![]() Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I'll grow. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn't have to be the best work that I'll ever do. There's sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you're that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I'll ever be able to do. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first, people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it's a great introduction to the world of SOUR.” And ‘brutal’ is actually one of my favorite songs on SOUR, but it almost didn't make it on the record. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people's. “Before I met my collaborator, producer-and cowriter in many instances-Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. There's only so much you can write about when you're in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” I think that's a true testament to how productive rest can be. ![]() I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren't very good. While making SOUR, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive-if not more-than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of ‘enough for you’ going on a walk around my neighborhood I got the idea for ‘good 4 u’ in the shower. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I'm driving for that same reason. “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you're the most creative when you're doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. You're okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. I felt all those things, and they're still very real, but I'm definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. “I called the record SOUR because it was this really sour period of my life-I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a Jagged Little Pill for Gen Z. ![]() Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’-an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021-SOUR combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know-on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level-exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter's going through.” “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) tells Apple Music. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling-none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. ![]()
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