FEATURE: Spotlight: Olivia Rodrigo — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Grant Spanier

Olivia Rodrigo

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IT seems odd…

PHOTO CREDIT: Grant Spanier

spotlighting an artist who has became almost a household name! Olivia Rodrigo released her debut album, SOUR, in May. I would urge people to buy it, as it is such an accomplished and varied debut. The eighteen-year-old Californian has a huge fanbase already - though she is still in the earliest stage of her career and has many more albums in her. That is why I wanted to spotlight her. I will come to some album reviews for SOUR very soon. I am keen to bring in some interviews that Rodrigo conducted recently. Before then, this is how she describes herself on her official website:

“hi there! my name is olivia! I’m 18 years old and writing songs is my favorite thing to do in the world. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember and I fall more in love with it every day. The first song I ever got published was called “All I Want.” I wrote it for a show I act in and it was a super cool experience that opened up a lot of doors for me. On the last day before Covid lockdown, I met the team at Interscope/Geffen records and a producer named Dan Nigro for the first time.

It turned out to be a very momentous day for so many reasons. I spent most of quarantine writing songs in my living room and producing them in a garage, including ‘drivers license’. It was always a really special song to me but I never expected the response it got. It absolutely blew my mind and I still to this day refuse to believe it all actually happened. The day I am writing this is actually the day that I turn in my debut album! I’m sooo excited for you to hear it and I feel so grateful that I get to make music for my job”.

It is no surprise that there have been a lot of interviews conducted with Rodrigo. I want to pull one from The Guardian. In it (among other things), we learn about Rodrigo’s Disney career, in addition to the success of her single, drivers license:

“Rodrigo was homeschooled long before the pandemic. She has been a Disney star since 2016, first in Bizaardvark, about two oddball vloggers, then High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (HSM), a mockumentary where the “real-life” teenagers attending the school where the original movies were filmed stage their own musical of HSM. The stars learn on set; fake Disney high school is as close as they’ll get to the real thing. Rodrigo questioned whether her unconventional life would make her songwriting unrelatable. Lorde’s debut, Pure Heroine, inspired her to get serious about it at age 12. “She talks about driving to the suburbs and going to school and all her friend-group drama,” says Rodrigo. “I remember feeling so seen: she’s taking this normal experience that we all go through and turning it into something really beautiful and artful. I always wanted to write a record like that, but never felt like I had that normal life experience.”

Then normal life – that pesky shattered heart – intruded. “It’s interesting, heartbreaks when you’re 16 or 17,” says Rodrigo, “because you don’t yet have that perspective of knowing that life goes on and you’re gonna meet other people; that it wasn’t the only happy experience you’ll ever have.” She recounts a day on set where the cast was filming “a really poppy, happy dance number”. Between takes, she was squirrelled away with her acoustic guitar, writing “this sad-ass song” called Happier, wishing her ex well and admiring his new girlfriend. On the piano-led album version, the verses spill over beautifully; the chorus awkwardly, earnestly strains its crescendo, showing the effort of her beneficence.

Much analysis of Drivers License’s wild success concerned a rumoured relationship between Rodrigo and a male co-star (and the alleged third wheel), which you can read about in asinine detail elsewhere. There is no way the majority of listeners cared about this; the song’s appeal is its musical familiarity and the cinematic lyrics laying out Rodrigo’s eviscerated-but-still-beating heart. (Even her best friend, Bizaardvark co-star Madison Hu – who steered Rodrigo through the breakup in real time – said she only really understood her anguish when she heard it.) And for all the media obsession with gen-Z culture shifts, she is reassuringly traditional: the eternal lovelorn teenage songwriter. Rodrigo’s songwriting also subtly distills the passing of innocence. Her second single, the gleefully accusatory Deja Vu, ribbed her ex for repeating their rituals with his new girl (Billy Joel songs, Glee) but also acknowledged “everything is all reused”. Losing first love, she says, “feels sort of earth-shattering in a way that’s obviously heartbreaking but really beautiful, too”.

Sour feels “intrinsically young”, she says; the point was to honour those acute teenage feelings. “Something I’m really proud of is that this record talks about emotions that are hard to talk about or aren’t really socially acceptable especially for girls: anger, jealousy, spite, sadness, they’re frowned-upon as bitchy and moaning and complaining or whatever. But I think they’re such valid emotions.” The seven songs I hear are also rife with deep insecurity: Rodrigo brutally comparing herself with the new girlfriend, defeated by a boy’s impossible standards, scrolling social media and feeling sick with envy.

Obviously, beauty and success aren’t everything, but it shows how absurdly poisonous social media is that the pretty, accomplished Rodrigo feels that way. “I think there’s a lot of strength in saying: I don’t know anything and I feel so insecure and unwanted,” she says. “If I were a younger person looking up to my favourite songwriter, I’d be really moved by that so I hope I can provide that.” Rodrigo is Filipino American, which created another point of comparison. “It’s hard for anyone to grow up in this media where it feels like if you don’t have European features and blond hair and blue eyes, you’re not traditionally pretty. I felt that a lot – since I don’t look exactly like the girl next door in all these movies, I’m not attractive. That actually took me a while to shake off. It’s something I’m still shaking off now”.

I am going to jump around a bit in terms of interview timeline. The BBC caught up with her as she was preparing to play in England as part of the BRIT Awards. It is a great interview. Rodrigo talked about Instagram, and what it was like being a household name:

“Her current single, Good 4 U, channels Alanis Morissette's pop-punk vitriol; Deja Vu finds her taunting her ex-boyfriend over waves of crashing drums and distorted guitars; and Enough For You is the sort of grippingly-told guitar ballad that made Taylor Swift a household name.

Swift is an important touchstone. Her intricate, inter-linking narratives have clearly influenced Rodrigo's writing and, like Swift, the star has a knack for excavating the little observational details that bring a song to life.

On Deja Vu, she recalls singing Billy Joel with her ex (Uptown Girl was their song) and how she's driven crazy by the thought of him sharing it with someone new.

Jealousy, Jealousy, meanwhile, tackles the inferiority she feels after being confronted by the "paper-white teeth and perfect bodies" of celebrities on Instagram.

"I wrote that song at a time when I was borderline addicted to social media and I just felt crippled by the comparisons," she says.

"I don't feel that now, but it's something I wanted to talk about. I am someone who has somewhat of a large following, so I think it's cool that I can be like, 'Yo, I still hate myself. I still compare myself to other girls.'

"Whenever I see people on Instagram do that, it always feel empowering to me - so I hope that I could be that for somebody else."

Until recently, Rodrigo had the unique experience of becoming a household name without having to leave the house - an experience she calls "a blessing in disguise".

"It helped me keep my sanity when there was so much drama going on. Being in isolation with people I loved and cared about kept me out of the hullabaloo."

She's speaking a few days before her first-ever live performance for an audience, which took place at last week's Brit Awards. For the privilege of playing in the UK, she's been locked in a hotel room for a week, somewhere outside London.

"I'm not sure where, but it's beautiful," she beams, sitting in front of a neatly-pressed bed and floral wallpaper, as a chorus of birds threatens to drown her out.

"They're so loud! Even at 4am, I was awake, because jetlag, and the birds were chirping away. I was like, 'Wow, I guess this is England!'.

I shall come to SOUR and the reviews it has accrued. I think it is among the best-received albums of this year. It is a fantastic album that everyone should check out! After such a busy year already, I hope that Rodrigo has chance to unwind at some point. I guess she will already be thinking about a follow-up to SOUR.

PHOTO CREDIT: Hanina Pinnick for NME

One especially deep interview came from NME. We learn so much about Rodrigo’s past and present. There are some segments that struck me that I feel is worthy of spotlighting:

“Work on the record first began last year, with initial plans to release a debut EP in 2021 – though this understandably changed after the response to ‘Drivers License’. “I was like, ‘I wish that I can make a project that fully encompasses who I am as an artist’,” she says. “And I feel like the EP wasn’t my strongest work.” Keen to fully showcase who she was as a songwriter, she called her label, Geffen, and asked to extend the project to a full album. They, of course, said yes.

On ‘Sour’, Rodrigo collaborated with producer Dan Nigro (who’s worked with the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and Sky Ferreira), largely recording in his home studio. “I was really inspired by ’90s alternative rock records with ‘Sour’, especially alternative rock girls,” she says, and references Alanis Morissette as a particular inspiration. “I think the albums from that time were so brutally honest and angsty, and I wanted to make an angsty record about me growing up and going through heartbreak.”

There’s one constant in Rodrigo’s music: her astonishingly open songwriting. She’s a thoroughly Gen-Z creator, wearing her emotions plainly and pouring her own experiences into her songs. That’s in keeping with her peers such as Madison Beer and Girl In Red, the latter of whom recently told NME: “Gen-Z crave and expect more honesty, intimacy and almost a rawness.”

Rodrigo adds: “I’ve always been such an oversharer. I’ll tell my Uber driver all of my deepest traumas and insecurities, and so I just think songwriting for me is an extension of that aspect of my personality. I’ve never really been so terrified of people learning about the intimate parts of myself; I think that’s what makes songwriting so special.”

odrigo’s parents are both “music heads” and encouraged their daughter’s artistic endeavours. Rodrigo started to audition for television and film acting roles at seven years old, something she recognises as a brutal process: “I think auditions are really rough for anyone. I know people who’ve gone into their first audition and booked it, but that definitely was not my experience”. There were times that she almost sacked the whole thing off. At one point she made a pact with her mum: if she didn’t get a job by Christmas, they’d call it quits. She booked her first gig in November of that year.

With this level of ownership as a writer, though, comes negatives. As ‘Drivers License’ picked up pace, there was huge intrigue as to who she’d written the song about, with sites speculating about a “love triangle drama” involving her High School Musical co-star Joshua Bassett. “To be completely honest, it was really hard,” she says of the endless online speculation. “And, yeah, sometimes it wasn’t always the kindest or the most respectful. But I understand why people are curious and I’ve been curious about who my favourite songwriters wrote their songs about, so I completely understand.”

This level of commentary is almost exclusively reserved for female artists, with lyrics by women undergoing an extra level of scrutiny from the media and listeners – just look at Taylor Swift’s songs being dissected for details about her love life. “It would be a bald-faced lie if I say that I didn’t face any misogyny in the music industry – especially being a young girl,” Rodrigo tells NME. “It’s a weird place to be. But I feel like I’m surrounded by people who really respect me and treat me with kindness. I’m really lucky in that regard and I hope that my generation of artists can really forge a path for younger artists”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Hanina Pinnick for NME

I shall get to some reviews in a bit. The final interview that I have been reading is from Vogue. They looked at the subject matter explored through SOUR, alongside the hugely positive response it has gained:

“Not all the songs are about heartbreak: the album’s closer, “hope ur ok,” pays tribute to lost connections with old friends—a boy with an abusive father, and a gay friend with homophobic parents—whose triumph in the face of adversity continues to inspire Rodrigo. Still, the terrain of romantic torment feels most natural, recalling some of the greatest alt-rock records of the ’90s, from Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me to Fiona Apple’s Tidal. “I wish I could be a teenager in the ’90s, because that’s my favorite music ever,” says Rodrigo, namechecking both Apple and Morrissette as influences for Sour. “I just feel like it’s so raw. I remember the first time I heard Jagged Little Pill and I turned to my mom and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, wow, she really just said that.’ It’s so brutally honest to the point it’s almost shocking—they were things that I’d genuinely never heard before in a song. And that was super inspiring to me. That’s what really got me going and what made me excited to write my own story.

For all its angst-riddled teenage catastrophism, though, the positive response to the album has been very much universal, with many noting its uncanny ability to transport you right back to the thick of the emotional turbulence of that life stage. “I work really hard to be specific in my songwriting, as I feel like specific songs are the most meaningful,” Rodrigo says. “I'm just so obsessed with really story-driven songs. I grew up listening to a lot of country music, and country music is really specific and vivid, and I think I always was attracted to that as a young girl, which translated over into my songwriting.” It’s a formula that clearly works, and has had its own, reciprocal benefits for Rodrigo too. “I always say you put out songs in hopes of making people feel more understood, but it also works in the reverse,” she continues. “All these people have said to me, I feel the exact same way, or this thing happened to me too. It makes me feel a lot less alone.”

For Rodrigo, the rollercoaster of the past six months has been so exciting that she has no intention of hitting the brakes any time soon, even as she completes the final months of her senior year of high school while on the road. “I’m just taking this day by day,” she says. “It’s all such a whirlwind at the moment, but it all comes down to the fact I just really love writing songs. I’m always writing, because it’s the way I process my emotions. It never feels like work to me in that regard.” Rodrigo might be in this for the long haul, but she wants all of us to come along for the ride”.

I could source a whole raft of reviews, as everyone has approached the album from a different angle. The response has been incredibly warm. SOUR is in my top-twenty albums of this year for sure. This is what Entertainment Weekly noted in their review:

“Born in 2003, Rodrigo began her come-up through the Disney ranks in the mid-2010s, appearing in and singing the theme song for the vlogcom Bizaardvark until 2019. That year, she was also cast in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which turns the unstoppable 2000s franchise into its own high school musical. As Nini Salazar-Roberts, who goes on to play Vanessa Hudgens' Gabriella Montez in the show's show, Rodrigo co-wrote and performed "All I Want" in the series, a deeply felt, if slightly gloppy, showcase for her lithe voice and detailed lyric writing.

Then came "Drivers License," which Rodrigo teased snippets of on Instagram last summer and released in January. While its popularity was given a boost by the gossip-page chatter around it — was it about HSMTMTS co-star Joshua Bassett? Who was "that blonde girl who always made [Rodrigo] doubt"? — its power-ballad grandeur and ingenious production, starting from the way its beat blossomed from a car's open-door chime, propelled its appeal across demographic lines. "Drivers License" sat atop the American charts during the country's shortest, coldest days, and its raging against cosmic unfairness felt righteous.

Sour could have been "Drivers License: The Maxi-Single," a cynical grab for curious streamers full of also-ran tracks from HSMTMTS' cutting-room floor. Instead, the album, which Rodrigo worked on with producer and co-writer Dan Nigro, announces the California native as a major player in the ever-shifting spheres of teen pop and adult pop. She's a singer who zeroes in on her lyrics' emotional core and a writer who's pushing past the noise of the outside world and listening intently to her truth — even if those realities seem ugly, or, as she sings on the serpentine "Jealousy, Jealousy," make her wonder, "I think too much."

Like any "bad times" playlist worth its track listing, Sour embraces sonic variety; pop-punk, synthpop, dreampop, and good old power ballads all come into the mix, while Rodrigo's limber soprano is its guiding light. "Good 4 U" is punchy and snide, with Rodrigo gasping out its syllable-laden, salt-heavy verses over tense drums that explode into a manic, sarcastic chorus. "Déjà Vu" is a gauzy fantasia with a time-blackened heart, all pillowy synths propping up Rodrigo's venom-filled diatribe toward an ex who's moved on. There are ballads, too — "Traitor," which precedes "Drivers License," feels like a thematic prelude to that hit, its lyrics full of the post-grief anger and bargaining that precede aimless-driving depression. But any heaviness is leavened by Rodrigo's self-awareness and grace: "Hope Ur Ok," which closes the album, is a shimmering blessing to down-on-their-luck people Rodrigo has known, complete with a chorus that sounds like a benediction.

Rodrigo was three years old when Taylor Swift's self-titled album came out, and 10 when Lorde released Pure Heroine; those two artists' DNA is definitely part of Sour's genetic makeup, from the interpolation of Swift's reputation track "New Year's Day" on the regret-wracked "1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back" to the spectral harmonies on the stripped-down "Favorite Crime" that recall the choirs accompanying Lorde on "Royals." But Sour doesn't try to be "the next" anyone; instead, Rodrigo distills her life and her listening habits into powerful, hooky pop that hints at an even brighter future. A-“.

To close, I found a great review from CLASH. There must have been a huge sense of pressure and expectation on her shoulders – given the fact there was a lot of hype and she was a recognisable a Disney star:

“If the past 12 months have been the weirdest in memory, then spare a thought for pop riser Olivia Rodrigo. This time last year she was a Disney star – fast forward and she’s a global icon three singles in, a teen voice already being touted as one of Gen Z’s finest.

Debut album ‘Sour’ arrives weighed down with hype and expectation, an 11 track song cycle that aims to make its mark. The banner headline of this review, then? ‘Sour’ exceeds the hype and smashes those expectations to pieces – lyrically strong, her bold, revealing, and punchy songwriting produces 11 potential smash hit singles, with each one feeling like a readymade anthem.

‘Brutal’ is a stabbing, succinct opener, recalling everyone from Garbage to Paramore via Elastica with its three chord minimalism. ‘Traitor’ opens out her pop palette a little, before the majestic, instant-classic ‘Drivers Licence’ arrives to make you fall in love with her calm, assured heartbreaker all over again.

‘Déjà vu’ sits close to the centre of the album, and Rodrigo’s heart – the buzzing digi-pop palette feels off kilter, breaking the rules because she’s too damn young to know them. ‘Good 4 U’ remains the exceptional, surging, stadium-throbbing monster it became on its release, but placed in this context her lyrical introspection becomes ever-more apparent.

‘Enough For You’ is a gorgeous hymn, perhaps the closest Olivia comes to echoing heroine – and now friend – Taylor Swift, with its ‘folklore’ esque acoustic chords. Indeed, Taylor is actually named on the credits, with ‘1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back’ acting as a bridge between two incredibly potent female pop voices.

Indeed, what’s revelatory on ‘Sour’ is the sheer breadth Olivia Rodrigo can occupy. Only three singles deep into her career, she’s able to move from the glorious torch song atmospherics of ‘Happier’ – a piano-pounding song of regret – to the blunt, half-spoken slacker pop of ‘Jealousy, Jealousy’.

Brought to a close with the demo-like intimacy of ‘Hope UR OK’, this is a bravura pop experience. Marked by excellence from front to back, ‘Sour’ is the sound of a bold talent operating on their own terms – potent in its execution, revealing in its lyricism, it’s a record that finds Olivia Rodrigo effortlessly claiming her status as pop’s newest icon, and one of its bravest voices”.

There is no doubt that Olivia Rodrigo will be a huge star of the future! At the moment, she is getting a lot of press. Many are labelling her as an icon of the future. Certainly, she is an exciting young talent who is created such interesting and memorable music. SOUR is the sound of an artist who has already found her feet and is in the groove. I feel, though, that Rodrigo will get even better. Having made such an impact on her debut album, there is no telling…