David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Olivia Rodrigo: Hi.

David Remnick: Oh, there we go.

Olivia Rodrigo: Wow, this is so high-tech. I can hear everyone so well.

David Remnick: Isn't that unbelievable?

Olivia Rodrigo: This is amazing. We're in the big times now. Wow.

[music - ​Olivia Rodrigo: Drivers License]

David Remnick: 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 Drivers 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. I talked to Jia Tolentino this morning who's great and on our staff.

Olivia Rodrigo: She's amazing.

David Remnick: She wrote about you for Vogue, and she said that you're new to New York?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, I am. I just got this apartment a few months ago. I'm still exploring, but I love that it's the greatest city ever that is just so much inspiration constantly.

David Remnick: You've left Los Angeles behind forever?

Olivia Rodrigo: I don't think so. I mean, LA will always be my first home, I think, but I love coming here as often as I can. It's the greatest.

David Remnick: Is New York more musically, I don't know, fertile for you in some way?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. I actually think it is in a weird way. 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." I would like roll my eyes and I'm like, "Okay, sure. I get it. I get it." [laughter]. We actually made half of this album GUTS at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village.

David Remnick: You're recording in the same room as Jimi Hendrix?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, exactly. All these incredible records were made in those rooms, and it's just, I don't know, you definitely feel that magic in the walls.

David Remnick: 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. Did you also harbor right away that ambition, that desire, that passion to be a solo singer, to be a songwriter?

Olivia Rodrigo: 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 my four-year-old problems.

David Remnick: Do you remember any?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. 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 [laughs]. 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. That's when everything took off. I fell in love with it, and that's just been my life ever since. It's just my favorite part of the job.

David Remnick: You seem to have, even much younger than you are now, 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?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, I give my parents a lot of credit for my music taste. My parents love '90s alternative rock. I grew up listening to The Smashing Pumpkins, and Hole and The White Stripes. Also, from a very early age, I fell in love with a lot of female singer-songwriters, and I realized that that was the 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.

[music - Carole King: I Feel the Earth Move]

Olivia Rodrigo: 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."

David Remnick: 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."?

Olivia Rodrigo: I wrote many songs when I was just putzing around in my living room when I was young. I actually remember writing Drivers License, I remember that exact feeling.

David Remnick: Which became a huge hit. The hit.

Olivia Rodrigo: I owe so much to that song. 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 were so much of myself in that song. 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 like, verbatim, "I think I just wrote my favorite song that I've ever written." He was like, "Okay, sit down and play it."

David Remnick: Tell me about the experience of writing. How did it work? One of the things that I love about it is it begins so directly. First, it sets the age, it sets the mood, it sets where you are, right with the first line. How did this happen?

Olivia Rodrigo: It's very specific. Yes. I quite literally got my driver's license a few days before I wrote the song and I was loving my newfound freedom. 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, and I was a very emotional girl as I am now. I just cried at the piano and I wrote that song.

David Remnick: 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 [laughs]. I don't know what it is. It unleashes something.

Olivia Rodrigo: It really does. 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. I love it to this day, you can do anything in the car. You 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. I think it's that isolation that brings out those feelings in you, maybe.

David Remnick: You performed that on Saturday Night Live. How much after the release?

Olivia Rodrigo: Oh my gosh, really soon after. Saturday Night Live was one of my first performances. I think I released that song and I performed at the BRIT in London and SNL. Those were my first two performances in my singer-songwriter career, which is pretty wild, looking back.

Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, Olivia Rodrigo.

[music - Olivia Rodrigo: Drivers License]

David Remnick: 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?" You had to know it was an audience of untold millions with this song? Are you shaking or how are you feeling? What's in your head?

Olivia Rodrigo: 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. The dressing room in SNL was the coolest place ever. There's like all these pictures of all of your heroes on the wall that performed on the same stage that you're performing on. I just fully had a breakdown. I was so nervous and so scared.

David Remnick: What do you mean by a breakdown, because you did make it out on stage?

Olivia Rodrigo: I did make it out. I was crying, and my producer was there, thankfully, who I love and trust so much, and I was just 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 is like, "You got it. I love you. You can do it." His support meant a lot to me in that moment. [laughs]

David Remnick: The first album struck me as many things, but unless I'm wrong, and tell me I'm crazy if I am, the 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?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. I actually wrote most of it during the pandemic. 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 lasts. We thought that the Pandemic was going to be two weeks. I'm like, "I can do it." Turned out to be forever.

David Remnick: 14 songs.

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. [laughs]. I did that for maybe five or six months and it really helped me hone into my songwriting craft and and have discipline with my writing. 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. Yes, I think that the pandemic definitely is a big part of that album.

David Remnick: 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 Drivers License in front of an immense audience, a big live audience.

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, it's really crazy. I think that feeling would probably never get old. My favorite songs actually to sing are the really angry ones, especially on tour. I love looking out in the audience. Sometimes I'll see these girls, and they're so young, and they're like, seven or eight, and they're screaming these angry songs and getting so hyped up, and they're so enraged. 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.

David Remnick: 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?

Olivia Rodrigo: Glastonbury. Performing at Glastonbury was incredible.

David Remnick: This is the big festival, outdoor festival in Britain.

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. It's actually the first music festival I'd ever been to, and I got to play it. It was just awesome. It was the most people I ever played for.

David Remnick: How many people were there?

Olivia Rodrigo: Oh, I think it was like 60,000 or something like that. Pretty crazy to think about. Yes, that was a really great moment in my career. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade the day before I went on stage, and Lilly Allen and I dedicated Fuck you to the Supreme Court that day. I just remember feeling so angry and being around so many of my friends were so angry and didn't know what to do or what to say. In that moment, really feeling like music was such an outlet for us and looking out into the crowd and seeing everyone who felt the same way. I think it just reminded me what the true purpose of music is.

David Remnick: You mean as something of release and emotional force?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, of everything. Of protests and of release and togetherness. Seeing an entire crowd sing that and share that emotion in that moment is just so transcendent.

[music]

David Remnick: I'm talking with a singer and songwriter, Olivia Rodrigo. Her new album, GUTS, came out this month, and we'll continue in just a moment.

[music]

David Remnick: I'm talking today with Olivia Rodrigo, who turned 20 this year. She's already been one of the most prominent artists in pop music since the gigantic success of Drivers License in 2021. Rodrigo's new album is called GUTS, a follow-up to SOUR. 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 get off your chest and get off your mind as a young person. How is the Olivia Rodrigo of now different than the one who sat down to write SOUR?

Olivia Rodrigo: Oh, my gosh. The world's different. The craziest thing is I've changed so much just from the ages of 17 to 20. In that time period, people are just-- I feel like I grow 25 years in three years. She's vastly different. I remember definitely that fear of sitting down and trying to write the second album and thinking, "Oh, my God, I'm not a 17-year-old girl going through a first heartbreak anymore." That's such a universally relatable experience. How am I going to make something that feels like people can get behind it? I don't know. I guess we just--

David Remnick: What is the pressure? In other words, is it creative or is it that your life has gotten 200% weirder because of all that comes with stardom and all the rest? What was the conversation like in your head?

Olivia Rodrigo: 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." I was like, "I don't know if that necessarily works for me. I don't know how I could ever follow up such a crazy, unexpected success." I put that pressure on myself for a long time. 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 a few bullet points of advice. One of the pieces of advice was that your only job is to write music that you would like to hear on the radio.

I remember I was really struggling with all this pressure and people on Twitter are going to like, like what this song sounds like, and all of this gunk in my head. I remember reading that and it just really igniting something in me. I think that really helped.

David Remnick: Jack White of the White Stripes writes you this bullet point advice column?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, and it helps so much.

David Remnick: We were able to take his advice?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, 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. 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 craft and not just this pouring my heart out the piano like I was doing when I was 17. I think these songs definitely took longer to write, and I think we just sat with them for a little longer.

David Remnick: Olivia, you took a poetry class at USC?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes.

David Remnick: When was that, and why did you do that?

Olivia Rodrigo: That was last year. 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. Yes, I was homeschooled my whole life and I always wanted to go to college and I always was very curious. I'm a very curious person. There's so much that I want to know in this world. 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. Yes, 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 lacy. It was pretty productive, I suppose.

[music - Olivia Rodrigo: lacy]

David Remnick: Olivia, were there any poems that you read by poets or poets that you read that are helpful to you, not just as a human being, but as an artist?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. Leonard Cohen, I read lots of his poetry while I was making GUTS. I think he's incredible. That's just an endless well of inspiration. All of his writings and drawings. It's so inspiring. I wrote the poem lacy, inspired by the poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath, too. Lots of inspiration. Inspiration comes from everywhere. [chuckles]

David Remnick: You grab it out where you can. I don't know if you watch Girls.

Olivia Rodrigo: I haven't watched it yet. Everyone's been recommending it to me, though I really need to.

David Remnick: Lena Dunham is the story runner, and she's also the star of the show, and she's a searching young woman. At a certain point, she announces to her parents because she wants to be a writer. She says, "I'm not the voice of my generation," I think I might be getting this right, "but the a voice of a generation." 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?

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, I tend to not think about it, just because I think that's 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. It's obviously super flattering when people say that. Yes, I don't know. I love my generation. I'm proud to be a part of it. I guess it's a good thing.

David Remnick: 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--

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, I never didn't have it, which is a strange way to grow up.

David Remnick: It makes its presence known in your songs. Do you also look at social media to see how people are perceiving you? Which seems like a lot of burden.

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes, that's an understatement. It's definitely a burden. I think that I've gotten better at it the more that I've been on it. It's a part of this job that I think is unnecessary evil. 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. It is weird, and in my life, I feel like I'm growing in front of people, which is really strange. I've been in front of people for a really long time. Sometimes it can feel 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.

David Remnick: Well, tell me about that burden.

Olivia Rodrigo: Yes. 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. I grew up on these kids shows where being a good role model is very important, as it should be. I think I always felt like I couldn't be a normal kid and go out and do stupid things and make mistakes and learn, which is then the making mistakes is only when you do learn, but in this album, in particular, I feel like that was me grappling with those feelings and talking about the mistakes that I did end up making and being open and honest about them, and I think that was cathartic for me.

David Remnick: Like what, an example?

Olivia Rodrigo: There's the song making the bed that I really love and they lyrics areWell, "Sometimes I feel like I don't wanna be where I am, Gettin' drunk at a club with my fair-weather friends," like the chorus.

[laughter]

Olivia Rodrigo: I was nervous to say, I remember then. I'm 20 years old, which is not of age yet, I guess. I didn't know. I was nervous to put that one out. I felt like I'm always so conscious of people, young kids listening to my music, and 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 being criticized. That's just what I tried to tell myself.

David Remnick: 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?

Olivia Rodrigo: It's a great question. I love that question. I think female rebellion music, for lack of a better word, is my favorite music ever. I've been obsessed with the Riot grrrl punk scene for a while and I think that song was my stab at trying to write a song like that. I feel a lot of kinship towards women. I love writing songs about these female feelings of anger and resentment that maybe aren't so easily expressible in everyday life.

David Remnick: How do you look at your now [chukles] 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?

Olivia Rodrigo: 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. I just owe everything to them. I don't think that I would have that attitude towards it if it wasn't for them. Yes, it is really strange, you sacrifice a lot. I didn't have a normal childhood in order to have that career and I'm really grateful for everything that happened. It's a give and take.

David Remnick: What did you miss most?

Olivia Rodrigo: I think I actually realized it this year how much I missed, or I feel like I missed out on going to high school and being around people my own age, and how important that camaraderie felt to me. I grew up on sets where I was just around 45-year-old guys all the time. I think that I feel like I had a relatively lonely childhood, which is okay. That's why I turned to writing songs and making music and all of that. Yes, that's definitely one of the pitfalls--

David Remnick: Famous and fame at the level that you're experiencing it now, which is pretty rare, is it lonely, or is it something else?

Olivia Rodrigo: I don't know what it is. Gosh, I feel incredibly lucky to have great people around me, but it certainly is trickier navigating social life and relationships of any kind. It's definitely something that I have to put more thought into, I guess, but social life and relationships are hard, regardless of what your career is, so, no.

David Remnick: Are we going to see you act again, or is music the rest of your career in a dominant way?

Olivia Rodrigo: I don't know. I'm open to whatever. I love telling stories. 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 love music. I think music will always be my biggest passion. Writing songs is where I feel the most like myself.

David Remnick: Olivia Rodrigo, thank you so much.

Olivia Rodrigo: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[music - Olivia Rodrigo: vampire]

David Remnick: Olivia Rodrigo's new album is called GUTS. At newyorker.com, you can find a review of the album by staff writer Carrie Battan, and an essay about dads listening to Olivia Rodrigo by Jay Caspian Kang.

[music - Olivia Rodrigo: vampire]

 

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