Olivia Rodrigo Archives

Lowercase girls tend to fly under the radar by design, but once you start looking you’ll see them everywhere. For one thing, they’ve been all over the streaming charts in the past few years: folklore, evermore, “thank u, next,” girl in red, mxmtoon, dodie, beabadoobee, how i’m feeling now, “drivers license,” “deja vu,” “good 4 u” — to name just a few recent, femme-forward musical phenomena that wouldn’t even think of imposing the tyranny of capital letters on the listener’s imagination.

But lowercase girls have been there forever, in the back rows of classrooms and the corners of parties, daydreaming, doodling, stockpiling vivid details and observations in the marble notebooks of their minds — waiting for the precise moment to launch them like a carefully crafted dart that punctures everybody else’s apathy and proves just how sharply she has been paying attention. Some of the best of them never grow out of it. “My only advantage as a reporter,” Joan Didion wrote in 1968, unwittingly describing her own species perfectly, “is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.” Beware the lowercase girl. Although she is usually overlooked, underestimated and even ignored, she sometimes turns out to be the one who’s been writing the story all along.

Such were the cultural forces that Olivia Rodrigo harnessed, streamlined and gloriously melo-dramatized earlier this year in her breakout single, “drivers license” — stylized all lowercase, because of course. A lifelong Swiftie (almost literally: When Taylor Swift’s self-titled debut album came out, Rodrigo was 3) and the daughter of a therapist, Rodrigo was raised to be the kind of person who didn’t exactly hide her feelings. On the chorus of the song that accelerated her to overnight fame, she saves her most impassioned vocal delivery for what she clearly considers to be her ex’s most grievous crime: Guess you didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me. The implication being that in her songs, defiantly, she means every word.

In the last few years, given the success of Billie Eilish’s ASMR jams and Swift’s soft acoustic reveries — “lowercase girl album” bona fides that were documented by Jill Gutowitz in Vulture last year — it has sometimes felt like pop musicians are playing one big round of the Quiet Game, daring each other into an ever more provocative hush. “drivers license” certainly benefits from that tonal shift, but the most moving thing about the song is actually its careening sense of dynamism, the way it swings repeatedly from a private muttering to a collective, belt-it-out exorcism of the heart. Such is the power of That Bridge. (Perhaps the surest indication of the song’s massive, cross-generational appeal is the fact that its bridge inspired both a TikTok challenge and an SNL skit — some kids may have been editing their small-screen video responses to it as their parents watched the episode on some old technological innovation called live TV.) Rodrigo’s songs play out like bottled-up soliloquies rather than two-sided conversations, which gives them the emotional force of someone who has previously felt unheard (by an apathetic boyfriend, or maybe by adult society writ large) finally speaking her mind. And so that bridge exposes the great irony of not only “drivers license,” but the lowercase girl herself. Because on the inside, where all the feelings are, her caps-lock key is JAMMED.

“drivers license” would have been a hard act for any new artist to follow, but in the past month, Rodrigo has seized every opportunity to prove that there’s more to her than even that song could fully showcase. The two singles she’s released in the lead-up to her debut album, Sour, have effortlessly slipped into unexpected genres — who among us could have predicted that the “drivers license” girl would go scorched-earth pop-punk on her third single, or that she’d pull it off? — and both have been sprinkled with striking, cleverly documented observational details. “Trading jackets, laughing ’bout how small it looks on you,” she sings on the hypnotic “deja vu,” as a chorus of backup Olivias exhale a scathing line of canned, can-barely-be-bothered laughter at such a romantic cliché: ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. “Guess the therapist I found for you, she really helped,” she shrugs on “good 4 u” — one of those kung fu lyrics that cuts its intended target in seven different places before he even realizes he’s bleeding. Rodrigo’s songs have lived-in details to spare, as though she had all this time been assembling a detailed dossier on the emotional minutiae of the teenage experience.

The remarkably potent Sour, out today, plays a similar game of bait-and-switch with expectations. Far from the muted chords of “drivers license”—and worlds away from the musical-theater sheen of her songs for Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series — the album’s opening track, “brutal,” crashes in with a torrent of loud, crunchy guitars, overtop of which Rodrigo’s dryly compressed voice lists a seemingly unending string of adolescent neuroses: “And I don’t stick up for myself / I’m anxious and nothing can help / And I wish I’d done this before / And I wish people liked me more.” The and and and and’s pile up like a teetering Jenga tower of stress. Rodrigo proved on “good 4 u” that she can do a very effective vocal sneer, and on “brutal” she saves her most caustic one for the adults who insist, in their rose-colored recollections, that their teenage years were the best of their lives. “I’m so sick of 17,” she sighs, “where’s my f****** teenage dream?!” It’s an exhilarating lyric, an expertly calibrated eye roll at anyone over the age of 18 — or maybe even at the previous generation’s entire philosophy about how pop music should be made.

“I’m very emo,” Rodrigo said in a recent Rolling Stone video interview, sitting beside her co-writer and producer Dan Nigro. “Dan was in an emo band, and he still tells me I’m emo — that’s how you know you’re really emo.”

Now 39, Nigro used to be the frontman of the Long Island-based band As Tall as Lions, who found moderate success in the booming East Coast emo-punk scene of the early aughts. He might seem an unlikely musical partner for Rodrigo, until you remember that perhaps the most prominent current producer of pop music made by young women, Jack Antonoff, is a veteran of the very same scene. (His first band, New Jersey-based Steel Train, was signed to the beloved, influential pop-punk label Drive-Thru Records.)

But as a one-time lowercase girl / emo kid / Drive-Thru Records enthusiast from suburban New Jersey, I do find it pretty surprising that two of the most successful producers in crafting pop music from a feminine point of view came out of that scene. Because, as I remember all too well, it was a realm almost entirely devoid of women’s voices.

“From my early-to-mid adolescence,” I wrote years ago in a reassessment of this period in my music-obsessed life, “I listened almost exclusively to music made by sad boys.” And it wasn’t just that girls’ perspectives were absent from this music that I loved so passionately during this confusing and hormonally tumultuous time: The Girl was always the reason the boys were sad. In these songs, she was often actively vilified, blamed for the Lead Singer Boy’s every earthly woe — and not infrequently the star of his violent revenge fantasies. “Even if her plane crashes tonight she’ll find some way to disappoint me,” went a song I can still sing by heart as an adult, “by not burning in the wreckage, or drowning at the bottom of the sea.” This was, to me, romantic, melodramatic, deep. I doodled lyrics like those on the backs of worksheets, in the margins of my diary. I played guitar — much better than I ever gave myself credit for then — but was too shy to be in a band, so I resorted to playing covers of those sorts of songs alone in my bedroom. Maybe I would have uploaded them to YouTube if it had existed.

I gravitated toward emo and punk music because I was seeking out some sort of alternative to life as I knew it, so I think if Olivia Rodrigo had existed when I was a teen I would have at first been a little skeptical of her mainstream popularity, her preternatural poise, her Disney past. But in the end I have to think I would have been pulled in by the oceanic undertow of her music’s subjectivity, an exquisitely detailed, deeply felt, young girl’s perspective that was woefully lacking in the music I listened to when I myself was learning how to parallel park.

Nigro’s production style for Rodrigo is both playful and atmospheric, conjuring a kind of dreamy internal space in which it seems like the listener is eavesdropping on the singer’s thoughts and impressions. Seemingly small, intimate moments — an ex sharing a Billy Joel song with his new flame, say, in “deja vu” — are underscored with operatic flair. Though updated for this world of social media surveillance and stream-of-consciousness text messages, this approach isn’t exactly new. It’s basically the foundation of modern pop music as we know it, dating back to the youth-oriented concerns of Brill Building songwriters in the 1950s and the early 1960s girl groups whose adolescent experiences were dramatized into three-minute symphonies thanks to Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound.”

But also: No thanks to Phil Spector. Because his unavoidable centrality in the story of modern pop music also reminds us that it is an industry with a long, troubling history of exploiting — or worse — the affective labor of teenage girls. Accusations of abuse now also loom over the previous generation’s most influential pop hitmaker, Dr. Luke — ironically the architect of so-called “empowering” female-driven millennial pop anthems like “Roar,” “Since U Been Gone” and, yep, f-ing “Teenage Dream.”

Rodrigo’s creative partnership with Nigro, though, seems to fit within a newer paradigm of pop star/producer power dynamics. Much like Antonoff’s pairings with some of the artists who have most directly inspired Rodrigo (Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey), and even a little like the intimate workings of Eilish’s bedroom pop laboratory with her brother Finneas, Rodrigo and Nigro present their work to the world as the result of a genuine, non-hierarchical collaboration. “I realize I’m okay at navigating my job because I played in a band for 10 years with three other very emotional, crazy people — myself probably being the most emotional crazy of the four of us,” Nigro told Vice earlier this year. “Having those experiences with my bandmates has really helped me work with so many different artists, because I’m able to understand what they’re going through and get them to feel open enough to be who they actually are.”

But maybe that supposedly “new” paradigm also has crucial antecedents scattered throughout musical history, too. Nigro’s language there bears a striking resemblance to the way Alanis Morissette has described her creative partnership with producer Glen Ballard, with whom she first worked on another album with which Sour finds cross-generational echoes: Jagged Little Pill. “glen’s presence with me had no agenda,” Morissette reflected in a 2015 essay commemorating the 20th anniversary of that landmark album and written — it must be said — all in lowercase letters. “this presence and this lack of projecting onto me ‘what i should be’ was the ultimate freedom and support i needed to crack open.”

In that essay, Morissette acknowledges that part of her success was lucky timing: In the mid-’90s there was suddenly, she writes, “a readiness, perhaps, for people to hear about the underbelly, the true experience of being a young, sensitive, and brave person in a patriarchal world.” That moment proved to be fleeting, though, and by the early aughts and my early teens the mainstream culture had shifted back to its norm of only caring about macho, masculine angst. Any girl trying to use the idioms of punk or emo to express herself — like, say, Avril Lavigne — was immediately regarded as an intruder, a poser or a sell-out until proven otherwise.

What I realize when I reflect back on the silent voices of my youth, though, is that we girls had so much to rage and yell and be sad about — maybe even more than the boys ever did. Because for all the sense of community it gave me in connecting with like-minded friends, the punk and emo scene often still replicated the most misogynistic impulses of the broader culture. Something I have been sitting with for the past few years, and which I have not even known how to begin to process, is that the songwriter and frontman of my favorite emo band — the one who wrote those plane-crash lyrics I sang along to endlessly — was accused of sexual misconduct by girls who, at the time, were about the same age that I was when I idolized him. When I think too hard about that, I want to scream until my lungs explode.

Rodrigo and her peers have come of age at a time when a lot of the gender norms that reinforce those exploitative power dynamics are breaking down, in part because most of them grow up with an awareness and acceptance of gender fluidity. Terms like “lowercase girl,” or just “girl,” are more pliable, inviting and optional than they used to be. Some very popular, very emotional musicians have also paved certain paths, whether that’s Swift, Lorde, or Paramore’s Hayley Williams. Even if I didn’t always hear it affirmed in my own adolescence, it’s heartening to now hear Rodrigo asserting, from the top of the charts, that girls have plenty to be emo about.

As Sour progresses, the ability to feel deeply and express herself becomes Rodrigo’s superpower. “Maybe I’m too emotional, or maybe you never cared at all,” she sings on the searing bridge of “good 4 u.” It’s not her, it’s him, she concludes, diagnosing an unfeeling ex as acting “like a damn sociopath.” Rodrigo refracts the shattering experience of first heartbreak through a multitude of different moods and genres, and it’s a testament to her transfixing strengths as a songwriter and a vocal performer that it only starts to feel repetitive one song from the end.

Some of the most promising moments on Sour come when Rodrigo widens her view beyond The Boy or even herself, toward the larger forces keeping kids of her generation feeling so emo. “jealousy, jealousy” fixes its frustration on the picture-perfect distortions of influencer culture: “I kinda wanna throw my phone against the wall,” Rodrigo groans. In response to a culture saturated with quick-fix life hacks, self-help truisms and therapy-speak, Rodrigo is refreshingly good at illuminating the space between what she knows she should feel and what she actually does feel. “I know their beauty’s not my lack,” she sings, harmonizing with herself so that the line sounds like one of those annoyingly tidy Instagram graphics with an inspirational note written in cursive. “Never doubted myself so much, like am I pretty, am I fun, boy?” she sings, airing her insecurities on the stirring “1 step forward, 3 steps back” (a song that interpolates, with permission, the piano riff from Taylor Swift’s “New Year’s Day” — the ultimate baton-pass). “I hate that I give you power over that kind of stuff,” Rodrigo sighs. And yet, how could she not? It’s brutal out there.

The final song on Sour finds one last opportunity to flip expectations. “hope ur ok” is not — as its title might suggest — a feel-good message to the ex of “drivers license,” thus cleanly and cathartically closing the narrative loop. It is instead a series of character sketches of kids Rodrigo once knew well and lost touch with over the years. Each of them carries their own trauma, which Rodrigo sketches in empathetic, economical writing (“he wore long sleeves ’cause of his dad”). The song is sad but hopeful, radically unsettling at times, and almost disarmingly earnest in its benevolently universal well-wishing. Again, Rodrigo plays the girl who’s always been observing everyone around her with a gimlet eye, whether they realized it or not. Maybe, she seems to be concluding on behalf of her much-misunderstood generation, this is a more realistic teenage dream. Not to be ecstatic, euphoric, eternally empowered. Just to be — as Rodrigo puts it in unpresuming lowercase — “ok.”

SOURCE: NPR.org

Chances are that, on the first or second listen, Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, “Sour,” will remind you of Billie Eilish’s own freshman effort from a little over two years ago. It’s not so much that, at 18, Rodrigo is still young enough to count a 19-year-old as an influence — although you do get the distinct impression at times that she’s taken a few lessons from Eilish to go along with the many, many pieces of homework she’s taken home from Taylor Swift. It’s more to do with feeling that same sensation with “Sour” that you might have when “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” first came across the midnight transom: If she’s this strong in her first very first at-bat, how mighty might she be when she’s 30? And then, why are we worrying about a dozen years down the line when there’s an album this good right in front of us? How sweet it is.

The good news is, a lot of the until-now-unheard tracks from “Sour” are even better than the three tracks that have already been out there. And those three tracks were already star-making, most of all, of course, “Drivers License,” which pretty well established that she’d passed “go” as a prodigy without wasting too much undue time with a learner’s permit. “Drivers License” put into motion Rodrigo’s penchant for turning basic teen melodrama into nearly the sturm und drang of opera, and the two subsequent singles, “Deja Vu” and “Good 4 U,” complemented that initial impression by making sure everyone knew she had as much pop-punk princess in her as balladic drama queen. But maybe none of these three singles went quite as far as some of the others on the new album do in establishing that she’s capable of some nifty turns of phrase and deeper insights to go with the oh my god I’m going to die up-and-down dynamics of those preview songs. She gives good stridency as a Young Woman Wronged, but her falsetto is a lovely thing that really deserves its own scholarship so it can go off to college, grad school and beyond, too.

The glory, though, of “Sour” is how unabashedly teenage it is. Maybe that goes without saying for a singer-songwriter who was 17 when she made this album … but actually, no, it doesn’t. Because the music industry has always loved teenagers — what’s not to love about having someone under contract who has that many more years ahead of her before she ages out of the demo? — but blatantly teenaged music is another thing. Different radio formats have long resisted songs that actually play up adolescent themes, for fear of alienating the product-buying 20-something listeners who don’t want to feel like they’re still sitting at the kids’ table. That’s why Swift ran into skepticism at the start singing about high school crushes in the likes of “Our Song,” until she was undeniable to the gatekeepers. Maybe even Swift wouldn’t have been quite bold enough, though, to put out as a first single a song that specifically pegged her as just having made her first pass through the DMV. So it’s a happy thing to report that Rodrigo kind of doubles down on her youth at various points throughout “Sour.” Rodrigo’s precocity goes without saying, to anyone who’s already heard her, but she’s still — delightfully — acting her age, not her deal size.

“I think I think too much ‘bout kids that don’t know me,” she sings in “Jealousy, Jealousy,” and it may set you to pondering the last time someone used the word “kid” on a superstar album to describe herself or her contemporaries. (Of course, she doesn’t use it nearly as often as she uses the words “fuck” and “fucking” as lyrical exclamations, so it’s not like we’re talking Kidz Bop territory here.) Rodrigo’s willingness to typecast herself as a person of youth for the time being is up front right at the outset, in the opening “Brutal,” which is like a “Summertime Blues” for the 2020s: “I’m so insecure I think/ That I’ll die before I drink… / I’m so sick of 17 / Where’s my fuckin’ teenage dream? / If someone tells me one more time / Enjoy your youth I’m gonna cry… / They say these are the golden years But I wish I could disappear.” The kicker: “And I’m not cool and I’m not smart / And I can’t even parallel park.” Alice Cooper did this teen angst thing almost as well when he sang “Eighteen,” but he did sound about 108 at the time. Olivia Rodrigo, for her part, does not sound a day over Skipped Senior Year to Become a Superstar.

“Brutal,” the song that makes it most clear she listened to her mom’s Hole records, also sets the autobiographical tone right away, which, if you’ve followed the IRL “Drivers License” drama, you know will be a key component. In the midst of the song’s cranky teen blues, she blurts, “I’m so tired that I might quit my job, start a new life.” She probably doesn’t mean a part-time job after school at the soda fountain, you may suss, as she quickly adds: “And they’d all be so disappointed / Cause who am I if not exploited.” That couplet ought to make Disney fear for a third season of “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” or maybe it’s just a passing moment of feeling caught up in the star-making machinery. Anyway, it’s the only time that she really comments in the album, obliquely or otherwise, on her position as a baby star. Because most of the rest of the album avoids that general ennui to focus on the very specific sourness of living without the boy who got away.

It might suck to be him right now — whoever the brown-eyed guy is; who could even speculate on such a thing? — but it’s good for everyone digging into the album that Rodrigo is so invested in being what Hayley Williams once called the misery business. Of the 11 songs on “Sour,” approximately or exactly eight form a downright concept album about one particular breakup. At least it seems to be just one: There are repeat references to the dude in question taking up with someone else exactly two weeks after their split, and other lyrics about her shock at how rapidly she’s been gotten over. This is a theme that works for songs that come out of divorce court, too, but her sheer admitted obsessiveness with the “Traitor” (“It took you two weeks to go off and date her,” goes the rhyme) is something that would seem a little unbecoming for a 40-year-old writer but seems perfectly, magnificently in line at 17. No matter how many generations you might be past what Rodrigo is experiencing in these songs, she makes you believe that her breakup is the stuff of an apocalypse now. And you’ve got to admire her commitment to keeping with the title emotion and not having even a single romantically un-spurned song, for variety or anything else. It’s some grand lemonade.

That Swift is her major inspiration in squeezing these lemons into song is nothing she tries to hide. When “Deja Vu” came out as her second single a few weeks back, she didn’t wait for anyone to notice that there’s a part of the song — where she’s singing “I know you got deja vu” — that sounds kind of like that angry-chanty thing that Swift occasionally works into her latter-day songs. Rodrigo came out in an interview and acknowledged that some of the arrangement was prompted by thinking of Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” so you don’t even have to go through the whole TS discography till you get to the moment where she was singing “‘I love you,’ ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” and have that “Oh, yeeeah” moment of recognition. Her indebtedness to Swift is mostly non-specific — except for “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back,” which drove fans in both camps a little crazy Thursday when the songwriting credits were revealed and Swift and Jack Antonoff appeared as co-writers on that one. It wasn’t an actual collaboration; Rodrigo just lifted the piano curlicue behind the verses on Swift’s “New Year’s Day,” the closing number of “Reputation,” and used that memorable riff for her verses, too. Honestly, Rodrigo could have come up with an entirely different basic track for her song and saved herself the shared royalties as well as the comparisons. But she also could have not used numerals for the title of “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” if she didn’t love the idea of having 1 + 3 = 13 as an overt homage to her spiritual mother. “Sour” is actually a very romantic album, when it comes down to it.. with Rodrigo unabashedly being in love with the confessional style and legacy of Swift.

It might get to be a bit much if Swift was the only one Rodrigo made you think of, but there are plenty of other ancestors to go around, including the aforementioned Williams, of Paramore fame, or Avril Lavigne for the moments when things get louder. For the moments when they get a lot softer, yes, it’s Eilish who comes to mind when there’s a kind of hush that falls over the proceedings — as it often does on an album with as many solo piano or solo finger-picking moments as “Sour.” Maybe the most Billie-esque track is “Jealousy, Jealousy,” partly because it opens with the kind of swell bass line you can imagine the bass-aholic Finneas coming up with, and some fuzzy guitar kicking in for punctuation, before her rising, multi-tracked vocals turn into a thing of choral beauty worthy of the most exquisite Eilish ballads like “I Love You.”

The song is no less beautiful when she’s singing “I’m so sick of myself / I’d rather be, rather be anyone, anyone else.” As Us magazine would say: The teen stars — they’re just like us! Self-exhausted, if not, in Rodrigo’s case, quite self-loathing. That the girl whom most other girls would be jealous of right now sings an entire song about wanting to do her own whole-body transfer into another identity, and kind of sounds like she means it, will only make her more relatable, of course. Think of the thousands or millions of young people about to be jealous of Olivia Rodrigo being jealous. It’s how pop works.

For her own Finneas, Rodrigo has found her brother from another mother in Daniel Nigro, who produced every song, played a lion’s share of the instruments and co-wrote all but a couple of the songs with the singer. He’s probably getting more streams in a minute with Rodrigo than he ever did in a year as the lead singer/guitarist of the indie band As Tall as Lions, and he’s surely not sorry about the tradeoff. One of the smartest things Rodrigo has done in her young life is make an investment in Nigro as a sympathetic collaborator. She clearly has a love for ’90s and oughts alt-rock, and she could have found someone who just adds a little hard-edged guitar riff here or there the way Dr. Luke used to with Kelly Clarkson or his other charges, but in Nigro, Rodrigo has someone who can go all-in with her on the abrasive stuff — where she’s not afraid to harden her lovely voice into something a little talkier or shriller — but also has the chops to be with her when she feels forlornly pretty, or prettily forlorn, and wants to do a chamber-folk thing.

If there’s anything that feels slightly like a hole (not to be confused with a Hole) on the album, it’s the kind of medium-tempo songs that might fully fill in the gaps between the three or four really loud songs and the dominant simple ‘n’ quiet ones. It’s hardly a major failing — with any luck, they’ll have lots of time to explore lots of spaces in-between the extreme dynamics that characterize “Sour.” Anyway, the best song on the album might be one that does kind of fall halfway between: “Happier,” a mid-sized, 6/8 ballad with a clever-but-real lyrical twist. After establishing the same lyrical bona fides as some of the other insta-memoir tracks (“Broke up a month ago,” etc.), Rodrigo takes the high road and decides she wishes her recent ex and his possible new love well. Or semi-well. Just not as well as what they were sharing six weeks ago. Or as Rodrigo puts it: “Think of me fondly when your hands are on her / I hope you’re happy, but don’t be happier.” That rhyme scheme is either a little rough or brilliant — I’m not sure which — but it works like sad gangbusters.

Not every lyric on the album is an instant classic, but among the verses that work just because they seem so unfiltered and teen-real, Rodrigo surely has her moments where it’s clear she’s been a quick study, sitting at the feet of the female pop singer-songwriter masters: “I kept quiet so I could keep you.” “Tried so hard to be everything that you liked / Just for you to say you’re not the compliment type.” “Doe-eyed as you buried me / One heart broke, four hands bloody” — now, there’s one her elders might wish they’d come up with. And the greatest thing she’s learned from Swift is how much specific details make the song (and, yes, make the gossip columns… but mostly make the song). Eye color, automobile color, number of days passed since the last romantic accident — these are the things that keep a young audience that’s actually been raised on confessional Top 40 fodder invested.

Even though Rodrigo rarely veers away from the album’s black-and-white focus on the aggravations of young love, there’s a glimpse of a Technicolor future in the closing track, “Hope Ur Okay,” in which the singer suddenly goes empathic for a world she secretly knows is suffering more than she is. The first verse recalls a boy she knew who was beaten by his possibly literally Bible-thumping parents; the second is about a probably lesbian middle school classmate whose “parents hated who she loved.” In using these anecdotes of young people encountering greater adversity than hers, Rodrigo almost seems to be doing her version of a Brandi Carlile song — it’s like “The Joke: Junior Version.” And it works.

But as much as you might want to cheer on the steady flashes of maturity that show up in her songwriting, the finest lyrical moment might come in “Good 4 U,” when she gets back to adolescent basics: “It’s like we never even happened, baby. What… the fuck… is up! Screw that! Screw you!” She may someday put pen to sheet music with the eloquence of Joni Mitchell, but we might never love her more than when she’s a profane kid, bluntly and prosaically spitting a verse about the end of a relationship like it’s the end of the world, because, of course, it is. Until album two, which we can only hope is as ridiculously good as this one.

SOURCE: Variety.com

Olivia Rodrigo released her highly anticipated debut album, “Sour,” on Friday.

The 18-year-old singer-songwriter burst into the spotlight earlier this year when her debut single, “Drivers License,” quickly became the biggest hit of 2021.

Insider’s music team (reporter Callie Ahlgrim and celebrity and music editor Courteney Larocca) listened to the new album on our own, jotting down our initial thoughts track by track.

Put simply, we’re obsessed. The 11-song collection draws from a vast array of influences, including ’60s psychedelia (“Deja Vu”), Paramore-flavored grunge (“Good 4 U”), acoustic balladry (“Enough For You”), and folksy storytelling (“Favorite Crime”). Strung together, it paints Rodrigo as a chameleonic vocalist, as well as one of the savviest songwriters working today.

Here is what we thought of each song on “Sour” upon first listen. (Skip to the end to see the only songs worth listening to and the album’s final score.)

“Brutal” is instantly magnetic.

AHLGRIM: Not to state the obvious, but opening your debut album with an off-the-cuff declaration (“I want it to be like, messy!”) is so perfect — and then to close the song with proof you weren’t kidding (“God, I don’t even know where to start”) is a brilliant full-circle moment.

Rodrigo invites you to dive into “Sour” headfirst, but warns you not to expect a polished pop persona. If her feelings are messy, her music should be, too.

Indeed, a big reason why Rodrigo’s songwriting is so powerful is that she seems hypnotically, almost obsessively, self-aware. “Brutal” is an ideal example of that power, though she might call it a vice.

“I’m so sick of 17 / Where’s my f—ing teenage dream?” is the new “I hate the headlines and the weather / I’m 19 and I’m on fire,” delivered this time with a healthy eye-roll. Rodrigo and Lorde both know how society loves a female wunderkind. It also loves to chew her up and spit her out.

So yeah, Rodrigo’s not falling for any of it. This is a girl who inspired frenzy and devotion with a song called “Drivers License,” and in the opening track, she pokes a hole in the circus tent: “I can’t even parallel park.”

To reduce “Brutal” to a teenage-angst banger, however, would be a disservice to the layers at work here. Questioning your identity, your looks, your reputation, your brain, who you love, where you fit into the world — these are lifelong struggles. Teenagers just tend to be more honest about them.

How much do I love this song? God, I don’t even know where to start.

LAROCCA: For the rest of this review I will be identifying as a teen. Ignore the fact that I turn 26 later this month — this song, and likely this entire album, are best served with a heaping helping of teenage angst. Thank God I never fully grew out of mine.

“Brutal” is a pop-punk banger that pulled me in so deeply, I instantly forgot I had an entire album to review as I hit the repeat button. Every line is delivered with more anguish than the last, until she shrugs it all off with a smirk (“God, it’s brutal out here”).

I do think it’s sad Rodrigo apparently relates to corporate burnout, so I’m choosing to believe her cowriter Dan Nigro came up with these lines: “And I’m so tired that I might / Quit my job, start a new life / And they’d all be so disappointed / ‘Cause who am I if not exploited.”

To be clear, this isn’t a complaint. It’s wildly relatable, but I’m not going to dig much further into it lest my boss reads this.

If “Brutal” is on full-boil, Rodrigo brings it back down to a simmer in the final moments to introduce her thesis statement: “Got a broken ego, broken heart / And God, I don’t even know where to start.”

“Traitor” is a masterful takedown wrapped in a beautiful package.

AHLGRIM: As the title suggests, “Traitor” is wily and skillful, mirroring the relationship Rodrigo resents. The sweet guitar strums and fluttery vocals obscure the torment within.

This song would feel right at home nestled on a tracklist next to “Dear John,” which is fitting, since “Speak Now” is Rodrigo’s favorite Taylor Swift album.

We all know Rodrigo is a devoted student in the Swiftian school of songwriting, and “Traitor” is an A+ in every category, from gently swooping melodies to coup de grâce couplets. “It took you two weeks to go off and date her / Guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor” gave me full-body chills.

LAROCCA: Rodrigo slows things way down on “Traitor,” but that doesn’t mean she lost any of her edge.

She hones in on a failed relationship, realizing that maybe all her paranoia wasn’t irrational after all — despite the reassurances (see: “little white lies”) her partner was spouting before he jumped into another relationship with his so-called friend two weeks later.

It’s a unique, complex type of pain that she somehow succinctly cracks open with a single lyric: “Guess you didn’t cheat / But you’re still a traitor.”

I’m also thrilled to report that Rodrigo continues to understand the power of bridges. Although it’s astonishing that it took until 2021 for someone to come up with this couplet: “God, I wish that you had thought this through / Before I went and fell in love with you.”

It’s almost obvious in its diaristic delivery, but that’s what makes it the perfect hook — it’s the kind of line that heartbroken girls are going to be screaming at the top of their lungs on highways for years to come. I can’t wait to be one of them.

“Drivers License” will probably be the defining song of 2021.

AHLGRIM: My true first-listen review of this song would be the text I sent my friend immediately after hearing it: “Listen to this and tell me it’s not ‘Save Myself’ by Ashe plus ‘Melodrama.’ I’m fully obsessed. And also emo.”

His response? “Holy crap,” and then, “Why did this song make me cry?”

Since that fateful day in January, “Drivers License” has apparently become my all-time second-most streamed song on Spotify, an account I’ve had since 2013. (Ariana Grande’s “Needy” better watch her back.)

Every time I turn it on, I brace myself for disappointment. It couldn’t possibly be as magical the 5th, the 10th, the 200th time… right? Rodrigo has consistently proved me wrong.

My story is not unique. In fact, it’s so common that even “Saturday Night Live” had to get a piece of the action. So what can I say about “Drivers License” that hasn’t been said? It’s already one of the most iconic breakup songs in history, and rightfully so.

LAROCCA: I know this review is called a “first listen” but I don’t even want to try estimating the number of times I’ve listened to “Drivers License” since it crashed into our collective psyche four months ago.

However, if you are curious about my initial thoughts, there’s concrete proof that I was sending it around to everyone I know the weekend it dropped.

Clearly I, like anyone with ears, know this record-breaking track is quite likely the best song that will be released all year — that is, if there aren’t others on this very album that will surpass its excellence. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of your first heartbreak — from the “I know we weren’t perfect but I’ve never felt this way for no one” to That Bridge.

It’s interesting to consider the context it was written in, too. “Drivers License” was written last year, while everyone was trapped indoors, listening to sad music, thinking back to happier times, with nowhere to go. Driving aimlessly through the suburbs while dissecting all of the feelings bubbled up inside your chest is an evergreen mood, but it hits closer to home when it’s all we could do with our time.

Whatever, you get it. This song is great, and you’ve likely heard it a zillion times by now. Or watched the “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Or seen her perform it at the BRIT Awards.

We can move on — or not. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

“1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” interpolates Taylor Swift’s “New Year’s Day.”

AHLGRIM: It’s slightly distracting to anchor this song in the “New Year’s Day” piano riff, because my brain is immediately expecting to hear, “There’s glitter on the floor after the party.”

But the deeper Rodrigo gets into her own rendition, the more it works. The juxtaposition of Swift’s bright chords with Rodrigo’s self-doubt is very evocative. As Swift has said, there’s a lot of fear that comes with being in love.

“1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” definitely feels like a song Rodrigo wrote by herself in her bedroom, likely before the “Drivers License” frenzy, when “Sour” was still supposed to be an EP.

True, it’s less artful than her other songs — but it’s a taste of pure unfiltered Rodrigo, the person who covered “Cruel Summer” and shared rough piano demos before knowing that millions of people would hear them, or speculate about her personal life.

I also appreciate the peek into Rodrigo’s mindset when she was actually dating this boy, in the the throes of conscious-altering, sacrificial love; it gives the breakup songs more gravity.

LAROCCA: As a Professional Swiftie, the piano intro to Swift’s “Reputation” closer never fails to make my heart swell. But knowing Rodrigo previously said she couldn’t get in the headspace to write any love songs for “Sour,” the sample serves to juxtapose a relationship you stay in when it’s hard or it’s wrong or you’re making mistakes with one that could send you home crying at the end of the night.

Positioning this track immediately after “Drivers License” gives Rodrigo the opportunity to literally take three steps back. This appears to be the only track on the album that explores her emotions from within the relationship, as opposed to the tortured aftermath.

But while “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” fills out our understanding of the relationship at the heart of “Sour,” its familiarity could result in getting lost in the shuffle among all these heavy-hitters.

“Deja Vu” is a perfect song.

AHLGRIM: I know I called “Drivers License” one of the most iconic breakup songs in history less than five minutes ago, and I stand by that. But part of me thinks I actually like “Deja Vu” better.

There is something so delirious and addictive about this song: the audible smirk in “so unique,” the whispered “I love you” buried in between the chorus and the verse, the controlled screaming in the bridge. I wouldn’t change one single thing about it.

LAROCCA: OK, I have a bone to pick with everyone who didn’t pull their weight in the pursuit of a No. 1 debut for “Deja Vu.” I was doing my part so where were all of you? This song is so clever and deserved more flowers than it ultimately received.

I’m not going to waste my time explaining this one — you’re either someone who already relistened to it enough times to finally hear the “I love you” buried deep after “Now I bet you even tell her how you love her / In between the chorus and the verse,” or you’re tasteless. Sorry!

“Good 4 U” is a delicious spoonful of punky pop-rock.

AHLGRIM: “Good 4 U” is what would happen if you put Paramore’s “Misery Business,” Demi Lovato’s “Don’t Forget” era, the explicit version of “Potential Breakup Song,” and the soundtrack of “Jennifer’s Body” in a blender.

It’s also the most cathartic song on the album. When I listen to “Good 4 U” at full volume, in the shower or in the car, I actually giggle with delight when Rodrigo abandons all poise: “Well screw that, and screw you!” I’ve rarely heard spite wielded so persuasively.

LAROCCA: “Good 4 U” sounds like a song that would’ve been included on the soundtrack for a Disney-adjacent movie in the early 2000s and I mean that as the highest form of flattery. As someone who has been incorporating Lindsay Lohan’s “Ultimate” from “Freaky Friday” into her regular listening lately, I can’t get enough.

Every second is pure unadulterated brattiness: the way she spits “Well, screw that and screw you;” the crescendo in the bridge; that final kill shot (“Like a damn sociopath!”).

Rodrigo is the main character, and listening to “Good 4 U” will make you feel like one, too.

“Enough For You” has some of the best lyrics on the album.

AHLGRIM: I’d like to point out how genius this sequence is. Looking at the tracklist, “Good 4 U” and “Enough For You” seem like a weird pairing because their titles are so similar. But the difference in syntax highlights an important tonal shift: the former is sarcastic and bitchy, while the latter brings Rodrigo back to earth, casting off her whimsical camouflage.

For the past two songs, Rodrigo has draped her pain in psychedelic teasing (“Don’t act like we didn’t do that s— too!”) and hyperbolic accusations (“Like a damn sociopath!”). Here, she lays herself bare.

Falling out of love is one thing, and getting dumped is quite another. But feeling inadequate in the eyes of someone you’d do anything for is an exquisite kind of anguish, and Rodrigo captures it beautifully, hauntingly, without flinching.

The song’s genius is solidified with a last-minute revision in the final chorus: “You say I’m never satisfied / But I don’t think that’s true,” becomes, “You say I’m never satisfied / But that’s not me, it’s you.” She finally makes the painful subtext explicit and it feels like a release, a mini liberation.

LAROCCA: “Enough For You” broke my heart in a way I hadn’t ever experienced before. As someone who, like Rodrigo, grew up admiring Swift for exposing her beating heart so I could better understand my own, I can deeply appreciate the excruciating vulnerability Rodrigo showcases here.

However, I’m no longer a young fan looking toward someone older and wiser. Instead, I’m seeing my past reflected back at me through the lens of someone younger, who’s experiencing that familiar pain like it’s brand new — because for her, it is.

I just want to give Rodrigo the biggest (fully vaccinated) hug — and tell her to keep writing, because there’s something so impressive and stunning about the way she makes sense of her sadness.

“Happier” reflects the stress and strain of post-heartbreak healing.

AHLGRIM: Rodrigo told The Guardian’s Laura Snapes that she wrote “Happier” on the set of “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” while the cast was filming “a really poppy, happy dance number.” She tucked herself away in between takes, armed with her acoustic guitar, and tried to regain some dignity.

If you’ve ever cried in the bathroom at work and then gone back to your desk as if nothing happened, this song might feel like a personal attack. (If you haven’t, you’re a liar.)

Rodrigo writes like she’s on the verge of combustion, and as Snapes notes, her delivery mirrors that tension. When the chorus spills out awkwardly, it recalls the strain of a forced smile. It’s an example of what Max Martin might call “incorrect songwriting,” which is a compliment.

LAROCCA: The chorus of “Happier” is a summation of the conflicting emotional palette spread out across these 11 tracks: “I hope you’re happy / But not like how you were with me / I’m selfish, I know / I can’t let you go / So find someone great but don’t find no one better.”

Rodrigo’s giving us the lyrical equivalent of a Sour Patch Kid: First she’s sour, then she’s sweet — until you take the next bite.

“Jealousy, Jealousy” is simultaneously fun, distressing, chaotic, and stylish.

AHLGRIM: “Jealousy, Jealousy” easily claims a top-three bridge on the album, along with “Drivers License” and “Deja Vu.” It roils and churns like the ocean is throwing a temper tantrum.

Rodrigo’s common sense is getting tossed around like a sailboat. Sure, she knows comparison is unhealthy and illogical. But as François Lelord wrote, “Knowing and feeling are two different things, and feeling is what counts.” (Maybe “Hector and the Search for Happiness” was one of the aforementioned self-help books Rodrigo read to impress her ex.)

Knowing that Rodrigo is a fan of Baby Queen, I wonder if this vibe was partially inspired by “Buzzkill,” which had the most rousing bridge of 2020.

Both artists write coming-of-age lyrics that are insightful and cutting, but never condescending. When Rodrigo rolls her eyes at “paper-white teeth and perfect bodies” on Instagram, she’s indicting her obsessive scrolling as much as anything else.

I dare anyone to try and reduce “Sour” to a “breakup album.” Rodrigo is tackling complex psychologies and societal ills that would daunt even the most seasoned songwriters, and she’s making it look stylish.

LAROCCA: Rodrigo often gets compared to Swift for her storytelling abilities and clear fandom — but Swift’s influence can’t be felt at all on “Jealousy, Jealousy.” Instead, Rodrigo seemingly came to the recording session after listening to Fiona Apple and Lorde. The alternative piano on the bridge could’ve been plucked right out of the ’90s, while the chorus sounds like it’d be right at home on the latter’s “The Love Club” EP.

The lyrics are tongue-in-cheek — even more so when you realize Rodrigo probably knew the song would draw co-com-comparisons to other artists.

And yet, I wouldn’t trust this song in anyone else’s hands; Rodrigo exudes the utter coolness this song requires, but she’s still a believable narrator. It’s not unimaginable that, even despite being 2021’s breakout star, she’s acutely familiar with the stomach drop that accompanies social media doom-scrolling, and coming to the conclusion that everyone’s living a better life.

“Favorite Crime” is a fascinating departure from Rodrigo’s hyper-literal writing style.

AHLGRIM: I love a song that’s built on an extended metaphor (“Hotel California,” “Take Me to Church,” “Getaway Car”) and “Favorite Crime” is plenty worthy to continue this tradition.

I don’t love that Rodrigo, who I’m coming to see as a sister-daughter hybrid, is willing to shoulder the blame for a boy’s mistreatment.

But the tapestry she weaves, using just a few kindred images, results in some of her most visceral storytelling yet (“One heart broke, four hands bloody,” “Every time a siren sounds / I wonder if you’re around”).

This track also boasts one of Rodrigo’s best vocal performances: warm, weary, yet completely in control, all at once. When those harmonies kicked in for the final chorus, I ascended to another dimension. I haven’t returned.

LAROCCA: “Favorite Crime” is one gut punch after another, swelling softly until the pace picks up on the bridge.

But the heartbreak quietly makes room for a glimpse of freedom.

In lines like, “‘Cause I was going down, but I was doing it with you,” Rodrigo is still very much entangled in the mess her partner left behind. But when she begins dueting with herself on the penultimate verse, she frees herself, stepping out of the wreckage on her own.

“Hope Ur OK” walks a delicate balance between heartbreaking and heartwarming.

AHLGRIM: I love how this song sounds like a letter. Not only is there no hook, but Rodrigo doesn’t simply repeat the same chorus — she adjusts along the way to fit the narrative. It makes the words feel more sincere, and the overall tone more intimate.

Rodrigo could have phoned in a structurally simple, stick-it-to-the-man anthem to close her album on a progressive note (Dua Lipa’s “Boys Will Be Boys” comes to mind). It could have felt corny, or manufactured by a brand specialist.

Instead, “Hope Ur OK” plays more like a heartfelt stream of consciousness that demanded to be heard.

LAROCCA: As I said earlier, this album is a Sour Patch Kid. So it makes poetic sense for it to end with something sweet.

The most Swiftian of all the songs on this tracklist, Rodrigo goes full storyteller on “Hope Ur OK” as she reflects back on two people she knew at different stages of her life, pondering where they ended up and sending well wishes to wherever they are.

The final lines — “God, I hope that you’re happier today / ‘Cause I love you, and I hope that you’re okay” – serve as a universal sendoff to these childhood pals, the album’s central romantic partner, and the listener themself. And when concerts inevitably return, it’ll take on a new life as thousands of fans sing it back to her, too.

Final Grade: 9.5/10

AHLGRIM: This is everything I could ever want from a pop album. If it had been released when I was 17 and heartbroken, I fear I would’ve changed my name to Olivia and tattooed “SOUR” on my forehead.

Luckily, I am 25 and slightly more secure, so I’ll settle for buying a “sociopath” t-shirt and belting “Brutal” at every karaoke bar I can find.

If “Drivers License,” “Deja Vu,” and “Good 4 U” are any indication — and it must be noted that Rodrigo has a prodigious talent for selecting singles — then I will only become more obsessed with “Sour” as it ages.

Every time I hear a new Rodrigo song, I’m like, “Oh OK, this one is my favorite.” Then I play it to death and wait to get tired of it, but never do.

I had a similar experience with this tracklist. I kept expecting to lose interest, kept bracing for impact — perhaps an underwhelming ballad, or an overcooked electro-pop mess. All I found was increasing awe. I suppose smart, vulnerable songwriting transcends the natural laws of fatigue.

I’d be suspicious of anyone who hears this album (I mean really hears it) and never once swoons, aches, or smolders with longing. The world is so big, the spectrum of musical taste so vast, yet in this album beats a tender heart. You can’t scoff at something so hungry and raw in any way that matters.

“Drivers License” became such a phenomenon for that exact reason, and many wondered if Rodrigo could ever top it. You’d be forgiven for making that assumption, but you’d still be wrong. “Sour” proves she’s here to stay, and it’ll likely go down as one of the great debuts in songwriting history.

LAROCCA: This album is a roller coaster of emotion, climbing toward acceptance, then dropping headfirst right back into sadness, passing through annoyance, jealousy, anger, and possessiveness along the way.

While I wish I could’ve experienced this with 17-year-old ears, I’m fortunate enough to belong in Rodrigo’s other core demographic: girls with water placements in their birth charts. (She is a self-proclaimed “spicy pisces” after all.)

I’m also a firm believer that teen girls have some of the best taste in music, and it’s been glorious to witness how the next generation’s songwriters will take inspiration from millennial artists, baring their own souls across shimmery synths and folksy guitar plucks. If Rodrigo is any foreshadowing of how Gen-Z is going to shape the music industry for years to come, then we’re driving in the right direction.

And while I joked in my “Brutal” review that I was identifying as a teen for my listening experience, there is a widespread appeal to the kaleidoscopic sentiments Rodrigo navigates throughout these 34 minutes.

After hearing it for the first time on May 11, a colleague of mine claimed he didn’t understand why everyone loved “Drivers License” so much. Yesterday, he willingly ate his words, admitting he hadn’t turned the track off in a week.

Don’t ever underestimate an 18-year-old girl with a broken heart, a guitar, and a deep understanding of Swift’s discography. She’ll sing you to tears.

Worth listening to:
“Brutal”
“Traitor”
“Drivers License”
“Deja Vu”
“Good 4 U”
“Enough For You”
“Happier”
“Jealousy, Jealousy”
“Favorite Crime”
“Hope Ur OK”

Background music:
“1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back”

Split decision:
N/A

Press skip:
N/A

*Final album score based on songs per category (1 point for “Worth listening to,” .5 for “Background music,” .5 for “Split decision,” 0 for “Press skip”).

SOURCE: Insider.com