{"id":548765,"date":"2026-06-22T19:27:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T19:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/548765\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T19:27:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T19:27:15","slug":"olivia-rodrigo-blood-on-the-tracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/548765\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia Rodrigo: Blood on the Tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking at it now, Rodrigo sees the album as about hope\u2014having it, then losing it\u2014more than love. \u201cThe first half of the album, your hopes are just so high, and you\u2019re dreaming about the future and dreaming about who you could be in this different environment,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd the last half is just that crushing feeling when you realize that your hopes aren\u2019t gonna get met.\u201d (I ask if the album is fatalistic in its view of love. Rodrigo says that in her mind the album ends hopefully, before drolly adding: \u201cI don\u2019t know right now in my regular life, but\u2026.\u201d).<\/p>\n

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The bulk of the tracks on the album\u2019s second half re-invent the classic Rodrigo breakup song: They\u2019re largely about her own fault in her relationship. On \u201cthe cure,\u201d the record\u2019s centerpiece, she sings about the realization that a good relationship can\u2019t fix her own insecurity. \u201cWhen you\u2019re knowing someone really intimately, the parts of yourself that you don\u2019t really like come out\u2014it\u2019s not like, \u2018Everything\u2019s great.\u2019 It really shines a mirror on yourself,\u201d she says of the track. It expresses \u201csomething that I\u2019ve been trying to say for a long time but didn\u2019t really have the perspective to put it into words,\u201d yet which she was finally able to unlock last year. \u201cI think it\u2019s impossible to make a song like that without being in a grown-up intimate relationship. I hadn\u2019t had that experience and didn\u2019t know any of that stuff about myself on the past few albums.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodrigo\u2019s friend, the singer Chappell Roan, tells me that Rodrigo has now \u201cexperienced heartbreak on another level, as we all do when we grow older\u2014she has experienced that feeling when all the things you thought were answers weren\u2019t actually the answer.\u201d As she\u2019s matured, \u201cher writing keeps getting better and better\u2014it\u2019s amazing to see an artist grow from a child to a woman and for it to all be cataloged in her art.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Some people in Rodrigo\u2019s orbit were worried about her making a five-minute song like \u201cthe cure\u201d a single. But, at this point, she feels like \u201cmaking a song that doesn\u2019t resonate or feel like it\u2019s fulfilling some creative impulse is kind of boring.\u201d She brings up Charli xcx as an example of an artist who is just \u201chaving a creative impulse and fulfilling it, even if it\u2019s something that\u2019s not fully expected.\u201d I suggest that in the 20th century, artists like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell were allowed to spend years or entire decades in the woods without commercial popularity before coming back into the limelight. \u201cFor sure, for sure, I think that\u2019s really admirable, it\u2019s like true artistry,\u201d she says, looking at me with a dazed expression. She\u2019s propped up her head with her elbow on the table and looks, for the first time in our conversation, slightly absent-minded. \u201cSorry, I\u2019m feeling like, Fuck, I got a little tipsy. I hope that I have interesting answers. It\u2019s gonna be more free.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Rodrigo will perform these songs\u2014open fire hydrants of typically unspoken emotions\u2014for hundreds of thousands of people on next year\u2019s The Unraveled Tour. She\u2019s already sold out 10 nights at Brooklyn\u2019s Barclays Center and 11 at London\u2019s O2 Arena. Her approach to performing such intense music is, to put it lightly, chill. \u201cI really do a good job of dissociating, for some reason,\u201d she says, with the lightly curious affect of someone talking about being double-jointed. If you were to only hear her tone, you\u2019d think she was just any other woman eating salmon crudo and drinking a spritz, as opposed to one of the biggest performers in the world talking about how she performs forensic investigations of her own psyche each night. \u201cI had a psychic tell me once: \u2018You can turn it on, and you can turn it right back off.\u2019 I really am weird, I don\u2019t know. I guess we\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking at it now, Rodrigo sees the album as about hope\u2014having it, then losing it\u2014more than love. \u201cThe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[268],"tags":[434,29905,18,117,19,17,33325,804,8077,806],"class_list":["post-548765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-cover-story","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-olivia-rodrigo","tag-onecolumn","tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","tag-web"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116795412295838414","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}