Olivia Rodrigo Embraces Success with New Album, Tour, and Festival

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Olivia Rodrigo: The Queen of Sad Finds Her Happy Place

She has spent years turning heartbreak into hits — and wrestling with the fame that followed. But with a massive new album, sold-out tour and her very own feminist music festival, the 23-year-old pop sensation is finally enjoying the view from the top.

By Ethan Millman

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Ethan Millman

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It‘s only been 40 hours since Olivia Rodrigo played the biggest show of her life — headlining a music festival she created and organized from the ground up — and the world’s buzziest pop star is already back on the grind.

“It felt like it was my wedding a little bit,” Rodrigo says of her performance in front of 50,000 at her all-female charity festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which took place over a scorching weekend in Irvine’s Great Park.

Now, on an equally hot Monday afternoon at a rehearsal space in the Valley, the pop star — still a bit tired and sunbaked from the event — nurses a tall Philz Coffee, black Ray-Ban Wayfarers shading her eyes.

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“Everyone that I ever met in my life was there. My whole family on both sides,” says Rodrigo, an only child born in Temecula, California, to a schoolteacher mother and family therapist father. “I planned it for a year and a half. I was joking about it to Alanis [Morissette], and she looks at me and she says: ‘This is more important than your wedding.’ I was like, ‘Oh, wow,’ and I just suddenly got a wave of nervousness. But, yeah, it was special.”

Rodrigo chalks some of those nerves up to sharing the stage with many of the rock idols who showed up for her, including Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan and Morissette. But for the pop sensation, Daisy Chain was more than a concert and more than a $20 million fundraiser for women-centered nonprofits. The festival marked the culmination of the artist Rodrigo has been transforming into for more than six years. Having delivered her third and most assured album to date, she is now establishing herself as the singular voice of Gen Z — raw, honest and relatable — with all the cultural clout, media scrutiny and potential land mines that come with the mantle.

Many 23-year-olds are heading into their first jobs, maybe moving away from home and starting the next chapter of their lives. Rodrigo has already been working since she was 13 — first as a Disney child star before exploding into a viral pop sensation with 2021’s “Drivers License” — and she tours and records so often that she says, “The blessing and the curse of my job is that I don’t really live anywhere — I’m never in a place longer than two or three months.”

While she spends a large chunk of time in New York, she still considers L.A. home. And so yesterday, she hosted a pool party with some friends to celebrate the festival win — but that brief honeymoon is over. Now it’s back to “Go, go, go, like forever,” as she puts it, turning her attention to the sold-out, 86-date, eight-month-long arena tour that kicks off three weeks from our meeting.

Her latest album — You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love — has been an overwhelming commercial hit, one of the biggest of the year. Lead single “Drop Dead” opened at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April and has since surpassed half a billion Spotify streams, while the album yielded two more top five singles with “The Cure” and “Stupid Song.” It had the biggest opening sales for a female artist this year (485,000), and it’s been stuck in the top five since its release June 12.

Artistically, it’s also Rodrigo’s most complete work to date. She came into 2023’s Guts just removed from her teens, facing the pressure of besting her debut album, Sour, which is the most streamed album from a female artist in Spotify history . Guts wasn’t quite the same commercial smash as Sour — it went a measly three times platinum to that album’s six — but it affirmed Rodrigo as a career artist who grew only more popular as she established herself as a major live act selling out arenas.

You Seem Pretty Sad also reflects Rodrigo’s ambitions beyond beating album and ticket sales, challenging herself to dig deeper on what she has to say.

“Olivia’s desire to be recognized as a songwriter is very refreshing; it’s unmodern in a way,” says The Cure’s Robert Smith, the first artist to ever feature on one of Rodrigo’s albums, lending his vocals on the You Seem Pretty Sad standout, “What’s Wrong With Me.” Rodrigo calls that song the best on the album.

“It’s not effortless — she spends an awful lot of time getting things right with her music,” Smith says. “But she also gets it right so quickly. It’s bizarre at times. She was in London with me a while back. She played me something she wrote that morning, things that could take 14 years for many writers to get out, and she does it in a morning.”

Beyond catchy hooks and choruses (which certainly help), Rodrigo has struck such a chord on the strength of an old-school confessional songwriting style that offers her fans a unique authenticity and powerful accessibility, putting out vulnerable songs that capture the intense feelings that come with young love and adolescence. Her songs feel urgent and unfiltered; Rodrigo sings about the negative sides of herself, too, whether that’s feelings of jealousy or obsession.

It’s a contrast to the more formulaic, homogeneous tracks the mainstream pop machine can often yield, and certainly to soulless AI slop that’s made headlines in recent years as thousands of those tracks have flooded streaming services.

“I would never use AI in any of my music,” she says. “Absolutely no. Hard line on that. The closest I’d ever got is that once, me and [producer] Dan [Nigro] were like, ‘God, I wonder what ideas ChatGPT would have for an Olivia Rodrigo title,’ and they’re all fucking awful.”

You Seem Pretty Sad lays bare the life and death of Rodrigo’s first adult relationship — in this case, purportedly with English actor Louis Partridge, who inspired Rodrigo’s first love song, “So American,” off the deluxe version of Guts. It starts with the exhilarating butterflies-in-your-stomach phase of finding a new crush (“Drop Dead”), works its way to the honeymoon phase (“Honeybee”), the first signs of trouble (“Purple”), the sobering breakup conversation (“Less”) and even the horrible return to the L.A. dating scene (“Expectations”). “Don’t think my future husband’s at this bar in Silver Lake,” Rodrigo bemoans with her signature cheeky, talky delivery.

Rodrigo didn’t know going in that this is how the album would take shape, and originally she was writing more traditional love songs. The concept changed, though, “when I went through a breakup,” she says with a chuckle.

She decided to make the “pretty sad” latter half of the album, with about two or three more months to finish the record. Along with writing new tracks, she and longtime producer Nigro rewrote and edited other songs to properly fit the new concept, injecting more sadness into the traditional love songs and capturing the “gray area” found in the highs and lows of a relationship.

“What’s Wrong With Me,” for example, was originally about “being in love with this person so much that I’m crazy. Then, post-breakup, you change perspective,” Rodrigo says. “It becomes, ‘Oh, I’m depressed and it’s because this relationship isn’t serving me anymore.’ That was a fun challenge. When you’re young, you just write and write and write. Editing has been something I’ve had to learn to do as I’ve become more of a quote-unquote professional songwriter.”

For an artist whose latest album is driven by a thesis statement about injecting melancholy into love songs, Rodrigo is more hopeful about love than expected. Throughout our interview, between topics, she sneaks in a few questions about my own upcoming wedding: Perhaps most relevantly, what will be our first-dance song?

She has said her own dream wedding song is Modern English’s new wave classic “I Melt With You.” Now she also floats Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “There’s a Break in the Rain [Have Love Will Travel]” so she can complement the more upbeat track with a ballad as well.

I mention my surprise that someone who’s so open about the struggles in their own love life would have so much curiosity about someone else’s wedding.

“Oh yeah, I’m such a lover girl,” she tells me. “I’m very optimistic about love. I can’t wait to get married — one day.”

***

Rodrigo is never more animated than when talking about the music she loves from other artists. She’s still in disbelief about playing with Nicks, McLachlan and Morissette, calling Nicks her hero, heaping praise on McLachlan as the impetus for Daisy Chain’s founding and saying her music would never have been the same if not for Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill.

Morissette, who showed up as a surprise guest at the festival after Karen O had to pull out because of a personal issue, calls Rodrigo “a very unique artist in that her value system shows up in all the choices she makes.”

“Themes of truth-speaking, feminism and humanism, empowered sensitivity and activism permeate her environments in a way that feels mission-full and loving,” Morissette says. “There is a softening in the community around women truly being there for each other. Us women have had good reason to be wary of female safety in a patriarchal world. I can feel it in a handful of us artists that it might actually be safe to lean on each other now. Olivia is at the front of this charge.”

Right now, Rodrigo’s on a PJ Harvey kick and gushes about the all-girl punk rockers Die Spitz, whom she put in the Daisy Chain lineup and who are also one of the tour openers for Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour. “I was just floored watching their set [at Daisy Chain],” Rodrigo says. “I had chills the entire time. They’re so important.”

Famously an avid Jack White fan, she says she spent an “exorbitant amount of money” to purchase the vintage white Gunne Sax prairie-style dress Meg White wore on the cover of The White Stripes’ Elephant. ( According to the Julien’s Auctions site, the dress sold for $25,600.) She actually planned on wearing it during Daisy Chain in August but decided against it because it was “too fucking hot.” “Maybe if I do Daisy Chain in the winter, I can wear it,” she jokes.

Rodrigo’s always been quite open and even overt about her musical influences.

In Smith’s case, his mark is apparent on the record in more ways than one, with Rodrigo referencing his song “Just Like Heaven” on “Drop Dead” and, of course, evoking his band’s name in the song title “The Cure.” (“I was like, ‘Oh thanks, every Google search from now on is going to come up with that,’ ” Smith jokes.)

Championing a mix of singer-songwriters and rock stars who melded her musical DNA — Smith, White, Fiona Apple, Lorde and Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna — has also proved savvy, connecting her to a broader set of listeners outside her original core fan base of young pop listeners. And it has allowed her to expand her sonic palette in a way that feels organic, shifting from a heavier bedroom pop influence on Sour t

_Originally reported by [Hollywood Reporter Music](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-features/olivia-rodrigo-interview-daisy-chain-festival-album-stardom-1236723322/)._