Olivia Rodrigo has learned many lessons on her way to overnight superstardom. In her cover interview with Phoebe Bridgers for Interview, the singer-songwriter revealed that she’s decided to let people know when she writes songs about them, and further opened up about the viral media mess that came after the release of her debut single “driver’s license.”
“I feel like last time there was so much weird media sh*t and I had no idea how to deal with any of it,” she said when Bridgers asked if she feels a sense of responsibility to give her song subjects a warning or heads up. “Literally, it was the first song out of the gate and all of that sh*t happened. I felt so ill-equipped That was an overwhelming experience, but now I definitely feel a responsibility. I just try not to think about it during the writing process.”
ICYMI: What Olivia Rodrigo is referring to is the press and social media firestorm that ignited when her first song was released, picked up almost instantly in the online mill of celebrity gossip. There was rampant speculation that the lyrics to “driver's license” centered around a love triangle between Rodrigo, her rumored ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett, and former Girl Meets World star Sabrina Carpenter.
Both Bassett and Carpenter would go on to release music that suggested how much they were affected by the sudden influx of online criticism; Bassett has also opened up in interviews about how the incident affected his physical and mental health, at one point leading to hospitalization. In another recent profile with The Guardian, Rodrigo called out impact the sudden attention had on her: “All of the drama that surrounded ‘Drivers License’ was baptism by fire."
“When I first started writing this record, I would sit at the piano and pretend other people were hearing what I was writing,” Rodrigo told Bridgers for Interview, “which is so awful and counterproductive to any creativity, so I had to just write what I wanted to write and think about the social implications after. It’s tricky. I don’t think anyone has it down to a science.”
Rodrigo went on to describe one of the tracks on the album, about the double edged blade of overnight fame, as being the most difficult to write. “There’s one song that I wrote about how my life changed because of all of the things that happened with the last album and how crazy that was," she said without naming the specific track. "It was cathartic in the end, but it was kind of hard dredging up all of that stuff.”
