The Singles Jukebox

The Jukebox has risen from the grave…

[Video]
[7.08]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Sophomore albums–and especially their lead singles–are so tricky because expectations are lofty and unreasonable. Artists need to appeal to their original fanbases without pigeonholing themselves; experiment with new sounds without alienating their original fanbases; create new aesthetics without sacrificing visual continuity; attain virality without being a flash in the pan. “Vampire” achieved all of this and more. On one hand, it’s a melancholy ballad à la “Drivers License”; on the other hand, it’s a ever-evolving three-minute distillation of her full pop-rock singer-songwriter range from SOUR. The songwriting’s emotional intimacy feels instantly familiar, but more mature and lived-in. Rodrigo sounds Disney enough, but the chorus climaxing with “fame fucker” is an electrifying reminder that she’s moved on, and invites just enough speculation as to who the song is about while avoiding Sabrina Carpenter and Joshua Bassett levels of specificity. The balladry of “Vampire” will sound good during karaoke, on car rides with parents, and on future seasons of The Voice; but its Hannah Montana, Elton John, and Queen-esque bridge is also snippy and clever enough to become a TikTok trend. It’s extraordinary how Olivia was able to get this balance right without sounding over-calculated. We’re witnessing the birth of a generational talent, and if there’s any justice in the pop world, one day we’ll look back on “Vampire” as the moment we knew Olivia Rodrigo wasn’t going anywhere.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: The most interesting thing about “Vampire” is the gap between what it convinces you it’s doing and what it’s actually doing. The introductory piano chords and initial aesthetics send a message to the audience that this is “Drivers License, Part 2” — an earnest ballad that tells a real, personal, relatable story of heartbreak. Except it isn’t that at all. Olivia’s debut single was a particular narrative whose songwriting hinged on Swiftian levels of detail, but “Vampire” is much vaguer and relies on broad strokes and tropes about predatory older men and the Hollywood machine to fill in the gaps. This evolution is probably a good thing, though, because instead of writing a song that incentivizes fans to engage in close readings and lore about her personal life, Rodrigo leans all the way into her theatre-kid dorkiness in a way that not even Ariana has let herself do on record. By the time “Vampire” builds to the hammering piano chords and the over-the-top backing vocals, it become very obviously a cheesy rock opera 11-o’clock number. That makes it hamfisted and embarrassing, but also the first sign that GUTS would be less “diaristic” and more Olivia chewing scenery and acting her way through songs, selling every line reading for the seats at the back of the theatre. That’s secretly her real strength.
[7]

Will Adams: Olivia Rodrigo has never clicked with me, despite all evidence suggesting that she should. A few listens of GUTS earlier this year helped me pinpoint the main reason: her musical theater pedigree often manifests as overly edited, everything-in-its-place songwriting that clashes with the messiness of the stories she’s telling. “Vampire” operates exactly like her debut single: a studied ballad that goes from tinkling piano to an urgent pulse, to the big climax before curtain call. The neat packaging only makes the clumsy moments stick out more, like the mixed metaphor of “sold me for parts as you sunk your teeth into me” arriving at exactly the worst time.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I prefer my undead tropes campier and faster. 
[4]

Leah Isobel: The lyric on the page is two words: “Bloodsucker/Famefucker.” Olivia sings it as four: “Blood, sucker/Fame, fucker.” During her breakout year, she spun a relatively low-profile relationship into tabloid fodder via sheer force of will and became a star in the process. For its first minute, “Vampire” seems to repeat the same set of ideas: lugubrious swells of piano, a throatily emotive lead vocal that leaps up into the chorus. But unlike “Drivers License,” this song is characterized by a new sense of paranoid shadow-play, an omnidirectional viciousness that drives its accelerating energy. By briefly inhabiting the form of her breakout hit, “Vampire” literally reanimates her past. By supercharging it into a rock opera, the song reveals that her past work was always, on some level, a performance, an exaggeration: a lie. She surveils the wreckage that her pen has wrought; she wonders, to others and to herself, “how do you lie?” The chorus is the answer. Fame demands blood.
[7]

Rose Stuart: I think I get Olivia Rodrigo now. “Vampire” feels like musical theatre, a perhaps unintentional Queen pastiche that uses its increasing momentum to move from depression to rage. In a year with so many big songs about breakups, “Vampire” is the only one that is honest enough to scream out its pain instead of hiding behind bravado. Its only flaw is that Rodrigo stops one foot too soon, ending the song when it is amping up rather than riding the crescendo to its full conclusion. If you’re going to do an anguished “Bohemian Rhapsody,” you need to leave space for some headbanging.
[8]

Brad Shoup: From her frequent dips into rippity-rap delivery to her tendency to make even her best asides feel workshopped, there’s more than a little Broadway about Rodrigo. “Vampire” feels like the deflating power ballad at the back end of an Act I: a sour realization that has to be swished around for a while. When she’s really spitting bile, it feels self-directed, and it’s all the more poignant for it. The ending (fists pounding on loop) is maybe the only way to end a pop version of a rock-opera track; the real deal would have had an instrumental solo to spell Rodrigo off.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: It is very personally funny to me how Olivia Rodrigo recorded a song called “Vampire” that sounds, at least in the beginning, like Christina Perri’s Twilight ballad “A Thousand Years.” But, of course, “Vampire” is not meant to be funny at all. The song is a product of Rodrigo’s musical theater background — maybe Chicago‘s “Nowadays” in chords and A Chorus Line‘s “What I Did For Love” in emotional arc. Musical theater shares more with pop music than detractors of either admit, and “Vampire” is Rodrigo’s version of Broadway’s version of opera’s tragic heroine arias. (So is “Praying,” with which “Vampire” also shares a lot.) You’ve heard many of these songs; they mark their characters’ final acts. They derive their power from an unspoken assumption: that one’s story isn’t truly real unless one sings it into existence, preferably over a recognizable ballad arrangement, with nodule-causing volume and superhuman virtuosity. The more you perform your pain, the more the audience will believe it. This triumph is always compromised, especially for a woman whose story is how she was hurt (c.f. Opera, or the Undoing of Women). But “Vampire” has another triumph, a meta-triumph: this isn’t Rodrigo’s final act. She may not even be done with Act 1.
[7]

Frank Falisi: “Theater kid,” as a moniker, exists in opposition to both its parts: not arty enough to be theater, not free enough to be kid. Posturing is expected, cliqueyness pervades, but between those obvious limitations is the opportunity provided by the grand gesture, which is to say: ascension. What makes a good dressing-room anthem? A certain sense of dramatic flamboyance, all the better for our impersonatory urges to inhabit. This accounts for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” obviously, but also fare both Hot Topicier (“Welcome to the Black Parade” dropped the year our spring musical was Sweet Charity) and more food-court block party. Do you remember the peculiar joy of hearing “Irreplaceable” drifting through the canned cleaner smells and chirpy family drama of a vast public space? The sublime is out there in the air! Reach through the fried food smells and teenage ennui! Maybe that’s the key: all good dressing-room songs could get equal play at the mall. Pop has always thrived on hemi-anonymity. Making these fantasies front and center in our vast pageant of overdriven hormonal imaginings was a first step toward personal curation; I knew a kid who repped Jethro Tull’s “Locomotive Breath” so hard that it elicited the same pre-show squeals as “Drops of Jupiter.” We just wanted to know you loved it–that energy was what these hidden and unstable moments of outburst were about. “Vampire” has all the cellophane grand guignol of a theater kid unbothered by the designation, an Evanescence and Mika-biting kiss-off with a delirious chorus that keeps reaching up, pushing Rodrigo’s formidable voice into the territory any songwriters hope to get an instrument; when a voice is that far and comfortably in the realm of its limit, emotion sheds right off. I don’t think we should remember our puerile joys as any less honest than the ones we look for in our maturity. I wouldn’t want to go back to the dressing room–I can listen to “Vampire” whenever I want–but it’s nice to imagine someone from Pippin or (yuch) The Addams Family, vibrating, too much makeup: “can I show you this song?”
[10]

Taylor Alatorre: A Three Minutes Hate session that’s structured like a Disney villain song from the perspective of the hero — which, as with most Disney villain songs, ends up making the designated bad guy seem more glamorous and enticing than he probably is. Fears of an aimless piano dirge are dispelled after the first third, but the steady pile-up of dramatic signifiers isn’t much of an improvement. Loudness and an indistinct busyness are used as crude synonyms for emotional tumult, and the quiet-loud dynamics feel unearned in a song that begins in the same lyrical register that it ends. It’s not that Rodrigo is too young or inexperienced to play the Lana-esque ingénue songwriter; it’s just that, for whatever reason, she’s more herself when she’s doing straight-ahead power pop songs that carry the risk of an IP lawsuit.
[3]

Andrew Karpan: “Vampire” is pure Olivia-core, her big tent pop-punk sound, which can be heard almost coalescing here. It also evokes her own school of soundalikes, like say Chappell Roan.
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: It’s a song full of big theatrical moments (the “How do you lie?” Greek chorus, the little glissando into the off-to-the-races bridge), but the understated epiphany comes at the end of the second verse, when the instrumentation drops out for Olivia to deliver an almost perfectly monotone “’cause girls your age know better.” She has more to say, but it’s already over. That’s the stake to the heart right there.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: In high school, I learned how much I loved to love. Blame it on my father: after seeing him tell my mom in the most mundane of circumstances–during car rides, at the dinner table–that she was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” I recognized that I, too, could be the same sort of unabashedly affectionate person to those around me. None of the other Asian men I knew were like this, and none were as visibly happy, and so it only made sense that when I had my first girlfriend I’d be first to say “I love you.” Two days later, a friend one year our senior convinced her to dump me. I shouldn’t say stuff like this, I was told, and it was in our best interest to cut ties as to prevent my further heartbreak. My immediate reaction was confusion: All the songs we sang together felt just as emotionally severe, just as intimate. What made it worse when the words were my own? My remaining teenage years would be defined by a reticence for emotional expression. But I still had these models in my life–my 1st-generation Korean American parents, the music I spent every waking moment devouring–that convinced me to live otherwise. It’s a testament to “Vampire” and its go-for-broke maximalism that I recalled all this. More than any other pop song this year, it makes a point to direct attention to its vocal delivery: every casual lilt and swerving cadence is a window into a complex web of emotions. Rodrigo’s other singles hint at this through clever wordplay, but “Vampire” and its deathly serious musical theater make it actually feel consequential. Even with the devastation she feels, my main takeaway is the same I had 15 years ago: the only life worth living is one of overflowing, unwieldy passion.
[10]

Stephen Eisermann: Olivia oversings this in the best way possible and wrings every possible emotion out of each note.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Bloodletting over a bloodsucker, for which Rodrigo recreates the venom and hurt that made “Drivers License” so gripping a listen, though round two shifts the balance towards the former. It’s not that rage is less compelling a mode for Rodrigo, but her logorrheic barbs speak to resentments specific to her and her target; without the granular detail that characterised “Drivers License,” there’s also little for we onlookers to grab a hold of. When the kick starts thumping, the song attains some get-up-and-go that’s not entirely thwarted by the mushy and muffled production. The pounded piano chords can’t quite crescendo with the high end filtered out. “Fame-fucker, bleeding me dry like a goddamn vampire” is a fun thing to shout, though.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Rodrigo says “fuck” the way a six-year-old wields a hammer: aimlessly and with delusions of competence.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: “Make us Drivers License: The Musical Theatre Experience,” asked nobody in particular. But Olivia Rodrigo obviously knew the demand was there and has given us the curtain raising (d-d-d-d-d), climax reprise (dundundundundundun) and denouement (DUN! DUN! DUN! DUN!) all in one. It’s catchy, her lyrics again hit that sweet spot of authentic teen tantrum but relatable to an adult, and her performance is both angry and a little bit scared. What, you expect to see a vampire and be angry, not scared?
[10]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Love the bit where it goes “DUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUNDUN.” More songs should do that! It’s great every time!
[8]

Crystal Leww: Earlier this year, I had to get an MRI done ahead of a surgery. At 6:45 in the morning while I was lying there, covered in nothing but a sheet and some paper shorts, freezing cold, the MRI tech found a vein in my right arm after poking around for five minutes in my left arm. The tech asked me if I wanted to listen to music while getting my MRI. I said no, I’m good, then immediately reconsidered after thinking about being kinda freaked out while lying very still in a giant magnet for like 30 minutes. The tech asked me what I wanted to listen to: Jazz? Classical? Top 40? Yeah, the last one, I told them. They put headphones over my ears, then loaded me into the machine. Turns out they can’t give you real headphones because it’s a giant magnet, and “Top 40” really just meant The Entire Olivia Rodrigo Album. So I just laid there listening to loud-ass MRI banging noises for 30 minutes and listening to Olivia Rodrigo through speakers that sounded like they were from the ’60s, blown out, and shoved underwater, and constantly interrupted every five or six minutes with a robo-voice lady going “hold your breath for five…four…three…” I think this is one of the most boring songs on the album — a [2] — but I don’t think that a single other American pop star in 2023 could make an album I could recognize so clearly under these conditions.
[4]

Michael Hong: “vampire” is SOUR‘s palette made darker and sexier, the ballad rendered theatrical. Every movement is felt. The sighed “look at you, cool guy, you got it” brings the image of a sly smile, the collapsing scream of “fame fucker” carries every bit of vitriol, and the builds and drops of the piano are a nauseating rollercoaster. At the center is Rodrigo leaning both into and away from her youth. She fixates on the simple, almost juvenile metaphor but demonstrates newfound maturity: desperately attempting to ensure that self-deprecating doesn’t mean self-loathing, and conceding her own faults without redirecting blame.
[7]

Ian Mathers: While “Vampire” is good, it feels an awful lot like the kind of song that benefits from and/or relies on the listener being able to slot it into place in the narrative of Olivia Rodrigo, Narrator/Protagonist. Not a complaint! But while I can appreciate what’s going on (the “sold me for parts” is really good, including how she performs it), I am struck by a nagging sense that I don’t Get It yet, the way I suspect I will at some point.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Is it about Chip Hunkley? Jaeden Jaxons? Esio Quaywurtz? It could even be the industry forces that would leech from them if they existed. Perish the thought and enjoy the ride, though: this wooden rollercoaster of a song thrills with its craft, character and momentum. Yes, they probably have ones with jetpacks now, but who wants to feel weightless when you have juddery? 
[8]

Jackie Powell: The crew at Switched on Pop introduced me to the thought that the track paints the image of the protagonist trying to escape from her antagonist (the vampire) in an old gothic castle. Imagine Rodrigo, in one of those white medieval dresses that’s too long, running for her life up a tower. Not all songs have this capability — actually, most of them do not. Rodrigo and her writing partner Dan Nigro succeed because of the way they play with the track’s dynamics and how intentional they are when they introduce different sounds. Their entrances are grand but pristine. The switches from piano (literally and in the dynamic sense) in the first verse, to the slight stringy synths in the first chorus, then to the percussive bass drum in verse two, are dramatic but not overstated. By the time Rodrigo hits that second chorus, the drum kit is fully present, and the listener can imagine her jogging faster through the castle. By the bridge she’s full-on running and making her damndest great escape, and by the final crash of the cymbals, she’s done it. The most potent phrase in “Vampire” is obviously “fame fucker,” a mature statement way beyond Rodrigo’s years. If only Britney Spears had known it, she might have avoided Kevin Federline. Yes, I’ve been listening to The Woman in Me on audiobook. The Federline chapters were so vampiric.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Vampires aren’t real. There are plenty of greedy, selfish, and pale people in the world who are quite happy to take your days, your hours, your minutes. They quite happily crowd into your life, settle so deep, and nestle so close that even honestly engaging with them will drive you crazy. Forget trying to get them to stop hurting you, stop lying to you, stop betraying you. They just want more and more of you until you can no longer feel them drain you — just collapse and sit, staring off into space. And once the last chorus kick-thuds painfully 16 more times, it finally collapses into silence because Olivia has shaken the man loose, but she is so depleted and uneasy she now has to keep watching around for him in the night. Vampires aren’t real. Men are.
[10]