The 5 Best Olivia Rodrigo Songs That Sound Like Other Songs

And why you shouldn't care that they do!

If you listened to this week’s episode of You Don’t Even Like This Show, hey, thank you so much! If you didn’t, feel free to do it right now right here.

Or later. Maybe later. I’m working here. Anyway, the episode is about the best music of 2023 and, spoiler, Olivia Rodrigo is the name that topped my list.

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One of the topics we covered while discussing her music was the tidal wave of plagiarism claims that have been directed her way since her first album came out in 2021.

There’s no disputing that she and her production team do a liberal amount of borrowing when concocting her music. But also, that’s fine!

Let’s talk about some of Olivia Rodrigo’s very best borrowed tunes and why you shouldn’t actually care that they sound like something else.

“brutal”/”Pump It Up” (Elvis Costello)

Your kid sister’s preferred version of Taylor Swift landed on copyright narc’s radars starting quite literally with the opening riff on the first song on her first album. That song is called “brutal” and that guitar riff at the beginning sure does sound a lot like the one from “Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello.

That said, do you know who didn’t give a single shit about those similarities? Elvis Costello. When a Twitter (currently known as X) user pointed it out, Costello replied thusly:

He’s not wrong. It’s really just a matter of you whether or not you ever get huge enough to be called to task for it. If you don’t believe that, please consider that, for all we know, Olivia Rodrigo wasn’t ripping off Elvis Costello at all. Maybe she was ripping off 2019’s “Hungry Sam” by The Paranoyds.

Great band, by the way! I saw them open for Jack White not long after “brutal” was released and when they introduced the above song they said it was called “We Need A Lawyer.”

Rodrigo was also accused of ripping off the cover art from Hole’s Live Through This album for promotional photos she released in the lead-up to her first album.

It’s interesting that Courtney Love, of all people, would take what is clearly just a nod to an obvious influence so hard when you take the history of the band that made her famous into account.

Hole? No. I mean Nirvana, obviously. Kurt Cobain, at least in terms of originality, was the Olivia Rodrigo of his day. There are honestly too many examples of Nirvana blatantly ripping off bands that came before them to even try citing them all here.

The most famous is probably the riff from “Come As You Are” which is a note for note copy of the main riff from a Killing Joke song called “The Eighties.”

My personal vote for the most damning Nirvana plagiarism moment though is a tie between how hard they robbed an obscure South American indie rock band called Los Brujos on the song “Very Ape” from the In Utero album…

…and this obvious theft of another song you’ve never heard by another band you’ve never heard of.

You could also build entire career-spanning boxed sets around the songs artists like Oasis and Madonna have been accused of stealing from other people, but that’s not the point. What I’m getting at is that I don’t care. Songs sound like other songs all the time. Musicians work within constraints that other entertainers don’t have. There are only so many notes you can play on an instrument and only so many progressions you can play them in that sound good.

I still like Nirvana’s music. Oasis is still one of my favorite bands. Madonna takes borrowing to a level I’m not entirely comfortable with, but to each their own.

So, with that in mind, let’s go through a few more examples of Olivia Rodrigo putting the unique power of being influenced by other artists to its absolute best possible use.

“hope ur ok”/”Cold, Cold Ground” (Tom Waits)

I think this next example might be an Adam Tod Brown exclusive? That is understandable. I imagine there’s not a lot of Venn diagram overlap between people who pre-ordered Olivia Rodrigo’s first album on vinyl and people who would recognize the guitar line from an obscure 1980s Tom Waits album cut from a mile away, but here we are.

The main riff and instrumentation from the SOUR album closer “hope ur ok”…

…at least IMHO, sounds a whole lot like “Cold Cold Ground” from the 1987 Tom Waits album Frank’s Wild Years.

The similarities obviously come to a screeching halt when the two start singing. One of them sounds like an angel and one of them sounds like singing this song is their daily assignment on the pirate ship they live on. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide who is who. Whatever the case, their vastly different voices don’t change the fact that it sounds like they are singing over the exact same song.

“get him back”/”Pepper” (Butthole Surfers)

I sure do wish I could take credit for this one! An eagle-eared Reddit user pointed out `that the intro and verses from the GUTS single “get him back”…

…sound shockingly similar to the song “Pepper” by your mom’s favorite band Butthole Surfers.

I was highly skeptical upon reading this but — yeah. Totally. It’s not just that they’re both songs where the singer is mostly just talking over drums. There are lots of those. But her flow, if that’s what you can call it in this case, is also weirdly similar to what Gibby Haynes is doing on “Pepper”.

Listen to them back to back, starting with “get him back” all the way through. Once you reach the end of the first verse of the Butthole Surfers song, it will be sorta jarring when Olivia Rodrigo doesn’t start singing the chorus. I promise.

“deja vu”/”No Surprises” (Radiohead)

This is the song that eventually got Taylor Swift an after-the-fact writing credit on Olivia Rodrigo’s first album, and I guess I hear it.

But for my money, the better comparison between “deja vu” and other songs is “No Surprises” by Radiohead.

That chime-y guitar riff in the Radiohead song is super similar to the piano riff at the beginning of “deja vu” and the vocal melodies are nearly identical.

If for some reason you just aren’t hearing it, here are the vocals from “deja vu” over an instrumental version of “No Surprises”.

The Radiohead song is a little slower, but the two are shockingly similar otherwise. Meanwhile, that they were recorded at the same tempo is kind of all “deja vu” and “Cruel Summer” have in common.

“drivers license”/”Where Do We Go Now?” (Gracie Abrams)

Around the time Olivia Rodrigo released “drivers license” she mentioned in an interview that she wrote that song after sitting in her car for hours crying to Gracie Abrams songs.

If you’re unfamiliar, Gracie Abrams is a fantastic singer-songwriter who doubles as living proof that our fears of nepotism babies taking over the entertainment industry might be a little unfounded. She’s highly respected among her peers AND her dad is big time Hollywood movie producer JJ Abrams. But none of that has done anything to change the fact that Olivia Rodrigo has approximately 12 million more YouTube subscribers than Gracie Abrams.

It’s a fairly safe bet that when Olivia Rodrigo cites Gracie Abrams as as influence on the song “drivers license”, she’s almost certainly referring to the Abrams song “Where Do We Go Now?”.

Aside from the lyrics both referencing driving around, they might not seem all that similar at first, but when you hear them together…

…the things they have in common become a little more apparent. This example is a little closer to that thing where “deja vu” and Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” both just have the same tempo, but it’s also further evidence that “borrowing” of this sort is a thing that only the pettiest of musicians actually care about.

Far from being offended that Olivia Rodrigo jacked her style a little to write one of the biggest pop songs of the last five years, Gracie Abrams was actually the opening act on the tour that supported the album that Olivia Rodrigo song was on.

So, hey, leave Olivia Rodrigo alone. Sometimes musicians borrow from other musicians. It doesn’t make “Love Is Embarrassing” any less of a banger (that kinda sounds like “Since U Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson).

Also, something that rarely gets mentioned in all of the talk about Olivia Rodrigo borrowing from other musicians is her producer. He’s a guy in his 40s named Dan Nigro. He used to be the front man of an indie rock group called As Tall As Lions in the early 2000s.

Now, between him and 20-year-old Olivia Rodrigo, which one do you think is more familiar with mid-90s Butthole Surfers songs? Which of the two is more likely to have obsessed over Radiohead’s OK Computer album in the late ‘90s? Who do you think knows more about Elvis Costello?

Olivia Rodrigo takes a lot of heat for borrowing elements from older songs, but it’s way more likely that the older people in the room when she was recording those songs are the ones who truly deserve the blame.

And even then, again, who cares? This really is just mostly how popular music works. It’s just that Olivia Rodrigo is a woman who is also young so we must find a reason why she’s not actually as good as people say she is.