A Bizarre Love Triangle Playlist

Dear listeners,

Today’s playlist is all about one of popular music’s favorite shapes: the love triangle.

Full of drama, secrets and passion, songs about love triangles have never exactly gone out of style. But as I’ve been considering some of the patterns and trends in this past year of pop music, I’ve noticed that they’re more popular — and in some cases, subversive — than ever.

This year has specifically been full of songs in which the singer is unusually fixated on “the other woman.” The most successful is “Taste,” a sassy, innuendo-stuffed pop-country smash by one of the year’s breakout stars, Sabrina Carpenter. “I’ve heard you’re back together,” she sings to her love interest’s former and current squeeze. “And if that’s true, you’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you.” That refrain has more than a hint of queer subtext, which Carpenter makes explicit in the campy, surprisingly gory music video, which ends with her kissing her female rival (played by Jenna Ortega) and the two accidentally killing their shared beau. In a twist, they’re not terribly bothered by it.

But “Taste” wasn’t the only 2024 song with an eye on the other point of the triangle. Released in March, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Obsessed” — a track from the deluxe edition of “Guts” — finds the singer haunted by the imagined perfection of her current partner’s ex-girlfriend: “If I told you how much I think about her, you’d think I was in love,” she sings. Another prominent triangular tune, Billie Eilish’s “Wildflower,” from “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” has become such a beloved fan favorite that it has spent 26 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. “I see her in the back of my mind, all the time,” Eilish sings of a partner’s ex — whom Eilish comforted when they first broke up, causing her to wonder, “Did I cross the line?”

These songs all suggest some sort of transference and, at times, even a flirtation with both opposing points on the love triangle. Pop songs about same-sex desire are not nearly as taboo as they once were, and I suspect the surge in these sorts of songs reflect that shift.

But in another sense, they’re telling a tale as old as time, a point I wanted to underscore by putting them in conversation with some older tracks. On today’s playlist, you’ll hear all the aforementioned songs, along with classics from the Cars, Loretta Lynn and Robyn, among other artists. It also features a certain global superstar’s 2024 remake of the ultimate “other woman” song, “Jolene.” No matter how you slice it, it seems, three’s a crowd.

I know I’ve been known to share,

Lindsay