Olivia Rodrigo was the first breakthrough pop star of this decade, a onetime Disney Channel star who set a fresh template for specific, confessional songwriting on a mass scale.
On billion-stream smashes like ‘Drivers License’ and ‘Good 4 U,’ Rodrigo, now 23, built a career on the back of two complementary musical impulses: exasperated power balladry and exasperated pop-punk. On her first two albums, Sour and Guts, her songs had targets; the fury she channelled nailed a frequency that activated a legion of young female fans.
Now on the other side of what Rodrigo calls her first ‘‘big-girl relationship,’’ the singer-songwriter’s third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love, out June 12, takes a step back and then zooms in. Across 13 songs, Rodrigo assesses an ultimately doomed relationship from beginning to breakup in real-time detail.
In an interview, Rodrigo discussed the many ways her creative process intersects with the extra-curricular noise of pop stardom, whether its managing relationship drama; accusations of pilfering songwriting gestures from Taylor Swift, her onetime idol; being targeted for the way she dresses; or her willingness to speak up about political and social causes in a way many of her peers won’t.
Edited excerpts from the interview:
CARAMANICA: This album strikes me as a chronological, structured mini-narrative. Are you writing those things in real time as the experiences are happening? Is that how you apply creativity to a lived experience?
RODRIGO: For the most part it is chronological and in the order in which it happened in my life and it’s the first time that’s happened. I write songs to process my feelings, so every day when I come and I sit at the piano or I go to the studio, it’s like, What is burning in me to say right now?
COSCARELLI: When did you realise you had an ending?