It’s safe to say that Olivia Rodrigo is a different person than she was when she released her debut album SOUR — which is why she says she got “freaked out” about writing about her current life on her new album GUTS.
Speaking to Phoebe Bridgers for Interview magazine, Olivia says, “There’s a sort of wide-eyed innocence to the first album that lots of people picked up on, and I kind of freaked out this time being like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have this 17-year-old heartbreak that everyone’s had. My life is different now.’”
Case in point: Her #1 hit “vampire.” She says, “I was so nervous to put out this song, especially the line, ‘fame f*****’ … I played it for a few people, and they’re like, ‘That’s really unrelatable. You can’t write songs about that.’”
“I think you have to be wary about writing songs about fame. A lot of the time people don’t want to hear about that,” Olivia notes. “But fame is more accessible than it has ever been. Everyone is yearning for some sort of internet virality, and there’s so much social climbing and lust for fame in the world … It’s just prevalent in our generation.”
Ultimately, Olivia says, “If you speak honestly about any experience, then someone is going to find truth in it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Olivia reveals that she got the title for one song on the album, “All American B****,” from an unlikely source: author Joan Didion‘s acclaimed 1979 essay collection, The White Album.
“She was talking to some hippie who ran away from home and he called his mom an all-American b****,” Olivia explains. “And I was like, ‘That’s the f****** coolest phrase I’ve ever heard,’ so I had to write a song about it.”
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