Now that Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour has been released, fans have a handful of songs from the pop star into which they can dig their teeth. There’s always room for more, though, and more regularly arrives thanks to Rodrigo’s role in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Last month brought the Rodrigo/Joshua Bassett duet “Even When/The Best Part,” for example, and now there’s a new Rodrigo solo track from the show, “The Rose Song.”
The song appears on the sixth episode of the show’s second season. In the episode, Nini (Rodrigo’s character) gets cast as the rose in the East High production of Beauty And The Beast. Subsequently, she writes and performs “The Rose Song.” On the chorus of the emotional piano ballad, she sings, “‘Cause I am more than what I am to you / You say I’m perfect, but I’ve got thorns with my petals, too / And I won’t be confined to your point of view / I’m breakin’ through the glass you put me in / ‘Cause my beauty’s from within.”
In a May interview ahead of the release of Sour, Rodrigo said of the song, “The success of the music I’ve put out recently has given me a lot of confidence as a writer and in the other songs that I’ve written, like ‘The Rose Song.’ I think it’s one of the best songs I’ve written. It’s this really intricate metaphor and I’ve never written a song like that before.”
In an interview from last year, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series showrunner Tim Federle described the song as “pretty extraordinary” and continued, “We all felt like, ‘How could she ever top ‘All I Want?’ And then she came up with this concept that knocked our socks off.”
Listen to “The Rose Song” above.