Rodrigo, Columbus audience connect in sold-out concert
The chunky silver rings on her right hand spell it out: GUTS. At barely 21 years old, Olivia Rodrigo is a gutsy performer and a noteworthy songwriter, and her Guts tour rocked a sold-out Nationwide Arena on Friday night.
Now with two full albums in her discography, Rodrigo is at an interesting point: The two albums, together, make up nearly a complete concert. And, really, there’s nothing from them she’d want to leave out – her songs are catchy, and her fans hang on every word.
The arena was a sea of silver sequined miniskirts, Converse Chuck Taylors, and everything purple. Merchandise lines wrapped around nearly the entire first floor. Trains of grade-school girls held hands, weaving through teenage best friends and moms who seemed just as excited as their daughters. Dads and boyfriends were few and far between – this was, for the most part, an all-ages Girls’ Night Out.
As for the tour’s much-talked-about support and inclusion of women’s health and abortion-rights groups, they occupied a single area in the main floor’s lobby while concertgoers arrived. The most popular feature seemed to be selfie frames for photo ops. By the end of the opening act, though, those advocacy groups had packed up and left the building. The concert itself was just that – the concert. Political issues weren’t broached, and the only drama was that with which Rodrigo imbues her songs.
This wasn’t a typical arena concert, where half the audience wanders in during the last five minutes of the opening act. Chappell Roan got a nearly-full house fired up during her opening set with bubbly, infectious hits including her recent “Hot To Go!” and “Red Wine Supernova.” The crowd’s excitement barely dimmed during the intermission.
As a songwriter and musician, Rodrigo can be hard to pin down. As a singer, she’s capable of everything from Broadway-style belting to the wistful mumble other popular singers rely on, and she can switch styles in the blink of an eye. She’s salty and vulnerable, angry and charming. Her self-awareness is countered by her insecurities. Are her songs pop, punk, coffeehouse, or alternative? Yes. But if you’re going to a live concert to hear her singing, you might want to think twice. Her first few songs, “bad idea right?,” “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” and “vampire,” were a feisty opening but were nearly impossible to hear over the sound of more than 10,000 voices singing (and shouting) along, most at the top of their lungs. In the encore, “good 4 u” was similarly fated. Did it make the concert less enjoyable? That depends on whether you were there to listen or to participate.
Pretty much every song was a singalong – encouraged, in the case of acoustic versions of “happier” and “favorite crime.” Rodrigo relished the crowd’s participation, no matter when or how. She is effervescent and outgoing, waving to fans, tossing out compliments, and blowing kisses. She knows how to engage a crowd. With her acting background, she plays out her songs like tiny movies, stepping into someone else’s shoes and bringing each one to life.
Her protagonists are the carefree young woman we’ve all dreamt of being, the heartbroken girl we’ve all been, and everything in between. She’s admitted that while her first album, “Sour,” drew more from personal experience, “Guts” is more focused on character development.
Even though she’s a few years older, no longer the heartbroken teenager she was when she wrote the songs for “Sour,” she still summons the anguish and anxiety needed for songs like “driver’s license” and “traitor.”
With Rodrigo at the piano, “driver’s license,” was startlingly empty and grieving, maybe even moreso than on the album. “teenage dream” followed, bleakly asking “They say it gets better, but what if I don’t?” and ending in dissonance.
Later, a silver crescent moon and stars descended from the rafters. Rodrigo orbited the room slowly, seated in the moon, waving and smiling between the pensive, anxious lines of “logical” and “enough for you.”
She writes a lot of songs about breakups. Fortunately, her music has enough stylistic variety that she can alternate sets of ballads with sets of pop or punkinspired songs to keep things fresh for an hour or two. The show never felt slow; the energy hardly ever dropped. Occasionally, a small group of dancers also took the stage with her to change things up a bit. Despite the “Guts (spilled)” deluxe album version that dropped Friday, Rodrigo didn’t include any of those bonus tracks except “obsessed.” She did, however, include “Can’t Catch Me Now” from “The Hunger Games,” compelling in its mystery. She may or may not be, as she declared in one of the last songs of the night, the “perfect all-american (expletive).” But she is, without a doubt, a performer with the guts to bare her soul and connect with her audience.