Olivia Rodrigo cover: Daisy Chain Festival, new album and fame

It’s only been 40 hours since Olivia Rodrigo gave the biggest concert of her life – headlining a music festival she created and organized from scratch – and the world’s hottest pop star is already back.

“I kind of felt like it was my wedding,” Rodrigo says of her performance in front of 50,000 people at her all-female charity festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which took place over a steamy weekend in Irvine’s Grand Park.

Today, on an equally hot Monday afternoon, in a Valley rehearsal room, the pop star – still a little tired and tanned from the event – is nursing a large Philz Coffee, black Ray-Ban Wayfarers protecting his eyes.

“Everyone I’ve ever met in my life was there. My whole family on both sides,” says Rodrigo, an only child born in Temecula, California, to a schoolteacher mother and a family therapist father. “I’ve been planning it for a year and a half. I was joking about it with Alanis (Morissette), and she looks at me and she says, ‘That’s it.’ more more important than your marriage. I thought, ‘Oh, wow,’ and suddenly felt a wave of nervousness. But yes, it was special.

Rodrigo attributes some of those nerves to sharing the stage with many of the rock idols who showed up for her, including Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan and Morissette. But for the pop sensation, Daisy Chain was more than a concert and more than a $20 million fundraiser for women-centered nonprofits. The festival marked the high point of the artist Rodrigo has been transforming into for over six years. Having delivered her third album, and most assured to date, she’s now established herself as the singular voice of Gen Z – raw, honest and accessible – with all the cultural influence, media scrutiny and potential landmines that come with it.

Many 23-year-olds are heading toward their first job, perhaps moving away from home and beginning the next chapter of their lives. Rodrigo has already been working since she was 13 — first as a Disney child star before becoming a viral pop sensation with 2021’s “Drivers License” — and she tours and records so often that she says, “The blessing and curse of my job is that I don’t really live anywhere — I’m never in one place for more than two or three months.”

Although she spends much of her time in New York, she still considers Los Angeles her home. And so yesterday she threw a pool party with friends to celebrate her festival win – but that brief honeymoon is over. Now we’re back to “Go, go, go, like forever,” as she puts it, turning her attention to the sold-out, 86-date, eight-month arena tour that kicks off three weeks after our reunion.

His latest album — You look rather sad for a girl so in love — was a huge commercial success, one of the biggest of the year. Lead single “Drop Dead” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April and has since surpassed half a billion Spotify streams, while the album produced two more top-five singles with “The Cure” and “Stupid Song.” It had the biggest opening sales for a female artist this year (485,000), and it has been stuck in the top five since its June 12 release.

Artistically, it is also Rodrigo’s most complete work to date. She entered 2023 Tripe barely out of adolescence, faced with the pressure to beat her first album, Sour, which is the most streamed album by a female artist in Spotify history. Tripe it wasn’t quite the same commercial success as Sour – it went three times platinum compared to that album’s six – but it established Rodrigo as a career artist who has only grown in popularity as she has established herself as a major sold-out live performer.

You look pretty sad also reflects Rodrigo’s ambitions beyond beating album and ticket sales, challenging herself to dig deeper into what she has to say.

“Olivia’s desire to be recognized as a songwriter is very refreshing; it’s not modern in a way,” says Robert Smith of The Cure, the first artist to appear on one of Rodrigo’s albums, lending his vocals on the You look pretty sad remarkable, “What’s wrong with me.” Rodrigo calls this song the best on the album.

“It’s not easy: she spends an awful lot of time getting her music right,” Smith says. “But she also succeeds very quickly. It’s weird sometimes. She was in London with me a while ago. She played me something she wrote that morning, things that might take many writers 14 years to come out with, and she does it in one morning.”

Beyond the catchy refrains and choruses (which certainly help), Rodrigo has struck such a chord through an old-school confessional writing style that offers his fans a unique authenticity and powerful accessibility, producing vulnerable songs that capture the intense feelings that come with young love and adolescence. His songs feel urgent and unfiltered; Rodrigo also sings about the negative sides of herself, whether it be feelings of jealousy or obsession.

This contrasts with the more formal, homogeneous tracks that the traditional pop machine can often produce, and certainly the soulless AI slop that has dominated headlines in recent years as thousands of such tracks have flooded streaming services.

“I would never use AI in any of my music,” she says. “Absolutely no. Hardline on that. The closest I ever got was one time me and (producer) Dan (Nigro) were like, ‘Gosh, I wonder what ideas ChatGPT would have for an Olivia Rodrigo title,’ and they’re all horrible.”

You look pretty sad lays bare the life and death of Rodrigo’s first adult relationship — in this case, allegedly with English actor Louis Partridge, who inspired Rodrigo’s first love song, “So American,” from the deluxe version of Guts. It starts with the exhilarating butterflies-in-the-stomach phase of finding a new crush (“Drop Dead”), continues through the honeymoon phase (“Honeybee”), the first signs of trouble (“Purple”), the sobering breakup conversation (“Less”) and even the horrifying return to the LA dating scene (“Expectations”). “Don’t think my future husband is in that bar in Silver Lake,” Rodrigo laments with his cheeky, chatty delivery.

Little did Rodrigo know that this was how the album would take shape, and originally she was writing more traditional love songs. The concept changed, however, “when I went through a breakup,” she says with a laugh.

She decided to make the second half of the album “pretty sad”, with about two or three more months to complete the record. In addition to writing new material, she and longtime producer Nigro rewrote and edited other songs to properly fit the new concept, injecting more sadness into traditional love songs and capturing the “gray area” found in the ups and downs of a relationship.

“What’s Wrong With Me,” for example, was originally about “being so in love with this person that I’m crazy about it. Then, after the breakup, you change your perspective,” Rodrigo says. “It becomes, ‘Oh, I’m depressed and it’s because this relationship isn’t serving me anymore.’ It was a fun challenge. When you’re young, you write and write and write. Editing is something that I’ve had to learn to do as I’ve become a quote-unquote professional songwriter.

For an artist whose latest album is driven by a thesis about injecting melancholy into love songs, Rodrigo is more hopeful about love than expected. Throughout our interview, between topics, she asks a few questions about my own upcoming wedding: Perhaps most pertinently, what will our first dance song be?

She said her own dream wedding song was Modern English’s new wave classic, “I Melt With You.” Now she also floats Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “There’s a Break in the Rain (Have Love Will Travel)” so she can also complement the more upbeat track with a ballad.

I mention my surprise that someone who is so open about the difficulties of his own love life would be so curious about someone else’s marriage.

“Oh yeah, I’m such a love girl,” she told me. “I’m very optimistic about love. I can’t wait to get married – one day.”

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Rodrigo is never more animated than when talking about the music she loves from other artists. She is still in disbelief at the idea of ​​performing with Nicks, McLachlan and Morissette, calling Nicks her hero, praising McLachlan as the impetus for founding Daisy Chain, and saying her music would never have been the same without Morissette’s. Small shredded pill.

Morissette, who showed up as a surprise guest at the festival after Karen O had to withdraw due to a personal issue, calls Rodrigo “a very unique artist in that her value system shows up in every choice she makes.”

“The themes of truth, feminism and humanism, heightened sensitivity and activism permeate its environments in a way that feels full of mission and love,” Morissette says. “There’s a softening in the community around the fact that women are truly there for each other. We women have good reason to be wary of women’s safety in a patriarchal world. I can sense in a handful of us artists that it might be safer to lean on each other now. Olivia is at the forefront of that charge.”

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