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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Hi. Oh, there we go. Wow. This is so high tech. I can hear everyone so well. Isn't that unbelievable? This is amazing. We're in the big times now. Wow.
Olivia Rodrigo is one of the biggest stars now in music, and her star rose incredibly quickly. In 2021, when she was just 17, she released a song called Driver's License that became the number one song on the planet. On the planet, her debut album Sour won three Grammys, including Best New Artist.
And her second album, Guts, came out earlier this month. I caught up with her recently for a conversation about music, writing, social media, and fame. So I talked to Gia Tolentino this morning, who is great and on our staff. She's amazing. And she wrote about you for Vogue. And she said that you're kind of new to New York.
Yeah, I am. I just got this apartment a few months ago. I'm still exploring, you know, but I love it. It's the greatest city ever. It does just so much inspiration constantly. So you've left Los Angeles behind forever?
I don't think so. I mean, L.A. will always be my first home, I think. But I love coming here as often as I can. It's the greatest. Is New York more musically, I don't know, fertile for you in some way? Yeah, I actually think it is in a weird way. And I remember people always used to tell that to me, like songwriters that I knew. They're like, oh, you have to go to New York. It's so inspiring. And I would like roll my eyes and I'm like, OK, sure. Like, I get it. I get it.
But we actually made half of this album, Guts, at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. So you're recording in the same room as Jimi Hendrix?
Yeah, exactly. All these incredible records were made in those rooms. And it's just, I don't know, you definitely like feel that magic in the walls. So let's start from the beginning a little bit. You grew up performing on Disney. You were on the show Bizaardvark and on High School Musical. And you already had a big TV career as a kid, if you don't mind me saying that.
Did you also harbor right away that ambition, that desire, that passion to be a solo singer, to be a songwriter? Completely. I always loved songwriting. That was my first love, my first passion when I was so young. I remember being like four years old or something and making up all these crazy songs about like my four-year-old problems. Do you remember any? Yeah.
Oh my gosh, my mom has a video of me singing about losing my parents in the supermarket, which is a very traumatic experience when you're four years old. I can imagine why I was so moved to write a song about it. But I think when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, I was acting, but I started playing songs on piano and learning how to write songs to chords, and that's when everything kind of took off. I
fell in love with it. And, you know, that's just been my life ever since. It's just my favorite part of the job. And you seem to have, even much younger than you are now, a real, a really wide sense of listening. That a lot of things were going into your ears. What were they? And why were you listening to what you were listening to?
Yeah, I mean, I give my parents a lot of credit for my music taste. My parents love 90s alternative rock. I grew up listening to, you know, Smashing Pumpkins and Hole and The White Stripes. And also from a very early age, I kind of fell in love with a lot of female singer songwriters and I kind of
that that was, you know, the kind of lineage that I wanted to follow. I remember going to the thrift store with my mom when I was probably 13 years old and getting Tapestry by Carole King for the first time and just playing it to death. I feel the sky, I feel my heart.
I'd play it over and over and over and get all these Pat Benatar records and play them over and over and over and Joni Mitchell. I don't know, I just remember something clicking in my head when I was really young and being like, wow, those are the girls that I want to emulate. Looking back, what was the first song that you wrote that you thought, now this is something, this isn't just kidding around, this could bring me somewhere? I mean, I wrote many songs when I was just...
putzing around in my living room when I was young. But I actually remember writing Driver's License. I remember that exact feeling. Which became a huge hit. Which, yeah, I mean, I owe so much to that song. It, you know...
It skyrocketed my career in ways completely unimaginable to me at the time. But I just remember writing that and feeling like I really expressed something and feeling like I felt like there was so much of myself in that song. And I remember feeling properly represented. And that's just a really beautiful feeling. I remember coming into the studio to show my producer the song and saying to him verbatim, I think I just wrote my favorite song that I've ever written. And he was like, OK, sit down and play it.
Well, tell me about the experience of writing. How did it work? Because one of the things that I love about it is it begins so directly. It sets the age, it sets the mood, it sets where you are right with the first line. Yeah. How did this happen? It's very specific, yeah. I mean, I quite literally got my driver's license a few days before I wrote the song, and I was a...
I was loving my newfound freedom, so I was driving around in my neighborhood and listening to sad songs and crying and thinking about this relationship. I just sat down at the piano. I'm a very emotional girl, as I am now. I just cried at the piano, and I wrote that song. What made you feel that sad in the car when you just had your license? I'm a Jersey kid, you're a California kid.
Something about driving, I don't know what it is. It unleashes something. It really does. You know, I thought about this a lot when I first got my driver's license. I think driving is one of the only times you're truly alone, especially as a teenager, when you're living at home with your parents.
But I love it to this day. You can do anything in the car. You can listen to whatever you want. You can literally scream your head off and no one will hear you. Your neighbors won't be banging on the walls telling you to shut up. So I think it's that isolation that brings out those feelings in you maybe. So you performed that on Saturday Night Live. How much...
How much after the release? Oh my gosh, really soon after. I mean, Saturday Night Live was one of my first performances. I think I released that song and I performed at the Brits in London and SNL. Those were my first two performances in my singer-songwriter career, which is pretty wild looking back. Ladies and gentlemen, Olivia Rodrigo! Yes!
So that's when I first heard about you. I was watching Saturday Night Live, and I looked at the tape again today, and I asked myself...
What was going through your mind when you were about to step on stage and what you had to know was an audience of untold millions with this song? Are you shaking? How are you feeling? What's in your head? I was terrified. I'm not even going to put up a front like I was being brave. I was so terrified. I remember...
being in the dressing room and the dressing room in SNL is like the coolest place ever. There's like all these pictures of all of your heroes on the wall, you know, that performed on the same stage that you're performing on. And, um,
I just like fully had a breakdown. I was so nervous and so scared. What do you mean by a breakdown? Because you did make it out on stage. I did make it out. I was crying. My producer was there, thankfully, who I love and trust so much. And I was just like crying to him. I'm like, I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I'm so scared. He's like, you got it. I love you. You can do it. And, you know, so his support meant a lot to me in that moment. The first album struck me as, well, as many things, right?
But unless I'm wrong, and tell me I'm crazy if I am, that Pandemic is something that, if that album is to live on in history, and I think it will in pop music history, it's attached to the Pandemic in some way, isn't it? Yeah. I actually wrote most of it during the Pandemic, and I...
I credit a lot of the songs to that isolation, like we were talking about earlier. I actually forced myself during the pandemic. I had a challenge with myself where I told myself I'd write a song every day as long as the pandemic lasted. Because we thought that the pandemic was going to be two weeks. I'm like, I can do it. It turned out to be forever. 14 songs. Yeah. But I did that for maybe five or six months. And it really helped me.
hone in on my songwriting craft and have discipline with my writing. And also, I think that people maybe wanted to hear all those sad songs in the pandemic because I think we were all just as a collective facing emotions that maybe we hadn't processed because of our new surroundings where we couldn't distract ourselves. So yeah, I think that the pandemic definitely is a big part of that album.
I want to ask another question about feeling. What does it feel like physically when you're on stage in front of a huge crowd and you're singing a ballad like Driver's License in front of an immense audience, a big live audience? Yeah, it's really crazy. I mean, I think that feeling will probably never get old. My favorite songs actually to sing are the really like angry ones.
especially on tour. I love looking out in the audience. Sometimes I'll see these girls and they're so young. They're like seven or eight and they're like screaming these angry songs and getting so hyped up and they're so enraged. And I just think that's the coolest thing ever. That's not something you'd see on the street, but it's just so cool that people get to express all those emotions through music. If you had to think of one moment or one image from your last tour that's seared into your memory, into your brain,
What might it be? Glastonbury. Performing at Glastonbury was incredible. This is the big, big festival, outdoor festival in Britain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually the first music festival I'd ever been to. And I got to play it. It was just awesome. And it was the most people I ever played for. How many people were there? Oh, I think it was like 60,000 or something like that. Yeah. You know, it was...
Pretty crazy to think about. But yeah, that was a really great moment in my career. And the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade the day before I went on stage. And Lily Allen and I dedicated Fuck You to the Supreme Court that day. And I just remember feeling so angry and being around so many of my friends who were so angry and didn't know what to do or what to say. And in that moment, really feeling like music was such a
for us and looking out into the crowd and seeing everyone who felt the same way. It was, I just, I think it just reminded me what the true purpose of music is, you know? You mean as something of release and emotional force? Yeah, of everything, of, you know, of protest and of release and togetherness, you know, seeing an entire crowd sing that and share that emotion in that moment is just so transcendent, you know?
I'm talking with the singer and songwriter Olivia Rodrigo. Her new album, Guts, came out this month and will continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.
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Rodrigo's new album is called Guts, a follow-up to Sour, and she told me that she sees herself working in the lineage of pop singer-songwriters like Carole King. We spoke the other day over Zoom. Let's talk about your new album. When you wrote your first album, Sour, you had so much that you wanted to express and, you know, and get off your chest and get off your mind as a young person. How was...
The Olivia Rodrigo of now different than the one who sat down to write Sour.
Oh my gosh, world's different. But you know, the craziest thing is I've changed so much just from the ages of 17 to 20. Like in, you know, in that time period, people are just, you know, you grow, I feel like I grow 20, 25 years in three years, you know? So yeah, I mean, she's vastly different. But I remember definitely that fear of sitting down and trying to write the second album and thinking, oh my God, I'm not a...
you know 17 year old girl going through her first heartbreak anymore you know that's such a universally relatable experience you know how am i gonna make something that feels you know like people can get behind it um but uh i don't know i i guess what is the pressure in other words is that is it the is it creative or is it that your life has gotten 200 percent weirder because of
You know, all that comes with stardom and all the rest. What was the conversation like in your head? Yeah, I think a mix of both. It's definitely like, you know how people always are like, oh, your only competition is your past self. And I was like, well, I don't know if that necessarily worked for me. I don't know how I could ever, like, you know, follow up such...
crazy, you know, unexpected success. And so I put that pressure on myself for a long time. And I remember, actually, Jack White is a big hero of mine. And I met him for the first time maybe a year ago. And he wrote me this letter. And it had like a few bullet points of like advice. And one of the pieces of advice was,
that your only job is to write music that you would like to hear on the radio. And I remember I was really struggling with, you know, all this pressure and, you know, are people on Twitter going to like what this song sounds like and all of this, you know, gunk in my head. And I remember reading that and it just really like igniting something in me. And so I think that really helped. So Jack White of the White Stripes writes you this kind of bullet point, you know, advice column.
And we were able to take his advice? Yeah, I think that keeping that in mind and reframing the songwriting process into just trying to write songs that you enjoy and songs that you like is just the only thing you can do. Also, that being said, making songs that you like is also terribly hard sometimes. It's a lot easier said than done. That's a feat in and of itself. But yeah, I don't know. I think reframing that really, really helped me.
I think on this album, Guts, I think I really learned how to look at a song and look at songwriting as a sort of a craft and not just this pouring my heart out at the piano like I was doing when I was 17. So I think these songs definitely took longer to write, and I think we just sat with them for a little longer. Livia, you took a poetry class at USC? Yeah. When was that, and why did you do that?
That was last year. I mean, I was homeschooled my whole life. There's a song on the album called Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl. It's about me dealing with the consequences of that. But yeah, I was homeschooled my whole life and I always wanted to go to college and I always was very curious and I'm a very curious person. There's so much that I want to know in this world.
And I really enjoyed taking that class and I've always been super interested in poetry and I've always been writing it for a long time. But yeah, it was really informative and I feel very grateful that I got that opportunity. We actually turned one of the poems that I wrote as an assignment in the poetry class into a song on the album called Lacey. So it was pretty productive, I suppose.
Lacey, oh Lacey, it's like you're out to get me. You poison every little thing that I do. Lacey, oh Lacey, I just loathe you lately. And I despise my jealous eyes and how hard they fell for you.
Olivia, were there any poems that you read by poets or poets that you read that are helpful to you as a, as a, not just as a human being, but as an artist? Yeah, I, um, I mean, Leonard Cohen, I, I read lots of his poetry while I was making, uh, Guts. I think he's incredible. It's just, that's just an endless well of inspiration, all of his writings and, you know, drawings. And I just, it's, it's so inspiring. Um,
Yeah, I wrote the poem Lacey inspired by the poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath, too. So, you know, lots of inspiration. Inspiration comes from everywhere. So you grab it out where you can. I don't know if you watch Girls. I haven't watched it yet. Everyone's been recommending it to me, though. I really need to. So Lena Dunham is, you know, the story runner and she's also the star of the show and she's a kind of searching young woman. And at a certain point she announces to her parents because she wants to be a writer. She says, I think I'm the voice of...
I'm not the voice of my generation. I think I might be getting this right, but the A voice of A generation. And now you're being branded, I hate to tell you, whether you like it or not, the voice of a generation, the voice of Generation Z, Gen Z. What do you make of all that? Yeah, you know, I tend to not think about it just because I think that's kind of a scary thought. I don't think of myself that way. I just try to be as...
much myself as I possibly can and try to make the best work I can. But I mean, it's obviously super flattering when people say that. But yeah, I don't know. I love my generation. I'm proud to be a part of it. You have a song, for example, where we've all been living with social media for quite a long time. It was already there when you... Yeah, I never didn't have it, which is a strange way to grow up. And it makes its presence known in your...
in your songs. Do you also look at social media to see how people are perceiving you? Which seems like a lot of burden. Yeah. That's an understatement. It's definitely a burden. Um...
Yeah, I think that I've gotten better at it the more that I've, you know, been on it. It's just, you know, it's a part of this job that I think is a necessary evil. And there are some things on social media that are awesome and I love connecting with people that I normally wouldn't have gotten the chance to. But it is weird. And in my life, I feel like I'm
growing in front of people, which is really strange. You know, I've been in front of people for a really long time. And sometimes it can feel kind of stifling or claustrophobic to feel like you're always being seen. But I don't know. I feel like I have a good relationship with it these days. I think I have a good... Well, tell me about that burden. Yeah, I mean, I think for a long time I felt like I maybe couldn't
make mistakes or I always felt this pressure to be a good role model and you know I grew up on these uh kids shows where you know that's being a being a good role model is very you know important as as it should be um and I think I always felt like I I couldn't be a normal kid and go out and do stupid things and make mistakes and learn which is you know the end of the day making mistakes is the only way you do learn but I I feel like in in this album part in particular I feel like that was kind of me grappling with with those feelings and um
talking about the mistakes that I did end up making and being open and honest about them and I think that was kind of cathartic for me. Like what? An example. I mean, um, there's a song, Making the Bed, that, um, I really love. Uh...
And the lyrics are, sometimes I feel like I don't want to be where I am getting drunk at a club with my fair weather friends. That's the chorus. And I was kind of nervous to say that I'm 20 years old, which is not of age yet, I guess. And I don't know, I was nervous to put that one out. And I felt like it, you know, I'm always so conscious of people, you know, young kids listening to my music and, you know,
people's parents listening to my music and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I think that all of my role models and all of my heroes are my heroes because they are unapologetically who they are and they express themselves without fear of, you know, fear of being criticized. So that's just what I try to tell myself.
On this album, on Guts, you seem to be reaching back even further in history. The opening track, which is about all the impossible standards of being a woman in America, starts out kind of Joni Mitchell, but then turns abruptly midway into a song that sounds like the Riot Grrrl scene. How do you position your music in this longer tradition of rebellion? Oh, great question. I love that question. I mean, I...
like female rebellion music for lack of better word is like my favorite music ever and I've been obsessed with like the Riot Grrrl punk scene for a while and I think that song was my
stab at trying to write a song like that. But yeah, I feel a lot of like kinship towards women. And, you know, I love writing songs about these, you know, female feelings of anger and resentment that maybe aren't so, you know, so easily expressible in an everyday life. How do you look at your...
Now, reasonably distant past. A lot of times you'll read about the early careers, particularly of women who were in TV as kids. And they look back on it and they feel sad about it, exploited, something, something maybe not terribly pleasant. Do you feel that you got through that decently treated and it was a healthy experience or there was downsides to it as well? Yeah.
I do. I can certainly see how people wouldn't have that experience. I think it's a very strange way to grow up.
I feel really lucky that I was surrounded by wonderful people. My parents are so wonderful and so grounded and always looking out for me. And I just owe everything to them. I don't think that I would have that attitude towards it if it wasn't for them. But yeah, it is really strange. And you sacrifice a lot. And I didn't have a normal childhood in order to have that career. And I'm really grateful for everything that happened. But it's definitely a give and take. What did you miss most?
I think I actually realized it this year how much I missed or I feel like I missed out on like going to high school and being around people my own age and how important that camaraderie felt like to me. You know, I grew up on sets where I was just around
45-year-old guys all the time. And so I think that I sort of feel like I had a relatively lonely childhood, which is okay. I mean, that's why I turned to writing songs and making music and all of that. But yeah, that's definitely one of the pitfalls. And fame at the level that you're experiencing it now, which is pretty rare, is it lonely or is it something else? I don't know what it is. Gosh, I...
I feel incredibly lucky to have great people around me, but it certainly is trickier, you know, navigating...
social life and relationships of any kind. You know, it's definitely something that I have to put more thought into, I guess. But, you know, social life and relationships are hard regardless of what your career is. Now, are we going to see you act again or is music the rest of your career in a dominant way? I don't know. I mean, I'm open to whatever. I love telling stories and, you know, if there's a story that's
in a script someday that I would love to tell, then I would be really honored to be able to do that. I don't really know though. I mean, I love music. I think music will always be my biggest passion. Writing songs is where I feel most like myself. Olivia Rodrigo, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I hate to give the satisfaction asking how you're doing now. How's the castle built of people you pretend to care about? Just what you wanted.
Olivia Rodrigo's new album is called Guts. At newyorker.com, you can find a review of the album by staff writer Carrie Batten and an essay about dads listening to Olivia Rodrigo by J. Caspian Kang. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ngofen Mputubwele, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Mike Kutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Tequete.
And thanks also to Alana Casanova-Burgess. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.