( That was our place / I found it first / I made the jokes you tell to her is Rodrigo’s favorite line.) The more specific the lyrics, the more the track resonates, because the details bring the emotion to life. “Deja vu” engages many of these senses you taste ice cream melting under Malibu sun, hear Billy’s piano notes, and feel the intimacy behind a couple’s inside jokes. It’s important to hear “people telling stories in their own words,” she said, “and able to feel the air that they’re feeling, see the things they’re seeing, and smell the things they’re smelling.” This concept evolved into a story set in Malibu, with Rodrigo imagining vivid details- often “completely made up,” she said-to build out the plot and immerse the listener in her scenes.Ī longtime country music fan, Rodrigo credits the genre and artists like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift for inspiring her narrative-based approach to songwriting.
“I get deja vu all the time,” Rodrigo explained, adding, “I thought it’d be interesting to write a song, using deja vu, about how sometimes when somebody moves on in a relationship and they get with a new partner, you watch it and you’re like, ‘oh my gosh, that was all of the stuff that I did.’ I think that’s a really relatable, universal thing.” She arrived at their session last fall with a standout line saved in her phone’s Notes app-“When she’s with you, do you get deja vu?”-and that question became the song’s resounding chorus.
“I really like descriptive, narrative-based songwriting, so we tried to do that in the verses and paint pictures of all the specific things that you do in a relationship,” Rodrigo told American Songwriter over the phone about “deja vu,” produced by her frequent collaborator and co-writer Dan Nigro. Like her debut record-breaking “drivers license,” the singer-songwriter’s latest single transforms the everyday into the extraordinary with the same hypnotizing vocals that earned her an eight-week reign over the Billboard Hot 100. Together we try to understand how the byzantine music copyright system works, and how its rules affect the sound of pop music today and in the future.Strawberry ice cream (one spoon for two), Glee on repeat, jackets that don’t fit, and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl”-these are the sights and sounds of Olivia Rodrigo’s “deja vu,” out now. This week we are airing the conversation Switched On Pop’s Charlie Harding had on the podcast Decoder with host Nilay Patel who is also editor and chief of The Verge. This online campaign likely contributed to Rodrigo handing songwriting credits, also known as publishing, to Hayley Williams and Josh Farro of the band Paramore. Viral TikTok videos compared Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” to Paramore’s “Misery Business,” which share a common chord progression and vibe. Many listeners have commented on Rodrigo’s more obvious influences on social media. The question of whether someone can borrow a vibe resurfaced when Olivia Rodrigo shared songwriting credits on her hit 2021 album Sour with Taylor Swift, and comparisons have been made to the art of Courtney Love and music of Elvis Costello. Many artists fear that a bad court outcome could let an artist copyright a “vibe” using commonly used musical language. But recent cases increasingly litigate the core building blocks of music. Historically, courts have extended copyright to only unique combinations of words and music, not rhythms, chords, instruments. This story has come in and out of the news cycle in closely watched jury trials including artists like Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, and Katie Perry. In the last ten years there have been 190 public cases, up over 350% from the prior decade, according to The George Washington University & Columbia Law School Music Copyright Infringement Resource. Smith’s melody for “Stay With Me” clearly drew from Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” On rare occasions these cases go to court, where music litigation is at an all time high. Frequently, credits are given retroactively to avoid the cost of long jury trials like when Sam Smith credited Tom Petty. More and more artists are giving songwriting credits away. In the last few years music copyright claims have skyrocketed.