ACTIVATING ROCK STAR MODE
Rodrigo cranks up the volume and digs deep for ‘Guts,’ a powerful follow-up to her blockbuster debut album
Olivia Rodrigo, the bearer of perhaps the most famous driver’s license in Los Angeles, piloted her black Range Rover on a scorching late July afternoon.
Six weeks remained before the release of her second album, “Guts,” and she was racked with anxiety — about finding a spot for her SUV. The car was her dream purchase, her favorite place to listen to music and yes, she feels guilty about the gas. A woman crossing a narrow street hustled out of Rodrigo’s path as she let out a “Sorry!,” unaware that the apologetic 20-year-old behind the wheel was the youngest artist to debut atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
When Rodrigo awoke on a January 2021 morning to news that her first single, the octave-climbing weeper “Drivers License,” had rocketed to No. 1, she knew “nothing would ever be the same,” she said. One day she was a Disney actor with powerhouse pipes, the next she was the promising new voice of her generation — all while she was still a high school senior living with her parents, and largely under COVID-19 restrictions.
“Sour,” the album Rodrigo released that May with writing credits on all 11 songs, went four times platinum; two of its tracks, “Drivers License” and “Good 4
U,” crossed that threshold six times over. She was feted by Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, and duetted with Billy Joel and Avril Lavigne. Cardi B gushed about her on Twitter. Halsey sent a cake. At the 2022 Grammys, three of her seven nominations turned into wins, including best new artist.
Embarking on her maiden tour? Watching tabloids diagram her dating history? None of that was easy. But crafting the follow-up to a smash debut is music’s most daunting crucible, and Rodrigo felt the pressure to make a diamond. Ultimately,
she turned to advice she’d received from an idol, Jack White.
“He wrote me this letter the first time I met him that said, ‘Your only job is to write music that you would want to hear on the radio,’ ” she recounted. She paused. “I mean, writing songs that you would like to hear on the radio is in fact very hard.”
Songs are only a fraction of the equation. Young women in pop face a dizzying array of pressures: to look a certain way, to compete against each other, to be role models, to project acceptable emotions. So it’s notable that Rodrigo has largely opted out. On “Guts,” recently released on Geffen, she is simply a rock star.
The album’s opener, “All-American Bitch,” begins with Rodrigo’s angelic soprano over fingerpicked acoustic guitar before snapping into fuzzy power chords and the first of many f-bombs. On “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” she chants a litany of embarrassing party fouls over a springy bass line and lets out cathartic screams.
There are still piano ballads — poignant ones, exploring the drawbacks of her unusual path, attraction to a gaslighting boyfriend, the challenge of granting forgiveness. The LP’s mix of energy reflects Rodrigo’s tastes. She loves women who rage, and Rage Against the Machine; songwriters unafraid to bare their intimate fears, and artists who make their politics crystal clear.
Her urge to move in a grungier direction took hold as “Sour” was wrapping up. “Brutal,” the last song she wrote for the album with Daniel Nigro, the producer who has become her creative partner, is a punky eye-roll she turned into her Sour tour’s opening number.
“It was super heavy when we were rehearsing it,” she said of her live band, whose members are all female or nonbinary. “I remember tears welling up in my eyes and
“I had such a desire to live and experience things and make mistakes and grow after ‘Sour’ came out, I kind of felt this pressure to be this girl that I thought everyone expected me to be.”
being like, this is so powerful. This is what I wanted to see when I was a girl scrolling YouTube when I was 14.”
When Rodrigo was that age, she was already a working actor, starring in the first of two Disney TV shows that brought her to national attention. She long had musical ambitions, but the ordinary path for the company’s phenoms — Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake’s gleaming synth-pop and pop-R&B — wasn’t for her.
Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato have indulged their taste for rock, but Rodrigo’s commitment to it is deeply ingrained. Her musical foundation was built on the ’90s bands her parents loved. While most of today’s pop is made by committee, she works almost exclusively with Nigro, a onetime frontman of the emo band As Tall as Lions. A few tracks on the new album were recorded live, with a full band.
Writing “All-American Bitch,” with its fierce dynamics and wry attitude, was an uncorking of emotions that don’t often find voice in pop.
“For me, that’s what music is, it’s expressing those feelings that are really hard to externalize, or that you feel aren’t societally acceptable to externalize,” Rodrigo said. “Especially as a girl.”
Rodrigo said she has “always loved rock music and always wanted to find a way that I could make it feel like me, and make it feel feminine and still telling a story and having something to say that’s vulnerable and intimate.” She beamed talking about how artists she admires are “using rock music, but they’re not trying to recreate a version of rock music that guys make.”
In late July, she did get to a Tori Amos show with Annie Clark (who records as St. Vincent), a hero who has become a mentor.
“I’ve never met anyone so young and so effortlessly self-possessed,” Clark said in a phone interview. Rodrigo “knows who she is and what she wants — and doesn’t seem to be in any way afraid of voicing that. And just a really lovely girl too,” she added. “I’ve never heard her say a bad word about anyone.”
Rodrigo’s ex-beaus might disagree. Although she doesn’t name them, they are the subject of both passionate takedowns and lighthearted ribbing on “Guts.” Its first single, “Vampire,” is a suite that builds from ballad to bombast aimed at a man who abused her trust and fame; on the hilarious rap-rock banger “Get Him Back!,” she playfully spins the title phrase, seeking both revenge and reconciliation.
“I had such a desire to live and experience things and make mistakes and grow after ‘Sour’ came out, I kind of felt this pressure to be this girl that I thought everyone expected me to be,” she said. “And I think because of that pressure, maybe I did things that maybe I shouldn’t have — dated people that I shouldn’t have.” She took a beat to clarify: “I’m very tame.” But a lot of the album, she said, is “about reckoning with those feelings and coming out of that disillusionment and realizing the core of who I am and what I want to be doing and who I want to be spending my time with.”
Over a few years of sea change, Rodrigo has sought anchors. She took a poetry class at the University of Southern California and insisted that the other students treated her “really normal.” She secured an apartment in New York and immediately endured a local rite of passage: a case of bedbugs.
Although she says her public profile is manageable — “I’m not like, Kim Kardashian or anything” — Rodrigo’s life remains unconventional. Some of the album’s most powerful moments are about her internal battles over early success.
She said she was at first hesitant to write about someone exploiting her celebrity in “Vampire,” because she feared the experience was self-indulgent. “I’ve always tried to write about the emotions rather than this weird environment that I’m in,” she explained. But the point of songwriting “is to distill all of your emotions into their simplest, purest, most effective form.”