Does Olivia Rodrigo's 'the cure' Sound Like 'Everlong'? In Its Loudest Minute

Olivia Rodrigo's 'the cure' comes closest to Foo Fighters' 'Everlong' in one minute, from 3:20, when the bridge and then the last chorus reach the loudest point of the record. Its acoustic opening and its string ending are the parts least like 'Everlong'. It is not a sample. In the listing Universal Music Group supplies to YouTube, the song has two composer-lyricists, Rodrigo and Daniel Nigro, who also produced it, and no one from Foo Fighters. The same kind of listing shows what a credit to another band looks like: on Rodrigo's 2021 hit 'good 4 u', Paramore's Hayley Williams and the band's former guitarist Josh Farro are listed beside her as composer-lyricists.

For every four-second stretch of the official audio of 'the cure', we looked for the closest match anywhere in 'Everlong', comparing tone and pitch together and leaving both songs at their own speed and key. To see what the same recording scores, we ran the test against the song's own music video, a second upload of the same record. Its closest stretch scored 0.43 on our scale, where lower means closer. 'Everlong' scored 0.98, in the same range as the three other songs we tried: 0.90 for Smashing Pumpkins' 'Disarm', 0.91 for Rodrigo's own 'drop dead' and 1.05 for The Cure's 'Just Like Heaven', one of the two songs she sang with Robert Smith at Glastonbury in 2025. The band whose name the title shares scored furthest of all, and none of the four came near the 0.43 of the same record.

Why do people say 'the cure' sounds like Foo Fighters' 'Everlong'?

The two songs are close in speed and in key. Our beat tracker puts 'Everlong' at about 157 beats a minute and 'the cure' at about 144, so Foo Fighters play roughly 9 percent faster. Our key finder hears 'the cure' in C sharp major; for 'Everlong' it picks B minor, which uses the same notes as D major, and the record's most common chord is D, one semitone above C sharp. Both begin on a busy guitar, too. Over the first 30 seconds an onset detector, which counts the moments a new note is struck, finds 4.6 such moments a second in 'the cure' and 4.7 in 'Everlong', though also 4.6 in 'drop dead', against 3.3 in 'Disarm'.

The likeness is strongest late in the song. We averaged the tone colour of each section of 'the cure' and measured how far it sits from the overall sound of each song we compared it with. The opening, 13 seconds that our sound classifier labels acoustic guitar and strumming, is further from 'Everlong' than from any of the other three. The gap shrinks in each loud chorus, opens again in the quieter third verse and is smallest from 3:20 to 4:14, where the record is at its loudest. That minute runs from the end of the second 'unraveled' passage through the bridge and into the last chorus. The only two of the song's 14 sections that our classifier tags 'grunge' fall inside it; 'Everlong' gets the same tag in 10 of its 13 sections, from about 13 seconds in.

Even at that point 'the cure' stays nearer to 'drop dead', the first single from the same album, than to 'Everlong'. What the two records share in that minute looks like the general sound of loud rock, not one borrowed part.

What is 'the cure' by Olivia Rodrigo about?

'the cure' is about a remedy that does not work. Other girls crowd the front of her mind in the first verse, and the line she has to clear keeps moving; she believed she had her antidote this time. By the second verse she is alone in her room at night, fighting bad thoughts, so lonely she feels as far off as the moon, and the antidote is now a person. A third verse, from about 1:51, describes a game the narrator used to play in her head when dating: adding up a boyfriend's past partners until she cried.

Each chorus answers in medical terms. Poison fills her head and doubt her heart; there are toxins in her blood that he has tried hard to draw out. His love feels like medication, she allows, and is surely good for her, and each chorus ends with the title line: “It'll never be the cure”. The poison in the lyric is hers, and what she asks of him comes later, in the bridge. The words never name an illness either. People search the title with OCD and depression, but the lyric describes bad thoughts and a remedy that fails, not a diagnosis.

Besides the title line, the song leans on one word, 'unraveled'. LRCLIB's lyric text has it on 17 lines, eight after the third verse and nine after the second chorus. Her tour, which began in September, is called The Unraveled Tour. Sewing takes over in the bridge, with “Why can't you come stitch me up?”, before she asks why it can never be enough and answers that it isn't. That bridge, from about 3:21, opens the minute in which the record gets loudest and comes closest to 'Everlong'.

Chords in 'the cure', and an ending nearer Smashing Pumpkins

Going bar by bar, our chord template puts 'the cure' on C sharp, D sharp minor, F sharp and G sharp, the first, second, fourth and fifth chords of its key. 'Everlong' circles D, G and B minor, the first, fourth and sixth of its own. Because the keys sit a semitone apart, no chord appears in both, and the two roles they do share, the home chord and the fourth, are common to countless songs. Teddy Swims' 'Mr. Know It All', another hit in which people hear an older song, came out the same way when we measured it: a likeness of mood and shape, on different chords.

'Everlong' gets loud early. It reaches 91 percent of its peak loudness within its first fifth and stays near it, apart from a quiet break just after three minutes. 'the cure' sits at about a third of its peak for its first minute and climbs slowly, topping out between 3:20 and 4:14. From 4:14, strings take over, violin and cello according to our classifier, and play under the last line until the song ends at 4:57; nothing like that happens in 'Everlong'.

Smashing Pumpkins, the other band people name alongside the song, fit its edges better: the acoustic opening and the string ending both sit nearer 'Disarm' than 'Everlong', and the ending sits nearer 'Disarm' than any other song we compared.

'the cure' is back at No. 6 on Spotify's global chart

'the cure' was released on 22 May as the second single from Rodrigo's third album, 'you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love', and more than five months later it is still among the most-played songs in the world. On 1 November Spotify's global daily list had it sixth, up eight places, with 2,981,396 plays on its 164th day on the chart; 'drop dead' was 53rd. In kworb.net's totals, which count only the weeks the song charted in each country, the United States comes first, then the Philippines, the United Kingdom and Indonesia. By 3 November the official video had been watched 55.9 million times.

On our measurements, 'the cure' comes closest to 'Everlong' for about a minute, from 3:20, when the bridge and the final chorus reach the record's loudest point and our classifier hears grunge, as it does in 'Everlong' from about the 13th second. Before and after that minute, the song opens on acoustic guitar a semitone below 'Everlong', moves through other chords and ends on violin and cello.