How Olivia Rodrigo went from Disney princess to pop queen

Olivia Rodrigo does not, as a general rule, read the comments. “Sometimes you see one thing and then you’re thinking about it all day,” says the 18-year-old singer and songwriter responsible for 2021’s biggest debut album. “It’s the antithesis of good creativity.” Late one night last May, though, she made an exception.

Rodrigo’s smash LP, “Sour,” had just come out, and with it a lyric video on YouTube for the album’s empathy bomb of a closer, “Hope Ur OK.” Over layers of dreamy electric guitar, the song stitches together “stories that I’ve collected throughout my life,” Rodrigo says, “of people that I’ve known who’ve grown up in broken homes or have parents that didn’t accept them.” With its focus on the trauma of others — a middle-school friend whose parents “hated who she loved,” a towhead blond who “wore long sleeves ‘cause of his dad” — “Hope Ur OK” is in some ways an outlier on “Sour,” which otherwise takes a proudly autobiographical approach to the pleasures and torments of young love in songs such as Rodrigo’s pair of No. 1 hit singles, the gloriously melodramatic “Drivers License” and the gloriously caustic “Good 4 U.”

But it also demonstrates this Disney Channel veteran’s desire to reflect something of her generation. So Rodrigo was curious to see how it had landed. “I was literally just crying,” she recalls of her midnight scroll, which brought up the appreciative words of a girl forced to raise her younger siblings and of a trans kid “kicked out at 17,” as one commenter wrote. “Seeing people share their own experiences of things that were so devastating, and how this song gave them hope — I just didn’t expect anything like that to come out of my album.” The fans she’d moved were just a fraction of the millions she’s made in the whirlwind 11 months since “Drivers License” dropped in early January and became an instant pop phenomenon.

A slow-building power ballad about a young woman sobbing as she motors through the suburbs in the wake of a painful breakup, “Drivers License” seemed to channel an eternal ache even as it cleverly nodded to a bit of real-life gossip involving Rodrigo and fellow Disney performer Joshua Bassett. The song topped Billboard’s Hot 100 for eight consecutive weeks and inspired a sketch on “Saturday Night Live”; eventually it helped propel “Sour” to a No. 1 bow of its own. Spotify reported that “Drivers License” was its most streamed song of 2021 and “Sour” its most streamed album; Apple Music stated that more of its users read the lyrics of “Drivers License” this year than read those of any other song — a distinction that might please Rodrigo even more than the rest. Now she’s capping her breakout year with seven Grammy nominations, including nods in the four major categories of album of the year, record and song of the year (both for “Drivers License”) and best new artist. Rodrigo is the 13th person in Grammys history to score all four nominations in the same year.

Tribune News Service