Olivia Rodrigo's "God, it's brutal out here" prophecy continues to foretell even now, over three years on from the release of her debut album SOUR, as she was recently revealed that she mistaken for a suspected criminal named Olivia Rodriguez and interrogated at the Canadian border. Of course, this was all happening amidst her wildly successful world tour behind sophomore album GUTS, which otherwise went off without a hitch — well, with the exception of falling into that hole.
Elvis Costello, too, knows it's brutal out here: in a new interview with Vanity Fair, the iconic singer-songwriter addressed the widely noted similarities between Rodrigo's SOUR opener and his 1978 cut with the Attractions, "Pump It Up," saying it would have been "ludicrous" to sue the young star.
When answering a question about whether he struggles with the fact that his first two albums seem to dominate his legacy, Costello told the publication's Chris Smith, "By far the most successful and ubiquitous music to other performers that I've been involved in writing is [1993's] The Juliet Letters [with the Brodsky Quartet]… Not so many people are playing — other than maybe 'Pump It Up.' And then mostly not playing it but alluding to it in their own arrangements."
He went on, "Like Olivia Rodrigo's producer obviously did. Now, I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that, because I think it would be ludicrous. It's a shared language of music." The musician added, "Other people clearly felt differently about other songs on that record," seemingly in reference to Rodrigo's retroactive crediting of Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent as a co-writers on "déja vu" after its similarities to "Cruel Summer" were pointed out, as well as Hayley Williams and Josh Farro for "good 4 u" taking evident influence from Paramore's "Misery Business."
However, as Costello noted, "But if there were no quotations, there'd be no Bach. There'd be no Mozart. There'd be no Sonny Rollins. So we can't start worrying about that."
Rodrigo herself said something similar back in 2021 when addressing the headlines she had made over the controversial songwriting credits on SOUR. "Every single artist is inspired by artists who have come before them," the pop star said in a Teen Vogue interview. "It's sort of a fun, beautiful sharing process. Nothing in music is ever new. There's four chords in every song. That's the fun part — trying to make that your own."
Costello also previously defended Rodrigo on social media when the similarities between the "brutal" riff and the one in "Pump It Up" were first being remarked upon. "This is fine by me, Billy," he wrote in response to someone on Twitter. "It's how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make it a brand new thrill. That's what I did," adding hashtags with the titles of the songs "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Too Much Monkey Business" (by Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry, respectively) that influenced "Pump It Up."