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Sadie Jean — the up-and-coming songwriter who went viral in 2021 with “WYD Now?” — admits that when she first started writing songs, it was for “selfish” reasons: “I just wanted to listen to something and know that no one else could relate to it as much as I could,” she tells Rolling Stone in the latest installment of On Your Radar. But her motive for making her music publicly available for the first time was pure, glorious revenge.
It happened when Jean was going into her senior year of high school, and her first boyfriend had cheated on her. Naturally, she was furious, and she wrote a song about it. “It was so petty,” she says with a laugh now, “I just wanted everyone to know that he sucked! So that was the real motivation. I was like, I have nothing to lose, I already felt humiliated that he cheated on me, and the school knew. So I kinda wanted to take my power back. So I put the song on SoundCloud, everyone knew the song as about him, and it was awesome.”
Shaming some dude is, of course, just one of the many powers of the internet that Jean has harnessed. TikTok helped launch the young singer-songwriter’s career, and while Jean acknowledges the obvious — the internet is “a crazy place” — it can also be a “special sanctuary for creative people.”
One thing she found particularly remarkable was the way so many people related to “WYD Now?” a song Jean was sure was too specific to reach a wide audience. “I didn’t expect that many people to resonate with it and also go a step further and add their own verse with the verse challenge,” Jean says. “It was definitely the most emotional part of the release process for that song. I would just cry in my bed for hours every night listening to people write their verses and being like, ‘How did they know that’s how I felt?’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Jean talks about some of her earliest musical memories singing in her parent’s car, her songwriting process, and her new single, “16” (out today, Aug. 18). “It’s really different than my previous three songs, which is kind of exciting,” Jean says. “Normally, I would shy away from doing something different this early, but it just feels very right. It feels very summer.”
She adds that the song is basically about wanting to be 16 again, though also understanding that’s not exactly possible. Noting that she’s spent much of this summer with her old high school friends in her hometown, Jean says, “It’s just weird to be in the same place, in my hometown, and really recognize the passing of time. It’s really trippy, so ’16’ is me trying to cope with being 21 years old. Because I still feel like I’m 16.”
