In August of 2023, when I was 26, I called my old college friends over to help clear out my Long Beach apartment in preparation for my cross country trip. They drove down two hours from Santa Barbara and helped me throw out relics of an old, horrid relationship. Then, they fought over the last unopened sriracha bottle in my pantry. We laid out furniture on the street and two of them handled the strangest Craigslist buyers while the rest of us looked on from the balcony. And then they all slept over, sprawled across random furniture that night so I felt less alone before I took off.
We decided to get Korean food that night, the five of us crammed into a tiny car on a hot summer night. Olivia Rodrigo had just released her single bad idea right?, which was sweeping the nation’s radios at the time. My biggest, tallest friend demanded we played it the entire drive there.
“Now if you listen here,” he’d lecture after having forced the driver to restart the song for the third time, “the hi-hats in the production here” – he did a little hand motion – “adds such flavor to the song’s production, it’s artistry that you guys don’t understand.”
We didn’t shut up about hi-hats for the rest of the night.
Early that next month, Olivia Rodrigo dropped GUTS, her second studio album. It was met with rapturous critical acclaim, instantly topping the album charts in 15 different countries. I liked it myself – how could I not, with those hi-hats – but the moment I really locked into the album was when I was scrolling TikTok one evening and heard a snippet of an unreleased song on the GUTS record.
At once, I set everything down and scoured the internet to find the source. I dove deep into the crevices of niche Olivia Rodrigo fansites and subreddits, scrolling through meticulously compiled excel files detailing all of the Filipina’s unreleased or live, hard-to-find recordings, until I finally found it: a filed called obsessed, a yet-unreleased track from her upcoming deluxe album. I downloaded the mp3 onto my phone and manually restarted the file repeatedly to nail the tune into my head.
Obsessed by Olivia Rodrigo details the superstar’s complicated, compulsive feelings about her current lover’s ex-girlfriend. In the song, she describes the way her every waking thought has been engulfed by her. She’s stalked her socials, stared at her pictures, investigated her star sign, even got into the nitty-gritty and totally-probably useless details like what her blood type is. And since she presumably dates in the celeb-o-sphere, Olivia describes watching all the movies she’s in, too. It’s the sort of thing where you know it’s not rational, or reasonable, but there’s nothing you can do to stop the compulsion. It’s a full-on obsession.
My first impression upon hearing the lyrics at first pass was: oh my God, I can fucking relate. And it unlocked a part of me that always felt ashamed and embarrassed for being so unable to let things go. I was 26 at the time, and Olivia Rodrigo was 20, but she was the one shamelessly spilling her GUTS (har-har) about something I’d always kept hidden from everyone except whatever miserable sucker had the misfortune to date me at the time.
I’d play the song on my phone, connected to my car, as I was driving and navigating through unfamiliar city traffic while also dangerously dragging the scrub bar back to its original position to replay the song. Obviously, I don’t recommend that. (Also, everyone thought this was weird of me.) But the song was so good, and it was insane how easily I could slot into Olivia’s shoes. Even if I knew he loved me, and I knew I was being insane, I couldn’t help it. I’d study their exes, imagine them laying with him like I was laid up now. I’d wonder if his friends liked her more, if I was funnier. I never felt like I was prettier, that’s for sure. And the song doesn’t conclude on a good note – she’s obsessed with his ex, and that’s it.
I hadn’t listened to Olivia Rodrigo much prior to that. Admittedly, my whole life I’d been struggling with some sort of age shame too. I was entering my late twenties and felt like I didn’t have anything under my belt after I graduated college. My peers were landing jobs at massive firms, making more money, traveling, not wasting their youth. To make it worse, young popstars were coming out of the woodwork to take over the music sphere, with Olivia Rodrigo leading the charge. It was only after my friend’s obsession with hi-hats did I finally give her discography a listen. I wish I did sooner, because Olivia’s albums are such a nicely bundled time capsule for the age she was at the time.
Let’s start at the beginning. In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo released SOUR, her debut studio album. She was 17 at the time of writing, 18 at the time of release. This came on after her role in High School Music: The Musical: The Series, where she was also featured on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Soundtrack, which is the funniest thing they could have possibly named it. Olivia states that producer Dan Nigro, blown away by Olivia’s performance on the album, reached out to the teen via Instagram to collaborate, planting the seed for the birth of her first studio album.
My favorite song on SOUR is brutal, which you may notice, like all songs discussed so far, is Gen Z-iedly stylized in all lower case letters to showcase how fucking cool she is. It’s the first song on the album. The concept of the album is upfront, with the first line literally being, in spoken word, “I want it to be, like, messy.” She then goes on to bitterly detail a gamut of insecurities: she wants to know who likes her, who hates her, who’s using her. She wants to run away, she’s tired of being 17, she’s tired of people telling her to enjoy being 17. She’s anxious, she’s a mess, and despite how much her album was designed to hit the top of the charts, she’s young and she doesn’t know whether her songwriting is adequate. The core of the song is that life has been brutal to her, as it has been to everyone.
One thing I appreciate about the music is that it doesn’t shy away from the Olivia Rodrigo identity. She is a pop star, she is a celebrity, there are tabloids about her. It would be inauthentic for her to leave these critical aspects out of her music in an effort to remain relatable. In integrating it into her music directly, you can tell that she wrote those lyrics straight from her real, actual experiences, which is far more compelling than another generic song about being a little nervous to grow up. Despite the fact that the vast majority of her listeners are probably not celebrities, this makes it easier to relate somehow. It makes it easier to trust her when she says she’s going through it, even when her definition also involves being a superstar.
Drivers license was Olivia Rodrigo’s first single for the album, released in January 2021. The song, which is one of Spotify’s top 100 most streamed songs, fits the theme of the 17-year-old perfectly. For most Americans, ages 16 through 18 are the exact years where many young teens are finally allowed to take their permit test and earn their driver’s license. It’s such a uniquely 17-year-old experience, I was astounded by how well it integrated into the album.
The song illustrates OIivia’s melancholy as she’s acquired her driver’s license, which she’d always imagined doing with a now-ex partner. Instead, she’s purposefully driving past his house to catch a glimpse of him, envisioning the future they once promised one another when she would eventually achieve this milestone. She also laments their love, wondering why he would falsely claim to love her forever and how she’s never felt this way for anyone – which is actually, truly the most 17-year-old line in the entire album, because that’s how serious romance was back in high school. We all know a junior year heartbreak is more devastating than a mid-twenties heartbreak. Once I hit my mid-twenties and had a few heartbreaks under my belt, I could only be in mourning so long before I had to draft some follow up emails about whatever bullshit.
It’s hard to talk about SOUR without addressing the elephant in the room, first plopped down by the second verse ever to be released in the entire album: “You’re probably with that blonde girl, who always made me doubt.” Popheads probably know this already, but I did have to explain this (embarrassingly) to my fellow contemporaries that get more vitamin D than I, but the blonde girl frequently mentioned in Olivia Rodrigo’s earlier music usually referred to Sabrina Carpenter, another child-actor-turned-mega-super-popstar. There’s a long, storied history there, but the long and short of it is essentially that Olivia Rodrigo dated Nameless Uninteresting Boy, and then Nameless Uninteresting Boy broke up with her (and possibly cheated) to be with Sabrina Carpenter instead. The two wrote songs back and forth at each other for a minute, then kinda moved on while the rest of the pop consumers sat back and theorized mercilessly. (Don’t worry guys – they hugged and made up, probably).
With that in mind, SOUR explores themes of betrayal and sardonic well-wishes, such as in happier where she hopes her ex is well but not happier than when she was with her, or in good 4 u where she unabashedly admits that she’s not doing well despite him having moved on. It’s angsty and angry and bitter, but I also found it to be incredibly brave. At that age, spelling all these thoughts out so honestly would have been a death sentence for me. I couldn’t handle the idea of not being the “winner”, so to speak, in love. If someone had moved on, then I’d moved on 5 days before that anyways. I was so ashamed of seeming weak that I just pretended I didn’t feel anything at all.
Let’s hop forward a few years. GUTS released in September of 2023 as an extremely strong sophomore album for the now-20-year-old Disney star. People my age born in the late 1990s might look back at the age difference between 18 and 20 as no big deal, but at the time, it may as well have been centuries of growth. Many Americans leave their homes at 18 for the first time to experience living on their own at college, and by 20 they’ve gained plenty of late night experiences that would send their parents into cardiac arrest if they’d known. It’s part of growing up, and another reason why the difference between GUTS and SOUR is so compelling.
While Olivia Rodrigo didn’t have a traditional college experience (besides a brief stint at USC, which directly led to the conception of lacy), she’s captured the soul of being young, dumb, and independent. Take, for example, the aforementioned hi-hat heaven, bad idea right? – this song relates the experience of being drunk, dumb, and then seeing the “you up?” notification appear on your phone from a contact named “❌❌❌”. She knows it’s a terrible idea to see him, and it’s an even worse idea to sleep with him, and how she goes through with it even knowing all her friends would be disappointed. What could define the experience of being 20 years old better than that?
I went to college at the University of California, Santa Barbara. California locals might recognize the school as a party school (not really true anymore, as unofficial events have been strictly policed and teens don’t really seem to be going to house parties anymore). People in my graduating year, though, were supposedly one of the last few graduating classes that truly partied. Every weekend was a drinking gauntlet that started from Thursday afternoon after having skipped class for the day and ended Sunday evening, with poorly concocted meals (solely for the purpose of preventing hangovers to facilitate additional drinking) thrown in as time allowed. And during that whole time, I’d be subjected to my terrible male friend’s love lives and the girls currently losing their minds over them, and the stupidest hookups anyone was doing all weekend.
I once awoke at a situationship’s apartment to an email from my best friend saying she had lost her phone at a guy’s house and she needed my reinforcements to go retrieve it. I hustled home to go get it with her. The guy was our neighbor.
All that to say – Olivia Rodrigo may not have had the exact same half-week-long bender every weekend (or who’s to say she didn’t?) but bad idea right? captures the total disarray of a silly evening in your young twenties. Get him back!, vampire, and love is embarrassing all tell a similar story related to ex regrets, but in GUTS Olivia also begins to steer away from the ex-lover themes.
All-american bitch, pretty isn’t pretty, and teenage dream are all sorrowful ballads exploring similar themes of unobtainable beauty standards, societal non-conformance, and general lostness for her place in society, both as a woman and as a celebrity. In these songs, she sings about the struggle to achieve the paradoxical standards people have set for her: to be built like both a mother and like a machine, to skip lunch and experiment with an array of medications to feel normal, to be so painfully insecure that you feel like a stranger in your own body.
Now, are these groundbreaking themes and topics? Not at all – the discourse around the impossible beauty standards for women has been around for eons, and has ramped up in the last few decades. Widespread usage of the internet has been a double edged sword in this regard. For the last several decades, young women could occasionally go see movies or read magazines with beautiful women in them, and aspire to look like them, but it wasn’t as all-consuming as it is today. With the rise of social media, girls of all ages can scroll through infinite amounts of touched-up photos, which can be easily updated with just the press of a button. You don’t need to wait for Vogue to print another issue to figure out what’s trending now – you just need to take a look at your phone.
So any girl living on this planet Earth has at some point felt too fat, or too hairy, or too broad, or too twiggy. It’s been easier to roll out this month’s insecurity faster than ever before. Have you ever heard of “canthal tilt”? What about whether you’re puppy pretty, fox pretty or frog pretty? Throwing it back, did you have a thigh gap in the 2000s? Did you participate in the “paper challenge”, where you see if you can cover your whole waist with a sheet of paper? I woke up one morning in Kindergarten wondering if my voice was too deep. The first person to ever call me fat was my brother, when I was 9. I’ve used hundreds of dollars of different shampoos, conditioners, and hair tools to tame my frizzy hair, then I’d walk out and see everyone else seemed to have rolled out of bed with perfectly kempt locks.
So, one might argue that songs like pretty isn’t pretty are not revolutionary, and it’s not. But this is an album, distinctly, about being 20 years old. Any media that’s taking personal, real issues and translating them into art, no matter how common, is a universal good. When art is shared between young women, it’s good. Art is meant to be celebrated and to be related to. Sometimes art just needs to be enough for young girls studying their pores in the mirror to know they’re not alone, and that itself is enough to help ease the burden of beauty a bit. And just because you’ve heard the discourse of the harshness of beauty standards a million times does not mean the tween girl downloading Spotify for the first time has.
As for myself, I’m approaching 29. Like I said before, I grew up with a lot of shame – I was embarrassed to feel my feelings. I was ashamed of being the loser who couldn’t figure herself out, who got broken up with, who wasn’t as desirable as the next. And as I grew older, the shame just grew within me. I found more and more things to be ashamed of – why didn’t I get into that school? Why aren’t my grades as good? Why can’t I focus? I always felt like I had so much time, but I was getting older and doing nothing. And then all of a sudden I was 25, and then I was 28, and I realized – holy shit, I probably should have been doing something.
I think, though, what I didn’t realize was that so many people were growing up beside me feeling the same way. For all the sophomore year roommates that are now traveling Dubai, there are also girls in their fourth year of part time work as they pursue their dreams on the side. For all my friends on their third trip to Europe this year was an equal, unmovable amount of credit card debt that would hold them hostage for the next ten years. Not that there aren’t people my age that are actually wildly successful, there’s surely a whole host of them. But of the 6,867 people in my graduating class, I think being a graduate with a stable remote job probably puts me squarely in the middle.
Pop music is sometimes looked down upon as being basic and non-challenging, like it’s vapid with no substance. Which is often true. But I think sometimes we forget the basics. That we’re human, and we all have more similar feelings than not. Ironically, it took a young girl like Olivia Rodrigo to remind me of that.
When I first brought up this discussion with a friend of mine, I told her how compelled I was by how well Olivia Rodrigo had captured the essence of being 17 and being 20 in these songs. She frowned at me, and responded, “Well, you say that, but I’ve felt all these things well into my late 20s.” So I wanted to clarify: these feelings are not exclusive to being a certain age, of course. But I think that these feelings are the nucleus of womanhood at those times. I think that the essence of getting your driver’s license and feeling absolutely emo about what could have been as you drive your mom’s car for the first time is a core component of being 17. I think that abandoning your friends on a drunken night for a messy hookup with an ex is intrinsic to being 20 years old. Even if you’re not doing exactly those things, the motif is there; these early years are pivotal for identity, growth, and while they never quite stop, they define these eras of your life.
I constructed the title and thesis to this piece based on my perception of Olivia Rodrigo’s albums, upon researching a bit more, I discovered that none of this is novel – the popstar herself described SOUR as an exploration of “the emotions that young women are often shamed for”, and GUTS as “about growing pains and trying to figure out who I am at this point in my life”. She even describes GUTS as a “time capsule commemorating a moment in which she feels like she’s ‘figuring stuff out, about failures and success and making mistakes’.” Which really means that I’m totally unoriginal in my work, but isn’t that the essence of it? For her to be such a wonderful young artist and to get her message across so cleanly that I can write this up. It’s a testament to her (and Dan Nigro’s) songwriting capability.
When I look back to when I was avoiding listening to newer aged music, the shame carries on, which counterintuitively feeds into my negative feedback loop. It’ll probably be an unlearning process for me for the rest of my life, honestly. It’s not as easy as listening to a song and being cured of a lifelong abashedness. But I went to go see Olivia Rodrigo at Lollapalooza in 2025, and I was surrounded by other girls of all ages jumping and singing and dancing along. So I look forward to what she’ll bring to us next.
To me, SOUR and GUTS are two excellent albums that really feel like a piece of Olivia Rodrigo’s soul splintered into accessible, relatable studio records. As of the time of writing this, she’s begun to drop hints of her highly anticipated third studio album. If I had to guess, I would wager that her new album will switch gears to focus on what I found to be more important than anything else as she enters her mid twenties: her connections with her friends, what they do for her and how they support her, and the importance of continued hi-hats in her production. Also, capitalized song titles.