Olivia Rodrigo interview: 'God, what a crazy trajectory'
Entertainment
She achieved overnight success that isn't supposed to be possible in the modern music industry
(Web Desk) - With one song, she achieved the sort of overnight success that isn't supposed to be possible in the modern, fractured music industry.
Drivers License, released in January 2021, broke Spotify records in just 24 hours. Then it broke them again. Seven days later, it entered the UK and the US charts at number one.
Even her record label was taken by surprise.
"I think we'd all be lying if we said we knew the extent of what was coming," Polydor's president Ben Mortimer admitted.
Drivers License wasn't a one-off. Rodrigo's debut album, Sour, sparked a pop-punk renaissance, spawned four more chart hits, and earned three Grammy Awards.
The star was invited to the White House as part of a vaccination drive, and used her Glastonbury debut to protest the overturning of Roe v Wade, which removed the federal right to abortion in the US.
Amidst it all, she returned to film her final episodes of the Disney series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series; and staged her first tour, cautiously playing smaller venues because, prior to the 2021 Brit Awards, she'd never played any of her own material in front of an audience.
"Looking back, I'm like, God, what a crazy trajectory," says the singer, now 20 years old, when we meet in London in August.
"It was, obviously, just absurd and crazy. I'd been writing songs and working my whole life, but it did seem sort of instantaneous.
"And it wasn't until very recently that I began to process how irrevocably my life was changed in a span of a few months."
A self-described introvert, she stepped out of the limelight as soon as the Sour tour wrapped up in July last year.
"I spent a lot of time alone," she says, describing long days filled with classic movies, knitting and baking oatmeal cookies.
"My God, that makes me sound so lame," she laughs. "Look at the old woman over here!"
But it wasn't long before she was drawn back to her first love - music.
Rodrigo has been obsessed with writing and performing for as long as she can remember. As a toddler, she would make up songs about getting lost in the grocery store, or decorating Christmas trees. She even released one of them as a festive gift for fans in 2022.
Her first "proper song" (her words) was a piano ballad called Naive Girl, which she posted to Instagram at the age of 12. It's a little rough, but it already bears the hallmarks of her sound: Angst-ridden lyrics, octave-spanning vocals, and a flair for the dramatic.
