.
This isn’t the only Mellotron moment in Honeybee, either. In fact, the parts played on the tape-based keyboard instrument – including the delicate flutes, which Nigro says are one of his favourite parts of the song – were there pretty much from the start.
Addressing Rodrigo, Nigro says: “The first thing that happened, besides laying down a demo the first day, I think you and I sat together and I started just messing around with the Mellotron, and so a lot of the sounds from the original day 1 demo are still in the song.”
Subscribers can check out the full six-part Honeybee video series on the Mix with the Masters website.
