At 10 years old, I could never fully comprehend a Taylor Swift song.
I did have a few criterion by which I sorted the “bops” from the “mehs,” one being whether it was hype enough to take up a spot on my fifth grade basketball team’s warmup set (imagine: a bunch of middle school girls sporting baggy shorts and tank tops—which look like someone punched a couple arm holes in a burlap sack—running out into a cramped, humid gym to DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win”) and another being whether or not it gave me the urge to burn down a non-existent ex-boyfriend’s house.
But I didn’t get those slow songs about love and heartbreak. Maybe I wanted to, or I tried to, but a song like “Last Kiss” just didn’t hit as hard when I was still in the “kissing is gross” phase. I’ve long mourned the fact that I didn’t get the opportunity to grow up alongside Taylor’s songwriting. She was a senior in high school when she released “Love Story;” I was in third grade. And while I would still scream out her lyrics at the top of my grade school lungs, I didn’t have enough emotional maturity to understand the depth and nuance of Swift’s best songs. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve begun to relate to songs that were released over a decade ago.
Enter: Olivia Rodrigo.
I first heard of Rodrigo when I started joke-watching the Disney+ series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” last year. I was under the impression it was just another dumb Disney show I could laugh about with my friends, but I was soon proven very wrong. This series defies a lot of the common stereotypes found in typical teen drama shows (of which The CW’s “Riverdale” is the blueprint). Namely, they cast actual teenagers—not 30-somethings with perfect skin and jawlines—to play, well, teenagers. Groundbreaking, I know. They also cast teenagers that could sing, which I’m sad to admit is a tough ask for any show with the ready availability of autotune.
The entire cast is fantastic, but I started following Olivia Rodrigo a little more closely once I found out she had written the show’s breakout hit, “All I Want,” entirely by herself at just 16 years old. A closer examination of her Instagram revealed a plethora of one-minute song clips that Rodrigo had posted over quarantine, which she revealed in an interview were part of her goal to write a chorus and verse per day. I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, I hope she puts this on an album soon,” about the first song I heard. Then the next. Then the next. Each song had a beautiful melody and poignant lyrics, and something that I’ll admit made me feel a bit unaccomplished as a 21-year-old with no discernable talent beyond writing snarky newspaper articles.
There was also something oddly familiar about how she crafted her lyrics, and it didn’t click until I saw one of Rodrigo’s own posts. I had scrolled far enough down on her page (yes, I was stalking. Let’s admit that we all do it, shall we?) to find a picture of Taylor Swift holding her Grammy awards for the album “1989,” with Rodrigo congratulating her “mom” in the caption. I scrolled further down and found a picture of 5-year-old Rodrigo holding a sign that, in all its handwritten kindergarten glory, probably said something along the lines of “Taylor Swift I Love You.”
That’s when it clicked: Olivia Rodrigo is a part of the new generation of artists that was raised on Taylor Swift—she is a “Swiftie” just like me, and it showed in her songwriting. That’s why it felt so familiar. She found a way to put emotion to things that feel intangible, to feelings you could only ever feel but never express. And with her smash-hit debut single “driver’s license,” Rodrigo found a way to connect to a universal audience without losing the specificity that made the song her own.
With Rodrigo’s latest release of “deja vu,” an indie-pop bop that ditches the heavy synth and piano chords of “driver’s license” for fuzzy electric guitar riffs and saturated drumbeats, I couldn’t help but compare the bridge to another Swift song, “Cruel Summer.” Others on Tik Tok and Twitter must have seen the similarities as well, because within a few hours of the song’s release, there were hundreds of mashups circulating the internet.
Lyrically, “deja vu” is yet another commentary on the nature of relationships. The repeated chorus line, “Do you get deja vu when she’s with you?” refers to an ex who, now that he has a new girlfriend, recycles all the things that made the previous relationship special. It’s clever, insightful (did I mention a bop?) and definitely feels like something Swift would write.
Now don’t get me wrong. Olivia Rodrigo is her own artist. From what I’ve seen from her released and unreleased songs, she has covered multiples genres and subject matters, and it’s frustrating to see news article after news article pigeonhole her into being a Taylor Swift fan and nothing more. However, what these articles do get right is that Rodrigo is exhibiting the same emotional depth and songwriting talent (and sassiness) as early-career, teenage Swift, and that should terrify the fragile hearts of teenage girls everywhere.
So maybe I didn’t get to truly grow up alongside Taylor Swift, and maybe I’m just a few months away from really understanding “22,” a song released nine years ago. But watching Rodrigo’s career blossom has given me something to look forward to—an artist that meets me where I am in life right now, as well as a Generation Z artist that hits the same emotional beats as my favorite Millennial artist.
That’s the best kind of “deja vu” a girl could ask for.
