Rodrigo is now 20 and ‘Guts’, out in September, will be her second album. And while “Drivers License” and its fallout became tabloid fodder, the public narrative was not encoded in the issue itself.
“Vampire” changes that. Rodrigo’s target here is someone trying to be glamorous, or maybe glamorous itself: “Look at you, cool dude, you got it / I see the parties and the diamonds sometimes when I close my eyes / Six months of torture you sold as something forbidden paradise.”
Perhaps the song is about Los Angeles nightlife Zack Bia, one of Rodrigo’s rumored partners – if so, the structural shift from the first to the second movement could indicate – then the music becomes coffeehouse EDM, possibly a veiled allusion on Bia’s emerging career as a producer and DJ, and an echo of Mayer-ian blues pop Swift channeled on “Dear John”.
The relationship itself, Rodrigo learns, is also a transaction. “The way you sold me for parts / As you sank your teeth into me,” she shrieks, before anointing her ex with the coldest name imaginable: “fame [expletive].” That insult usually begins with “star” rather than “fame,” but Rodrigo knows that the state of fame is far more toxic than any one person’s, and that someone who craves it may not be interested in personality at all.
In “Drivers License,” Rodrigo still saw the other woman as an enemy or source of tension, but now in “Vampire,” she understands what the lines of loyalty really are, marking an emerging feminist streak. Here she finds kinship with her ex’s other partners and berates herself for thinking she was once the exception: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news / You called them crazy, God I hate the way I called them too crazy.
