A few years into his twenties, Irish vocal powerhouse Van Morrison achieved his moment in the sun — the album Astral Weeks. For 20-something Jimi Hendrix, it was his meeting with Eric Clapton that turned out to be a career turning point. Frank Sinatra, in his early 20s, was a singing waiter at The Rustic Cabin in New Jersey. On the other hand, there is Olivia Rodrigo, who at age 18 turned in Drivers License and her resume was never the same again.
On February 20, Rodrigo will turn 21. With multiple Billboard and Grammys to her name, she is already in a position to offer mantras like ‘the road to success is a long one’, ‘never let go of your dreams’ and ‘stop comparing life trajectories’. What makes her special? Or let’s put it this way: What makes her special enough to even have US president Joe Biden invite her over to the White House to get messages across to the American youth? Rodrigo is one of those singers who can be appreciated by Gen Alpha as well as Gen X dads.
Olivia uses a nostalgia hose to spray her songs with bratty rock moments and piano-driven gloominess, offering a certain degree of emotional consistency, singing about betrayal and regret. She has an astonishing degree of clarity in her lyrics that can be considered old-school. She tends to inhabit an era of music she did not live in. Rodrigo is an Instagram-ready soon-to-be 21-year-old who feels energised by riffs of Led Zeppelin or closer to her era, Alanis Morissette. Give her latest album, Guts, a listen and you will like it if you enjoy the music of Electric Light Orchestra or the Strokes. She gives that feeling that her music needs to be heard on vinyl. Yes, she is old-school rock as much as 1990s-loving wilderness music.
Olivia Rodrigo in performance
When I ask my 12-year-old daughter what Rodrigo means to her age group, she mentions a sense of defiance that has been missing from mainstream pop music for some years. Her feelings capture emotions like dislike, sadness and bravery in a way that can raise eyebrows. At the same time, Olivia’s songs show dads of 12-year-olds how far music has come. We grew up in an era when we associated Seattle with the grunge music scene or hip-hop with New York City. Rodrigo’s albums are frictionless and her “scene” is the Spotify or Apple Music recommendation algorithm. Her music is global and she is probably the biggest find of the pandemic era.
Doors opened
Rodrigo has appeared in lead roles on two Disney shows, Bizaardvark, which ran from 2016 to 2019, and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. But she is unlike most Disney stars we have seen. All it took was the release of Drivers License in 2021 via Geffen Records. It was an immediate success, setting streaming records on Spotify and ruling TikTok where most global teenagers are. It made listeners speculate about the real-life breakup that inspired the lyrics.
The song penned by Rodrigo begins with a straightforward thought: “I got my driver’s license last week”. She sings over a basic piano part, “just like we always talked about”. But then her music swells as she’s “crying in the suburbs” and then she arrives at a cathartic bridge. The next few songs from her album Sour — Déjà Vu, Good 4 U and Traitor — carried the thought forward.
In fact, she received her driver’s license a few days before she wrote the song and she was enjoying her newfound freedom. The young singer was driving around her neighbourhood, listening to sad songs, crying and “thinking about this relationship”. “I do believe that creativity sometimes is kind of something beyond you. It’s like a magic that we as humans with egos can’t control. And that was a really magical moment in my career, in my creative life.”
Joni Mitchell
Of course, the thought of becoming a one-hit wonder was on her mind. She told The New Yorker: “Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy. It happened so young in my career. I had this album that was out, and I won Grammys, and I was 19, and I was like, wow, I’ve done so much that I wanted to do. I’m only 19. But, in a way, that’s also sort of freeing. Maybe that sounds weird, but it’s so nice to have accomplished those things in the last album cycle. I’m so grateful for everything that happened then, and all of the doors that’s opened. But, in a way, it’s kind of nice also to think, now I just get to make music for me. You know what I mean? I feel like I can get away with doing anything now.”
Born and raised in Southern California, she was a talent-show regular by the age of eight and was cast first on Bizaardvark, which ran for three seasons on the Disney Channel. She learned to play guitar for the role and starred as Paige Olvera, a teenager who makes songs and videos for an online content studio.
Is there a Disney element in her? Like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato before her, she worked on her fan base and tried to translate her lyrics for a broader, more adult audience. Fans have speculated that Drivers License is about Rodigro’s High School Musical co-star Joshua Bassett. At the same time, she has managed to de-Disneyfy herself right from her debut single. In the climactic moment of the song, she declares: “I still f***in’ love you, babe”, which doesn’t sound written, rather it almost sounds improvised. In a freewheeling interview in 2021, she spoke about the use of profanity: “If that naturally sort of separated me from the Disney archetype? That’s cool.”
Her 2021 album Sour was a “sonic autopsy of a shattered heart”. “I tried to write all these songs about other things, and it just didn’t feel like it resonated with me; it didn’t feel authentic. I want my songs to feel like something I need to say. I’d rather have songs that feel personal to me than songs that people could dance to,” she told W Magazine.
Bolder than most
Her follow-up album, Guts (2023), allowed her to take a leap from the abandoned pathos of Drivers License: “I still hear your voice in the traffic/ We’re laughing/ Over all the noise.” Vampire, the first single from Guts, saw her feelings curdle. There is a sense of defiance in the track that kicks off with an Elton John-esque piano balladry. The up-tempo song sort of makes her a master of the deadpan as she sings: “I loved you truly/ You gotta laugh at the stupidity.” Her subject matter here is romantic disappointment once again but the stakes are much greater now. “I used to think I was smart/ But you made me look so naive”, she sings.
Carole King
Suddenly, one got reminded of one of Taylor Swift’s powerful songs: Dear John, which is supposedly about a romantic engagement with John Mayer. Consider Swift’s lyrics: “Well, maybe it’s me/ And my blind optimism to blame…. You are an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry/ Never impressed by me acing your tests”. It’s a song that shows a bolder side to Swift.
As for Rodrigo, she speaks about someone attempting to be glamorous: “Look at you, cool guy, you got it/ I see the parties and the diamonds sometimes when I close my eyes/ Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise.”
“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together,” Swift had said when she performed Dear John a few years ago. “So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the Internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.” The creative template of Dear John involving how one should harden the outer shell guides Rodrigo’s Vampire.
Guts is packed with powerful lyrics. She sings on Logical: “I look so stupid thinking/ Two plus two equals five/ And I’m the love of your life” and on Love Is Embarrassing, she sings “My God, how could I be so stupid”. Pretty Isn’t Pretty is about self-love and Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl spotlights outsider awkwardness. Or consider the folklore-esque Lacy, which is about illusions: “I despise my rotten mind/ And how much it worships you”, she sings.
Like Swift, she writes her own lyrics and she never compromises on the small degree of enjoyable rowdiness in her music. Like always, there are some punk moments. If her debut album was a nod to Swift or Alanis Morissette or Avril Lavigne, she doffs her hat to Sky Ferreira on Guts.
Credit for her taste in music goes to her parents and their love for Nineties alternative rock. She grew up listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Hole and the White Stripes. As a teenager, she fell in love with female singer-songwriters. “I realised that that was the lineage that I wanted to follow in. 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’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, and, I dunno, 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,” she said last year.
Her friend Joe Locke, star of Netflix’s queer coming-of-age series Heartstopper, recently captured the maturity of her songs in an interview: “Olivia has the wisdom of a person who’s lived seven lifetimes, with the energy of someone just entering adulthood. Guts is the perfect next album — her songwriting has somehow gotten better, more clever, more mature. She’s insanely amazing, and too humble for her own good.”
A good influence
Such is Rodrigo’s pull over the youth that US president Joe Biden invited her over to the White House to spread the message of getting vaccinated during the pandemic. Her speech was far better than what White House could have otherwise put out: “It’s important to have conversations with friends and family members and actually get to a vaccination site, which you can do more easily than ever before,” she said. US president Richard Nixon had his pop-star moment when Elvis Presley visited the White House and Donald Trump had Kanye West (which didn’t go well at all). Biden has Rodrigo as well as Taylor Swift on his side.
Though her songs focus on quintessential teen experiences — high-school break-up, relationship anxieties and the useless need to fit in — her music can be enjoyed by all. And it helps when she throws in cultural references a person like me can pick up. Déjà Vu is a cheeky pop single that says her ex has no original moves, and she sings: “Watching reruns of Glee / Being annoying, singing in harmony”. Well, that makes sense!
Also, her approach to music is something that appeals to listeners from an older generation. She is artistically in control of her songs, writing all her lyrics, unlike many of her Disney actress-turned-pop-star predecessors. She is like Lorde and Billie Eilish whose lyrics stem from an angst of teen girlhood. There is always a sense of urgency in her music and her sound hints at a future where young women remain in control of their story and art.
It’s a brutal world out here and Rodrigo’s angst is a reminder of realities. It’s enough to make a Gen X dad squint his ears to listen to her sing: “All I did was speak normally / Somehow, I still struck a nerve”. Happy birthday Olivia and stay wild.
Messages a Gen X dad has picked up from Olivia Rodrigo songs
Brutal: She can read the mind of every other school student: Do they like me?
Traitor: The imagery of being stabbed in the back is liberally sprinkled.
Drivers License: It makes teenagers wonder: What if I had gone about a relationship differently?
Déjà Vu: Something that everyone experiences in some stage of their relationship.
Good 4 U: She can find her way around teenage minds with sarcasm.
Jealousy, Jealousy: Looking for things around social media can hurt us.
Favourite Crime: Breaking one’s heart is a crime.
Decoding Olivia Rodrigo
Porshia Sen
Olivia Rodrigo quickly became one of my favourite female artistes after I listened to Good 4 U. Some of her other tracks I like are Déja Vu and Drivers License. I really like her voice, the music videos she produces, her outfits, the sets and the choreography of her pieces! She is a rebel and I love her work — Porshia Sen
I think the way Vampire is arranged musically is quite interesting. Her dark lyrics and production are quite good. I think she’s won hearts and is the current pop icon of the generation — Gaurab Chatterjee aka Gaboo
I love the texture of Olivia’s voice, the range, the dreamy vocals and all of what contributes to the soundscape and harmonies. She started off on her musical journey so young and it’s because of her sheer talent that she’s growing as a musician and slaying it at 20! Her music is mature for her age and she pours her heart and soul into the songwriting. Her lucid lyrics, despite flaunting a simplicity, convey a profound message. Her poignant lyrics and honesty give away how she doesn’t recoil from being vulnerable in art and that’s what I am in awe of. I guess that’s what moves people and her songs are like a gush of nostalgia — Diya Bhattacharya