Two years ago, on her angst-ridden anthem “Brutal,” Rodrigo blurted out “I’m not cool, and I’m not smart/And I can’t even parallel park” to the tune of more than half a billion streams. The parallel-parking thing - funny story. It’s all pretty typical for a 20-year-old driver, except for the fact that the calendar on her car’s display screen reads “Rolling Stone interview.”
Accutane, the acne med she’s been on for about six months, makes her lips perpetually dry, so there’s some Burt’s Bees and two travel tubes of Aquaphor jostling around in the cup holder.
Rodrigo has a killer late-July outfit on - short, summery floral dress tall, brown leather boots her fingers decked out in rings - but she’s pretty bummed about the new pimple between her eyebrows. We’re sitting in Rodrigo’s black Range Rover in L.A.’s Highland Park, stopped outside her producer Dan Nigro’s home studio. The sound of Guts is noticeably tougher than its predecessor, as if taking Sour’s Elvis Costello-indebted opener Brutal as its starting point: more distorted guitars, a live sound underlined by the presence of count-ins and discussions among the musicians about which song they’re playing next, a hint of grunge-era alt-rock in the quiet-loud dynamics of Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl and a sprinkling of sprechgesang vocals that probably have something to do with Wet Leg, but which, allied to the lumbering syncopated rhythm and massed-vocal chorus of Get Him Back!, more clearly conjure up the spectre of early 00s rap-rock.Oh, my God - look!” Olivia Rodrigo says. Any intimations that their subjects are fellow celebrities are smartly batted away in interviews, among them the persistent rumour that Guts’s lead single Vampire – which stirs both polarities of Rodrigo’s style together with a hint of Broadway showstopper – is aimed at Swift, who was given 50% of the songwriting credits to Rodrigo’s Deja Vu after similarities with the former’s Cruel Summer were pointed out better to present something that feels familiar to her audience’s daily lives than an acerbic transmission from a distant star-studded universe. They stripped away both the left-field electronic aspects of Eilish’s sound and the gothic horror aspects of her lyrics in favour of big ballads and polished pop-punk – inhabiting a musical universe where Avril Lavigne’s Let Go and Pink’s Missundaztood occupy the same position of influence that the Stooges’ and the New York Dolls’ eponymous debuts occupied during punk itself – and song titles that read like double-underlined phrases in an adolescent diary: Guts features Get Him Back!, Pretty Isn’t Pretty, Bad Idea Right? and Love Is Embarrassing. If the rise of Billie Eilish obviated the need for teenage listeners to distil universal, #relatable lessons from Swift’s sagas of romance and enmity among young habitués of the entertainment world – Eilish was a teenager, talking about teenage stuff, with nary a film star boyfriend nor supermodel frenemy in sight – then Rodrigo’s songs rendered things more straightforward still. It broke sales records, won Grammys and made her the solitary new artist in the last two years admitted to pop’s rarefied upper echelons, the multi-platinum realm of Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, where albums don’t just sell on release, they keep on doing so for years: Guts is being launched into a Top 20 that Sour has yet to vacate. You would be hard-pushed to call her 2021 debut album, Sour, anything other than a phenomenon. It feels realistic, partly because it’s studded with self-loathing at her apparent ingratitude and worries that she’s “playing the victim” and partly because Rodrigo clearly knows what she’s talking about. “I wanted it so I got it,” she admits, before making clear it wasn’t what she bargained for: being treated “like a tourist attraction”, haunted by dreams of being in a car without brakes that “can’t swerve off the road”. Between shimmering guitars and a doleful piano line, a song from Olivia Rodrigo’s second album called Making the Bed offers a grim picture of fame.
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