Olivia Rodrigo Archives

The singer-songwriter also opened up about being compared to Rodrigo.

GAYLE has become a teen pop sensation overnight due to the success of her viral hit “abcdefu,” and is now getting praise from her peers. In an interview with E! News published on Thursday (Jan. 20), the 17-year-old explained how surreal the success has been and revealed that 2021’s breakthrough pop star Olivia Rodrigo has not only been in touch with her, but has also been incredibly supportive of her journey.

“Olivia Rodrigo DMed me. That was insane,” GAYLE shared. “She was just congratulating me on the success of the song. She told me that I was killing it and that was very just nice to hear from her, especially because she’s just such an amazing artist and talented human being.”

Though Rodrigo has reached out to GAYLE, this doesn’t mean they’re planning to collaborate on a track — at least not yet. “I would love to collaborate with Olivia. I had an opportunity to ask that but I didn’t because, you know, everybody wants to collaborate with Olivia Rodrigo,” the “Ur Just Horny” singer explained. She added that it would be “amazing, but I’m also not going to be like stalking her for it because she knows what she wants to do.”

With the popularity of both GAYLE’s debut single and Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” fans of both of the artists sometimes comment on their similarities. For GAYLE, she sees the comparisons as a compliment.
“I’m so grateful and so happy that people could look at my music and even just think it’s maybe possibly the high quality of Olivia’s is. The only problem that I have with comparisons is when they start competing us against each other,” she said. “I truly believe that we both can be great in our own ways, and she’s already great. And I’m just trying to do my thing and not suck, you know?”

“Abcdefu” is currently in its second week at No. 1 on both the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts (dated Jan. 22). The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 51, but has since climbed to the No. 9 spot on the chart also dated Jan. 22.

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Olivia Rodrigo does not, as a general rule, read the comments.

“Sometimes you see one thing and then you’re thinking about it all day,” says the 18-year-old singer and songwriter responsible for 2021’s biggest debut album. “It’s the antithesis of good creativity.”

Late one night last May, though, she made an exception. Rodrigo’s smash LP, “Sour,” had just come out, and with it a lyric video on YouTube for the album’s empathy bomb of a closer, “Hope Ur OK.” Over layers of dreamy electric guitar, the song stitches together “stories that I’ve collected throughout my life,” Rodrigo says, “of people that I’ve known who’ve grown up in broken homes or have parents that didn’t accept them.”

With its focus on the trauma of others — a middle-school friend whose parents “hated who she loved,” a towhead blond who “wore long sleeves ’cause of his dad” — “Hope Ur OK” is in some ways an outlier on “Sour,” which otherwise takes a proudly autobiographical approach to the pleasures and torments of young love in songs such as Rodrigo’s pair of No. 1 hit singles, the gloriously melodramatic “Drivers License” and the gloriously caustic “Good 4 U.” But it also demonstrates this Disney Channel veteran’s desire to reflect something of her generation. So Rodrigo was curious to see how it had landed.

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The air is musty, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is playing on an ancient TV by the door, and Olivia Rodrigo is flipping through racks of slip dresses and flared pants. “What’s your style?” she asks. I tell her, unhelpfully, that I’m looking for something I might actually wear. She nods and says, “Vibes.”

We’re at a vintage shop in East Los Angeles, one the 18-year-old singer-songwriter frequented while working on her debut album, Sour. She was out late last night at the American Music Awards, but she’s moving so quickly this morning you’d never guess. She’s using one hand to browse, the other to grip a matcha latte, and somehow, without my noticing, has managed to collect at least five pieces under her elbow.

She suggests, for me, a T-shirt reading #1 MOM. I explain why I can’t take it home: once you’re in your 30s, there’s no room for irony about motherhood. Instead, the winner is a baby blue tee with a spy plane on it. “It’s soft,” she says, handing it my way. I can’t describe why it’s cool. It just is.

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