Olivia Rodrigo's First Christmas Song Arrives as Her Album Returns to No. 1

Olivia Rodrigo released her first holiday song, "take me home (4 christmas)," at 5 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, Nov. 5, with a music video that went up on her official channel at the same hour. Three days later, Billboard reported that her third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, had risen from No. 2 back to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a fourth nonconsecutive week.

The single and the chart return are separate events. The song is a standalone single, and it arrived with a few hours left in a tracking week that ended Nov. 5. The album's units that week were overwhelmingly streams of its own tracks, and the single's first full tracking week is the one under way now.

A rock song for the holidays

Rodrigo wrote the track with her frequent collaborators Dan Nigro and Amy Allen, and Nigro produced it. "I wrote this song with @dan_nigro and Amy Allen last summer and I'm so happy it's finally close to Christmastime so I can share it with you guys lol," she wrote on Instagram. It runs just under three minutes, came out under exclusive license to Interscope Records, and launched alongside a 7-inch vinyl and a cassette sold through Target. Variety's Chris Willman called it "a Christmas rock banger, the likes of which are rarely heard nowadays."

The video opens with Rodrigo cleaning up after a house party while Marshall sleeps on the couch. The two then arrive at his family home, where Nixon plays his mother, and the holiday that follows turns out to be Rodrigo's imagination. At one point the family plays Heads Up with the name "Olivia Rodrigo" taped to every forehead.

The casting has a history. Rodrigo told Jimmy Fallon in May that Sex and the City is "my favorite show" and that "multiple songs" on the album drew on the relationship between Nixon's Miranda and David Eigenberg's Steve. On Watch What Happens Live the night the song came out, Nixon said, "I was very startled and thrilled to be invited."

The email Chris Butler thought was fake

Listeners quickly compared the song to the Waitresses' 1981 standard "Christmas Wrapping," and the man who wrote that song had been offered an early listen two months before. Chris Butler, 77, posted on Facebook that about two months ago he "received a weird email from someone claiming to be 'Olivia Rodrigo.'" It "just had to be fake," he wrote, and he had to look her up. He answered anyway, and he later met her with his fiancée after her Unraveled Tour stop in Columbus, Ohio.

When commenters claimed the two songs were too close, Butler replied, "The vibe is there, but no plagiarism." Willman's own read was that the songs share a loose, irreverently romantic spirit and little in the way of composition or lyrics. Butler went further on its prospects: "It's going to be a smash, maybe even that elusive Christmas #1 contest they have every year in the UK."

Where the numbers stand

As of this writing, the video has more than 4.1 million YouTube views and the track has about 2.4 million Spotify streams on Kworb's tracker.

The album's return came on 57,000 equivalent album units, down 10% from the week before, the smallest total for a No. 1 in more than a year. Streaming supplied 49,500 of those units, equal to 53.33 million on-demand streams, and the album has not left the top five in 21 weeks on the chart. Michael Jackson's Thriller finished just behind it at No. 2 with 55,000 units after its Halloween surge, its highest rank since 1984.

The holiday single also follows the "Expectations" remix with Chappell Roan, released Oct. 15, which took the song to No. 3 on the Hot 100. Rodrigo's Unraveled Tour has North American dates through Dec. 20 before a short break, which gives her several weeks to play the song live before Christmas, and Variety will name her Songwriter of the Year at its Hitmakers event in Los Angeles in December.