FEATURE:
Guts and Glory
PHOTO CREDIT: Larissa Hofmann
Olivia Rodrigo: A Modern Pop Icon
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I am writing this in reaction…
PHOTO CREDIT: Davis Bates
to one of the best songs of the year. Having dropped vampire yesterday (30th June), there is a lot of excited anticipation ahead of Olivia Rodrigo’s second studio album, GUTS. Due on 8th September, it is the second studio album from the twenty-year-old California-born artist. I wanted to use this opportunity to, in part explore her debut album, new singles and interviews around both. I also wanted to highlight how, in Rodrigo, we have a modern-day Pop icon. Where artists like Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and other megastars get a lot of attention and focus, there is less aimed the way of Olivia Rodrigo. When she released her debut album, SOUR, in 2021, there was so much talk and buzz. Topping the charts here and in the U.S., and with huge singles like drivers license, it was a remarkable and hugely successful introduction! Olivia Rodrigo co-wrote the songs. The then-teenager was already being talked up as a potential Pop icon and legend. I think that this will come to fruition. On the basis of one song from her GUTS album, it seems as if she may even top the mighty and mesmeric SOUR. I think that GUTS (putting SOUR and GUTS next to each other sounds quite gross, mind!) might even better her debut. It seems like we have someone who is no one-trick pony or fluke. If you loved SOUR, I think you will discover new depths and layers to this remarkable artist! I am going to start off with a 2021 interview from the Los Angeles Times. If you didn’t know, Rodrigo starred in the Disney television shows, Bizaardvark and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. She then signed with Geffen and Interscope Records in 2020.
It would limiting to just label her as a Pop artist. Her music has raw edges and Rock brilliance. There are other genres and sounds working together. I wonder whether, when GUTS comes out, she will be elevated to the same heights as modern-day icons like Taylor Swift. I think that Olivia Rodrigo is deserving of that! The Los Angeles Times interview gives us a bit of background about a wonderful and hugely inspiring artist:
“Rodrigo, whose mom is white and dad is Filipino American, grew up in Temecula convinced she’d be an Olympic gymnast. “I was terrible at it — terrible!” she says now. “But I was like, ‘Mom and Dad, this is what we’re doing.’” An only child, she was always into music; her mom, an elementary school teacher, took her record shopping at Goodwill and Amoeba and taught her about grunge and riot grrrl: L7, Hole, Babes in Toyland. (“Brutal,” “Sour’s” cheerfully blistering opener, has some serious Bikini Kill energy.) Her first concert was a Weezer gig at the Del Mar Fairgrounds her parents dragged her to; later she begged them to take her to see Carrie Underwood.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times
“I was a big country girl when I was younger,” she says. One of her key Goodwill finds? A Tanya Tucker greatest-hits LP featuring “Delta Dawn,” which Tucker recorded when she was 13. “The song isn’t about her — she’s literally telling someone else’s story,” Rodrigo says of the early-’70s character study. “As a young kid, I was like, That’s so cool.”
Rodrigo started singing and writing songs before she hit double digits, and soon she was giving up gymnastics to belt adult-size ballads at little-kid talent shows. At 13 she was cast on the Disney Channel’s “Bizaardvark,” about a group of teenage internet content creators; among her co-stars was Jake Paul, the shock-merchant YouTuber turned pro boxing villain.
“I haven’t seen him since he left the show,” Rodrigo says of her old castmate. “But the last thing he said to me was, ‘You’re gonna sell out stadiums one day, kid.’”
Wait — Jake Paul, of all people, was the first to identify Rodrigo’s pop-star potential?
“He called it,” she says, laughing. “God, my publicist would not appreciate me saying this. He was very nice to me. I don’t really follow all the stuff he does online anymore.”
In 2019, Rodrigo booked the role of Nini on “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” a Disney+ extension of the durable Disney Channel franchise. Last year she wrote a song for the show, the plaintive “All I Want,” which went viral on TikTok and led to a deal with Geffen Records.
“I’ve been doing this for a minute, and usually what you hear from young writers are parts of songs,” says Sam Riback, co-head of A&R at Interscope Geffen A&M. “But with Olivia it’s the whole composition that’s so well put together.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times
“I’m a big believer in the discipline of songwriting,” says Rodrigo, who swears by Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.” “She talks about how ideas are more likely to come to you when you show up for them,” Rodrigo says, adding that she wrote a song every day for the first four months of COVID-19 quarantine. (She says the voice memos app on her phone is so full that it doesn’t work anymore.)
She and Nigro were equally diligent in the studio, cutting and re-cutting her vocals on every song until they were just right. One of Rodrigo’s strengths as a singer is her background as an actor; she knows how to bring a lyric fully to life, as in “Deja Vu,” where she punctuates a verse about an ex who recycles old jokes with a bitter little chuckle that says more than words could.
“Sometimes we’d do a take and it would be fine,” she says. “Then we’d do it again but Dan would film me while I was singing. I’d perform for the camera, and that take would be so much better.”
When “Sour” came out, the song “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” carried a co-writing credit for Swift and her producer, Jack Antonoff, because Rodrigo interpolated the piano chords from Swift’s song “New Year’s Day.” Then, months later, after fans on YouTube made videos about the similarities between “Good 4 U” and Paramore’s 2007 hit “Misery Business,” Rodrigo retroactively cut in that band’s Hayley Williams and Joshua Farro as co-writers on “Good 4 U” (with a combined 50% share of the song’s royalties, according to Billboard).
Asked if the experience bummed her out, Rodrigo sighs, then spends a few seconds deciding what she wants to say. “I think it’s disappointing in general to see people discredit young women’s abilities and talents,” she says. “All music is inspired by other music, and I think it would be so cool if a girl 15 years from now wants to write a song inspired by something I made. That’s the whole point of creativity.”
As her public profile has grown, Rodrigo says she’s stayed tight with a circle of old pals that includes “Bizaardvark’s” Madison Hu. (She’s reportedly dating Adam Faze, a podcaster and film producer.) Is she ever suspicious of the motives of would-be new friends? “You can always tell — there’s always a gut feeling,” she says. “But sometimes I can tell and I’m just like, I don’t care — I still want to hang out with them.”
Looking ahead to 2022, Rodrigo is excited to finally mount her first tour behind “Sour,” which is scheduled to launch in April and play theaters, including the Greek in L.A. and New York’s Radio City Music Hall, rather than going straight into the arenas she likely could fill. “I don’t think I should skip any steps,” says Rodrigo, who will bring Abrams and Humberstone along as opening acts. At a recent rehearsal for a TV performance, she and her band — “It’s all girls,” she notes happily — ran through “Brutal,” which nearly brought a tear to her eye. “Six girls on electric guitars and things, rocking out on this super-crunchy grunge song — I feel like I didn’t get to see enough of that when I was a kid,” she says.
She’s started writing too, including one song the other day about the “way that young women are so competitive with each other and tear each other down in a way that’s so counterintuitive.” Many of the songs on “Sour” deal with first-time experiences and sensations, but she’s not worried about aging out of that perspective. “There’s always something on my mind I can talk about. I’ve been listening to a lot of rap lately, and I really admire rappers for that.” J. Cole’s latest, “The Off-Season,” is a current fave. “He can talk about anything and everything and we eat it up because he says it in such an interesting storytelling way”.
I will come to a couple of the many positive reviews for 2021’s SOUR. That album was quite vulnerable and sad. It did resonate and connect with people. It managed to be uplifting, powerful and hugely nuanced in spite of the fact Rodrigo put so much of herself in it. When she spoke with ELLE in 2022, she was discussing her film, Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U. She also hoped that her second studio album was going to be less sad. Was this, as ELLE posed the question, the end of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sad Girl era? On the basis of vampire, it seems like GUTS is going to be still personal - and yet, there is that social awareness, anger and outrage. Someone who is calling out those who deserve it. Maybe slightly angrier, the music and lyrics on vampire are compelling and rich. It creates this intrigue ahead of the release of GUTS:
“Even though Sour came from a vulnerable place (or perhaps because of it) people did enjoy it. A lot. The album debuted at number one when it dropped last May and earned Rodrigo seven Grammy nominations, and that was all after its lead single, the breakup anthem “Drivers License,” went viral. In a time when Sad Girl music is very much part of the zeitgeist, Rodrigo’s heart-wrenching compositions—whether in ballad or punk-rock form—have resonated. When I mention I’m a fan of the so-called genre, she nods in agreement, “Me too.” Phoebe Bridgers is her personal favorite. “I love her so much and I hung out with her a little at the Women in Music Billboard event. … And she’s just the coolest person in the world and her music’s so great.”
Sour isn’t only about heartbreak, though. The track “Jealousy, Jealousy” captures those feelings of anxiety triggered by social media, and “Hope Ur Ok” is an uplifting message to queer kids. “Brutal” is an aptly pop-punk response to the frustrations about the public frenzy surrounding her life and her music, the loneliness she experienced, insecurities about her image and her craft, and just being a teenager. “That period of my life was very strange, and I remember feeling lonely and I remember wanting a boyfriend really bad,” she says in the film of her headspace at the time. “That was during a time when I looked through what people said about me online or in print.”
The line “‘Cause who am I, if not exploited?” came out of those emotions. In the film, Rodrigo recalls how excited and proud she was when she wrote it. (With good reason: It’s an impressive callout to the media and public obsession around her personal life, and a pleasantly surprising rhyme for “disappointed.”)
PHOTO CREDIT: Disney
“My gosh, it’s so funny,” Rodrigo says in our interview. “I look back at it and I was like, ‘Wow, I was so angsty.’” She later adds, “I guess I was just coming to terms with being like a really young person in the industry and feeling weird about it. But I don’t think I feel that way anymore, which is nice.”
It’s fascinating to watch the behind-the-scenes footage of “Brutal” coming together: Weeks before Rodrigo’s deadline to turn the album in, she decides she wants to add another more upbeat song in the mix. Nigro starts playing around with a rock chord progression that piques Rodrigo’s interest. She starts forming a melody over the chords, in gibberish at first. “It kind of just really came naturally and I think it was meant to be,” she recalls.
When she performs the song in the film, it’s with her all-women band and in the bones of an abandoned airplane in a Mojave Desert airport. They go hard. There’s so much attitude, it’s basically oozing from the screen. It helps that Rodrigo is accompanied by guitarist Towa Bird and bassist Bleu de Tiger, two musicians who gained popularity on TikTok. Rodrigo admits she discovered them on the app. “Look at TikTok bringing people together,” she quips. It’s a fitting, very Gen Z move. As for what’s on Rodrigo’s For You Page right now? “I’m on like the spiritual TikTok where it’s like, girls who are reading your tarot cards for you. And they’re like, ‘Just take it if it resonates.’ And they’re never really right, but I still like to listen through all of them and I love that,” she says. “It’s that and it’s also videos that have no likes and it’s just someone making a dance in their bedroom in like, Tennessee.”
There are many revelations in Driving Home 2 U, but mainly, it serves as a reminder of Rodrigo’s sheer talent. You see it in the recordings of her writing songs and singing them in private, to performing them with creative new arrangements for the film. Her voice holds power on both the belts and the soft notes. Her lyrics evoke so much with few words. She believes two core tenets of songwriting should be “specificity and authenticity.” “Good 4 U” is backed by a string orchestra in the desert; “Favorite Crime” echoes in the walls of a canyon; she does “Traitor” on a loop pedal at a gas station as she plays all the instruments.
“I really wanted to make this film for my fans, especially my fans who maybe couldn’t see me on tour,” Rodrigo says. “And so I thought it’d be really cool if they got to see new arrangements of the songs, kind of as if it’s a whole new concert. So I had a lot of fun playing with different sonics and different ways that you could kind of position these songs that I’ve kind of gotten comfortable with over this past year. … It was kind of like stretching a new creative muscle”.
I am going to move things up to date. Before that, CLASH were among them to have their say regarding one of the best debut albums in many a year. Olivia Rodrigo announced herself as one of the most talented and promising artists of her generation. I remember hearing SOUR when it came out, and I was instantly compelled and hooked. I am excited to see what we will get from GUTS in September:
“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.
8/10”.
I am going to finish up with a very glowing review of Olivia Rodrigo’s new single, vampire. Before then, here is another review for the sensational SOUR. Entertainment Weekly were captivated by such a confident and assured debut by the teenage Olivia Rodrigo. It is clear that, even in 2021, people could tell that this was an artist who was going to go a very long way:
“Olivia Rodrigo's debut album opens with swooping strings, indicating the sort of melodrama that made "Drivers License," her debut single, a TikTok staple and automatic chart-topper. Would Sour, the Disney star's entrée into pop music, lean into what worked so well over the winter? The answer comes about 14 seconds later, when the strings break and Rodrigo declares, "I want it to be, like, messy." Whew: Thrashy guitars careen into the mix, announcing the teen-angst tirade "Brutal" — and Rodrigo's desire to defy any pop expectations that have been placed upon her by fans, friends, executives, or exes.
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-”.
We do know some details about GUTS. Produced by Dan Nigro, it will be released through Geffen. I predict that it will be one of the finest albums of this year. If vampire is anything to go by, Olivia Rodrigo is not going to drop a step! We have this truly remarkable artist who will be an all-time great in years to come. This is what The Guardian’s Laura Snapes made of vampire in her five-star review:
“It starts all heavy, Beatles-y piano chords. The hum of the room is intact, creating an image of a young woman alone at the keys with her thoughts. But they quickly overtake Rodrigo as she reflects on a relationship with a leeching ex who subjected her to “six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise”. She remembers infraction after infraction, and her vocal performance races from rueful rumination to bitter crescendo, the piano galloping alongside her, and the song feels like it’s approaching liftoff. The pre-chorus has a dreamy lightheadedness to it that’s quickly become a Rodrigo trademark – as has her way with a punch to the gut. The music dips, and she wails the blow, seething with rage: “Bloodsucker! Fame fucker! Bleeding me dry like a goddamn vampire!”
It only thunders harder from there, Rodrigo indicating that this guy was significantly older (“girls your age know better”) and hating herself for ignoring other women’s warnings about him and agreeing with his characterisation of them as “crazy”. It’s as laden with words as a Gilmore Girls script, delivered with a spit and a stomp at truly exhilarating, breakneck pace that ends in a furious, battered exorcism: imagine if Tidal-era Fiona Apple was performing a Dear John on a piano being towed by a runaway truck and you’re somewhere close.
PHOTO CREDIT: Larissa Hofmann
It’s depressing that much of the media coverage of Rodrigo’s comeback will inevitably dwell on who it’s about. To do so undersells the strength of her songwriting. Vampire is an elegantly executed conceit: “I should have known it was strange you only come out at night … you sunk your teeth into me,” she sings. Skewering a guy only there for “the parties and the diamonds”, it flips the sexist stereotype of the female gold digger and acknowledges Rodrigo’s forever-changed status without coming off as a classic second-album whinge about celebrity. And the piano-led arrangement dodges current chart trends (for one thing, it rescues the bridge from pop’s dumper), establishing that this is Rodrigo’s lane to keep refining.More significant than its subject are the women that Vampire puts Rodrigo in conversation with. Apple is there musically, but also spiritually: that line about the man calling the women who are worried about Rodrigo crazy connects directly to her 2020 song Newspaper (“I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me / To make sure that we’ll never be friends”). The exploitative age difference ties it both to Taylor Swift’s 2010 song Dear John (and last year’s Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, thought to be about the same relationship) and Billie Eilish’s 2021 single Your Power, her own second-album comeback. Rodrigo castigates her ex, but also herself for not having known better (“I used to think I was smart / But you made me look so naive”), a dichotomy that Eilish articulated powerfully to Vogue: “It’s so embarrassing and humiliating and demoralising to be in that position of thinking you know so much and then you realise, I’m being abused right now.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Larissa Hofmann
Vampire will also resonate deeply with a generation of young fans who are alert to abuses of power. Even six years post-#MeToo, those dynamics remain depressingly prevalent in life and in the entertainment industry. Surely that’s the reason behind the current vogue for delicious revenge songs (linking Rodrigo’s vengeful bloodletting to SZA, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey, too): when real justice is hard to come by, the fantasy of public humiliation in a stratospherically popular hit may be the next best available option. The fantastic Vampire bears Rodrigo’s wounds in a reminder of what’s at stake for young women”.
If you have not heard Olivia Rodrigo’s music, or you have only listened to vampire or drivers license, then I would encourage you to dive deeper. It is such a rewarding experience! She is a stunning artist who everyone needs to hear. Ahead of the release of GUTS, there is this opportunity to immerse yourself in the music of a modern great. Whilst these are the early days, there is every sign that she is going to…
GO down in music history.