Now their new collaborative track has been premiered, Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith have been speaking about what it has been like collaborating with each other in various forms over the last year.
Whilst speaking to Popcast, Olivia explained how it felt to have Robert perform with her during her headline set at Glastonbury Festival.
“I obviously wrote to him a bunch before Glastonbury. I was so shocked that he said yes. He’s everything to me, and I was just so nervous, even to ask, but I was so delighted when he said that he wanted to. That night at Glastonbury was like the best night of my life. It was so special. There was just something in the air.”
She then goes into how the pair then got working on more music together, which then materialised into him putting his mark on her new track ‘what’s wrong with me’.
“After that we hung out a bit after, and I was in London a lot, and he was like, “Well, we should, we should hang out in the studio, like, come and let’s, let’s hang, and he’s nocturnal, also, which is amazing. He’s only awake when it’s dark out.
“I brought him this song, and he’s just incredible. I think when he sent us back the like his vocals in the chorus, like the first time the chorus came in, I was like, ‘Oh my god’. Just the way that it elevates that song and the way that it blends together almost brought me to tears. I thought it was so beautiful, and hearing him sing something that I had written was just so wild”
The pair gave the song its debut at Primavera Sound over the weekend, where The Cure were scheduled to headline and Olivia popped up for a surprise set.
A soft and tear-stained synth-laden ballad, one that allows the heartwrenching words that accompany it to take the forefront. Stories of not being able to get out of bed but unable to eat or sleep but being told by others that there’s nothing actually wrong, it’s a raw and very real look at what it means to have the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Following the performance, Robert spoke to BBC Radio 6Music, where he described his admiration for Olivia as an artist.
“She’s so good, I mean, she is genuinely fantastic as a songwriter and as a singer, as a performer, and the band, everything about it. I genuinely love what she does. I am slightly in awe of how easy she finds it all. It’s not really comparable to how I do things. [At] 23 you’ve got a lot more energy than someone of my age, but it just comes across as very effortless. Very natural. And I’m not really a natural performer. When I write songs, I’m writing for a very specific reason. I agonize, to be honest, a lot of the time in later life, and she’s just banging it out and saying, “What do you think of this? That’s great.”
The song is set to appear on Olivia’s new album ‘you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’, which will be released this Friday (June 12).
