![]() ![]() ![]() In a way, the flattening effect of the internet has worked in her favor, allowing her-someone who has been on TV for roughly a third of her life and is signed with the biggest record company in the world-to slip into the role of the underdog. Like her seeming newness, her earnestness, the heartbreak baked into her ascent, it’s one of the qualities that make her easy to root for. This minor subversion of expectations has given Rodrigo a low-key rebel status. To anyone familiar with the history of Disney darlings and the morality clauses that typically bind them, the profanity that peppers Sour will stand out as a break from type. Meanwhile, Rodrigo is still very much a part of the Disney ecosystem, reprising her role in the second season of HSM:TM:TS, which debuted just last week. It’s easy to hear what he heard in the homemade snippet: a gently tumbling melody, Rodrigo’s flute-like lilt, a winning balance of pettiness and wisdom. On “happier,” a sweet-and-sour ballad that appeared in demo form on Rodrigo’s Instagram in early 2020, she grapples with the faulty narrative of female rivalry: “And now I’m picking her apart/Like cutting her down will make you miss my wretched heart.” It was this song that captured the attention of Nigro, a former emo band frontman who’s written with Carly Rae Jepsen and Conan Gray. “I wore makeup when we dated ’cause I thought you’d like me more,” she sings over fingerpicked guitar on the tearful “enough for you.” It’s a shot at her ex for underappreciating her, but also a hard lesson about not making concessions. She’s said that the shouty bridge in Swift’s “Cruel Summer” directly inspired her own in “deja vu” “1 step forward, 3 steps back” interpolates the reputation song “New Year's Day.” And publicly inveighing against a heartbreaker, then sauntering off with the last word? How very Swiftian.īut there’s more to Rodrigo’s writing than revenge Sour gives her occasion to examine her own insecurities. Like her idol, Rodrigo treats emotional turmoil like jet fuel, and laces her lyrics with specifics-a Billy Joel song she and her ex listened to together, the self-help books she read to impress him. Of Rodrigo’s many influences, she’s most obviously styled herself after Taylor Swift, whose work she praises often and emphatically. The fluidity of her approach creates a sense of play that balances out the record’s more sullen moments-the self-righteous sprawl of “traitor,” for example, or the sinister extended metaphor of “favorite crime.” Like any teenager, Rodrigo is trying on identities. The range of her taste, and her disinterest in choosing a lane, animate Sour queue up a track at random, and you might hear pop-punk fireworks à la Paramore (“good 4 u”), dewy-eyed soft balladry à la Ingrid Michaelson (“1 step forward, 3 steps back”), or alt-rock squall à la the Kills (“jealousy, jealousy”). 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. But 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. ![]()
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