Everyone is talking about Olivia Rodrigo these days and I’m no different. Her new album Sour is a certified banger and that’s saying a lot from me because I don’t listen to music outside of the same ten songs. Lots of people my age are posting about how it takes them back to high school, how they were transported back to that time when their boyfriends broke their heart for the first time, how it’s such a relatable album that they needed back then. It’s not a new thing, or Olivia Rodrigo-specific—they said that about all the Taylor Swift remakes a while back too. That’s great for them to feel that way about all these pop songs but I just cannot relate.
When I was in high school, I was a weird girl. A weird girl who wore weird clothes with the hope that someone would notice me as a “quirky girl” and then would ask me to be their girlfriend. This obviously didn’t work, even though I did have straight-across bangs for the later half of my high school career. I was obsessed with getting straight A’s and spent most of my time doing homework. In the off hours my favorite hobby was having a crush on almost every cute (?) guy at school, even when they barely even knew who I was. I was a hopeless romantic, and that made me very annoying to be around.
At 26 years old, I don’t have the life experience to really get in deep in my own memories to get where artists like Olivia are coming from. Breakup and heartbreak songs are treated like they’re a universal lived experience, but that’s not really true. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a wide collection of other music about other lived young people experiences, such having your friends tell you to ask out a guy you don’t like just because he likes you and you “might not get another chance,” or a song about letting someone copy your physics labs all the time just because you think they’re cute but they obviously do not like you back.
What I’m trying to say is that if nobody is going to make music that is relatable to me, I’m going to have to do it myself. I am not a musician outside of being a flute player that hasn’t played in years, but I’ll learn how to play guitar if I absolutely have to. I will take you on a musical journey that starts with being the weird girl in high school, all through being very sexually inactive in college, then to living with my parents as an adult and hating my hometown, to finish with me as a fully-fledged adult living in the city who is trying to fall in love for the first time but can only grab the attention of weird unicorn hunting couples on Tinder.
It’s not even just with music, but with art in general. I made the mistake of going to college for a creative writing degree and pretty much 95% of the material we read was all about being in love or at least about having a lot of sex with someone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the whole time I was like, “Damn! I can’t be a real artist, I’ve never touched another human being! How would I know how to capture the human experience into beautiful words? I am not sexy enough to be qualified to do this.”
Even with cool Instagram artists, there was always something about drugs, love, or bondage, at the very least. I never really felt more self-conscious about my own precarious situation until I started to make art myself—caught in a weird space of growing older while also not having had any of the life experiences my peers have already gone through. I’m not inherently straight-edge or Christian but I accidentally do live my life where it appears I could be that way. I felt like anything I made was just childish and immature and nothing more. Sure, that’s a lot of insecurity talking but I also don’t believe that my feelings about this came straight out of my ass.
And I guess that’s why I shifted from wanting to write novels and started doing comedy. When telling jokes, you aren’t expected to be sexy or even remotely know how to be sexy. People love hearing about how I am absolutely not sexy or cool at all. Maybe someday I can finally be that sexy artist I always thought I could be, but in the meantime I will continue being exceptionally un-sexy, making art and potential songs in my head about being a fully-grown adult wondering what it feels like to hold hands with someone and feel love (or a similar emotion) for the first time.