After the box office success of her debut album Sour and her hit ‘Drivers License’, 20-year-old Olivia Rodrigo reinvents herself on the powerful successor Guts. Portrait of a ‘very sweet girl’ who can get very angry.
Caryn Ganz / The New York Times3 september 2023, 09:52
When Olivia Rodrigo woke up one morning in January 2021 to the news that her first single, ‘Drivers License’, had shot to No. 1 on the charts, she knew that “nothing would ever be the same again”. One day she was a Disney actress who could sing well, the next day she was the promising new voice of her generation – all while still a high school student living with her parents.
Sour, the album Rodrigo released in May (she co-wrote all 11 tracks), went four times platinum. She received praise from Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani and was allowed to record duets with Billy Joel and Avril Lavigne. Cardi B sang about her on Twitter, Halsey sent a cake. At the 2022 Grammys, three of her seven nominations were converted to trophies, including Best New Artist.
It was not all easy: she had to do a first solo tour and learn to deal with the tabloids that scrutinized her entire love life. But all of that was nothing compared to the pressure she felt to create a worthy successor to her successful debut. Rodrigo says she benefited greatly from the advice of Jack White, one of her idols. “He wrote me a letter after our first meeting saying, ‘Your only job is to write music that you would like to hear on the radio,’ she says. “But writing songs that you would like to hear on the radio is actually very difficult.”
Salvo to fucks
Young pop stars today face a dizzying amount of pressure: they have to look a certain way, compete with each other, be role models and display acceptable emotions. It is therefore remarkable that Rodrigo largely ignores those expectations. On follow-up album Guts, which will be released on September 8, she simply reinvents herself as a rock star.
Take the opening track of the album, ‘All-American Bitch’: if you still hear Rodrigo’s angelic soprano voice at the beginning, the song quickly flows into power chords and a volley of fucks. And in addition to some poignant ballads about a manipulative boyfriend and the power of forgiveness, there is also ‘Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl’, in which she sings about a litany of embarrassing faux pas at parties.
The shifting energy on the record reflects Rodrigo’s taste. She likes angry women and Rage Against the Machine, songwriters who aren’t afraid to expose their intimate fears and artists who don’t shy away from political statements.
Her urge to move in a more grungy direction is also reflected in ‘Brutal’: a punky eye-roll (‘I’m not cool and I’m not smart/And I can’t even parallel park’) that she turns into the opening number dipped from her Sour Tour.
“It was super tough when we rehearsed it,” she says of her live band, all members of which are either female or non-binary. “I remember getting tears in my eyes and thinking, this is so powerful. This is what I wanted to hear and see for myself when I was scrolling through YouTube as a 14-year-old girl.”
Olivia Rodrigo, at Britain’s Glastonbury Festival last year.Image AFP
By the age of 14, Rodrigo was already a working actress, starring in a Disney TV show. She had long had musical ambitions, but the pop or R&B path followed by her fellow Disney stars – Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake – was not for her. Rodrigo’s commitment to rock is deep-rooted. Her musical foundation is built on the ’90s bands her parents loved. She works almost exclusively with Nigro, former frontman of the emo band As Tall as Lions. In ‘All-American Bitch’ you as a listener are presented with emotions that do not often find a voice in pop music. Rodrigo: “For me, that’s what music is all about, expressing feelings that are really hard to express, or that you feel are not socially accepted if you do express them. Especially as a girl.”
Rodrigo, who is of Filipino descent, grew up as an only child in Temecula, a town between Los Angeles and San Diego. She begged her mother and father—a teacher and therapist with no artistic inclinations—to take her to auditions. No stage was too small. “When I was 9, I was already performing at the opening of a grocery store in my town,” says Rodrigo during our zoom from her home office in Los Angeles.
She broke through in 2016 with the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark. Music, her first love, was incorporated into the three seasons – she learned to play the guitar for her role. And when she landed one of the lead roles in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series in 2019, her amazing singing performance caught the eye. The latter Disney series gave her the single ‘All I Want’, and a relationship that – as readers of the tabloids know – ended in heartbreak that she sings off in the hit ‘Drivers License’.
When Rodrigo isn’t making music, she’s inhaling it. She speaks highly of Snail Mail (“Valentine is one of my favorites”), Joni Mitchell (“I literally get emotional”), Kathleen Hanna (“I love Bikini Kill”), Gwen Stefani (“Return of Saturn was a of the albums that made me want to make music”), Depeche Mode (“I’m addicted”) and Billy Joel (“He’s everything”). She likes Beyoncé and Sleater-Kinney, Simon & Garfunkel and Sweet. “Oh my God, I listened to ‘The Ballroom Blitz’ ten times today,” she exclaims during the zoom. “I have no idea why.”
One of her superpowers is bridging generations. “She’s a revelation,” says Kathleen Hanna of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, in a telephone interview. “It’s not often at my age that I cry with emotion over songs written by someone so young. When I first heard ‘Drivers License’, I was sobbing in my car moments later.”
Although Rodrigo deals with different genres, Guts leans more towards rock, which has lost popularity to pop and hip-hop in recent years. When Rodrigo took the stage in a pleated plaid skirt and arm warmers on tour, she drew on a tradition of early 2000s riot grrrl and pop punk and acts like Soccer Mommy and Boygenius.
Hanna, who started releasing music in the late 1980s, has noticed. She was encouraged by Rodrigo speaking out on stage at Glastonbury about abortion rights, and was proud to have incorporated the riot grrrl iconography into her visuals: “That’s so great, to see this underground music style become graphic represented in the mainstream by someone who really loves music.”
Rodrigo beams as she talks about the artists she admires, female artists who “use rock music, but make their own version, and not just copy men’s rock music.”
“When I was 9, I performed at the opening of a grocery store in my town.” NYT Image
Her openness about her influences is striking when you consider that such openness has already involved risks in the past. Taylor Swift and Paramore may have been sources of inspiration for her album Sour, but after the great success of the album, she suddenly had to give those inspirations writing credits for two songs. When asked if she’s seen Swift’s Eras Tour, Rodrigo is now curt: “Not yet,” she says, quickly adding that she’s busy. “I am going to Europe this week.”
In late July, she went to a Tori Amos show with Annie Clark (who makes music as St. Vincent), a heroine turned mentor. “I’ve never met anyone so young and so effortlessly confident,” Clark says over the phone. Rodrigo “knows who she is and what she wants – and doesn’t seem afraid to speak that out in any way. And she’s also just a really sweet girl,” she adds. “I’ve never heard her say a bad word about anyone.”
Rodrigo’s ex-lovers may disagree. While she doesn’t name them, they are the subject of passionate musical takedowns on Guts. The first single, ‘Vampire’, is about a man who abused her trust and fame.
“I had such a desire to live and experience things and make mistakes and grow after Sour came out that I felt a kind of pressure to be the girl I thought everyone expected me to be,” she says. “And I think that pressure may have made me do things I shouldn’t have done — dated people I shouldn’t have avoided. I am very tame.” But a big part of the album, she says, is “about processing those feelings and overcoming that disillusionment and realizing the core of who I am and what I want to do and who I want to spend my time with .”
Normal childhood
Rodrigo has been looking for anchors in her life lately. She took poetry class at the University of Southern California and insisted that the other students treated her “quite normally.” She has an apartment in New York, where her boyfriend Hu studies, and where she had to deal with bed bugs immediately after moving.
She calls the attention around her person still manageable – “I’m not Kim Kardashian or anything” –, but Rodrigo’s life remains unconventional. Some of the album’s most powerful moments deal with her internal struggles over her success at a young age. ‘Making the Bed’ came about when Rodrigo grieved that she would never have a normal childhood. ‘Teenage Dream’, fluttering between major and minor chords, is about the intense pressure to make a follow-up to Sour. (‘They all say that it gets better / it gets better better, but what if I don’t’, she sings).
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“I was so scared and struggling with the image of a precocious child,” she says, “and I wondered if people would still like the music” when she got older. But as becomes clear on the single “Bad Idea Right?” (a funny remark about a misstep with an ex), Rodrigo has a lively sense of humor and self-relativism. She mocks herself for crying when she met Jack White and laughs about a questionable compliment from a fan. “That was already the third person this week to tell me I’m prettier in real life. I’m now like: do I really take that bad in photos?”
“She’s funny and always positive,” says her producer Dan Nigro. Rodrigo says she was happy that she wrote the second album during a happy period, but that also raised some doubts. “Is this happy feeling going to appeal to people? On a chart you would clearly see that when I am saddest, I write the songs that make the most money.” (It was something she brought up later in therapy.)
She says she was initially hesitant to write about someone exploiting her celebrity in ‘Vampire’: “I’ve always tried to write about the emotions rather than this strange environment I find myself in.” But the point of songwriting “is to distill all your emotions into their simplest, purest, most effective form.”
She noticed this herself during the Sour Tour, when girls shouted at her the lyrics of ‘Traitor’. “Deep down, it’s a really angry song,” she says. She describes watching the audience every night during the tour and seeing girls with “tears streaming down their faces, screaming.” They were “so angry”. “Those girls in the audience felt what I felt, I realized at that moment. That realization is so cool.”
© The New York Times
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