Born two years post-Napster, two years pre-YouTube, Rodrigo grew up with music of all varieties at her fingertips. When she was little, Rodrigo and her mother made a habit of grabbing records indiscriminately from the thrift store, exposing her to the mistiness of Carole King and the muscle of Pat Benatar. Bucking expectations about the kind of sounds she might gravitate toward? That’s just part of the fun. It’s not particularly elegant-it’s not meant to be. “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” she snarls, wisecracking about the way pop culture romanticizes youth. Abandoning both the gossamer falsetto and the emotive belt that power “drivers license,” Rodrigo adopts a wry sprechstimme on “brutal” to rattle off her grievances: self-doubt, impossible expectations, her inability to parallel park. Rodrigo’s first trick: Seconds into the lugubrious strings that open the record, she and her producer, Dan Nigro, abruptly switch to grunge guitar and distortion.
The matter of failed romance is central to Sour, a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief. (If you must know, it’s said to be about Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s HSM:TM:TS co-star, who has since been linked to another Disney star.) A gossipy real-life backstory aided-though certainly did not precipitate-the song’s rise. “drivers license” outlined a crushing breakup, the contours of which became clearer in subsequent singles. Then she was invited on as the musical guest.īut most of us can know how Olivia Rodrigo felt when she wrote her debut album, Sour: so gutted by heartbreak she simply couldn’t talk about anything else. Since then, she’s graced magazine covers, sung at the Brits, and become the subject of an SNL sketch.
By January 12, she had smashed streaming records and blanketed TikTok with her debut single, “drivers license,” a piano-driven power ballad steeped in suburban malaise and teen anguish. On January 7, she was playing in the celebrity minor leagues, the not-quite-18-year-old star of the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Few people on Earth can know how Olivia Rodrigo feels right now even by today’s standards of viral fame, her rise has been exceptional.
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