Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan appear on vintage game shows in the retro music video for the “Expectations” remix, featuring appearances from musician David Byrne and producer Dan Nigro.
The clip, directed by Bardia Zeinali, shows Rodrigo and Roan (in her first-ever feature) appearing on sets clearly inspired by “Family Feud” and “Hollywood Squares.” Byrne appears as Johnny Johnson, host of the “Big Expectations” show, where he asks three Rodrigos in different outfits “a little bit how you got here.”
What follows is a trip to the different sets and a new “Expectations” verse from Roan, who shows up on the set of “Sister Squabble” to contend with Rodrigo in a “Family Feud” face-off. “I took her to a concert front row thought it’d be fun,” she sings. “Her hand moving up my skirt, no piercing on her tongue / She said she’d call me later, that was three weeks ago / Classic L.A. behavior, she could’ve just said no.”
Nigro, who produced “Expectations” along with Roan and Rodrigo’s albums, pops up at the end clutching a giant brick of a phone straight out of the 1990s. His appearance makes sense, as he produced the track and its parent album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.”
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on Thursday afternoon, Roan and Rodrigo explained why they teamed for the remix. “This is obviously my first feature,” said Roan. “I’ve never done this before, so it feels perfect to me. I don’t know. I feel like it represents a generation of songwriters that are just really thinking about their lyrics. I felt like with this song, I was like, ‘Wow, it’s so cool that she is putting a pretty difficult concept within the pop song,’ which is my favorite pop songs ever.”
Rodrigo explained that she had asked Byrne to appear in the video but was a “bit sheepish” about making the request. “I always feel shy asking people for favors, but he was so down,” she said. “He showed up the entire day. He had a character that he had built out and he made this Johnny Johnson character. There’s so many outtakes we have of him just improvising and riffing and he was so into it. And I was like, ‘Gosh, David, maybe he should be an actor too one of these days.” He’s very multi-talented.”
Beyond sharing Nigro as a producer, Rodrigo and Roan go back some years, as the latter supported the former on both her “Sour” and “Guts” tours. Roan recently performed at Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Festival in late August as part of an all-female lineup that featured Doechii, Rachel Chinouriri, Garbage, the Breeders and more.