Still buzzing from the success of her Daisy Chain Fields festival at the weekend, Olivia Rodrigo had another engagement on Tuesday evening: a Q&A with director and sometime rock writer Cameron Crowe at the Grammy Museum in LA.
The event coincided with the launch of an exhibition at the venue that features sets and items from the video for The Cure – one of the standout songs from Rodrigo’s latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love.
According to Variety, Rodrigo described this as “my favourite song on the record,” before going a step further and saying “It might be my favourite song I’ve ever made.”
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Rodrigo also touched on Stupid Song, another hit from the album, revealing that it was a tricky one for her and producer Dan Nigro to put to bed.
“Stupid Song, I swear to God, we were working on for a year and a half,” she admits. “It was such a hard one to pull off. We just kept editing production and melodies, and we didn’t finish it until maybe one week before we had to turn the album in. But I’m really happy with where it ended up, so it was worth it.”
Relatedly, Rodrigo revealed one of the tricks that Nigro uses in the studio to get the best possible take from her: “I was a child actor when I was younger, and so I’m very used to being in front of a camera. And so sometimes when I’m not giving an emotional enough performance, Dan will actually just set up the camera on his phone and film me, and I’ll always do a better job, for whatever reason. Muscle memory, I guess.”
As well as being interviewed, Rodrigo also performed stripped-back versions of some of the You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love songs – Drop Dead, Stupid Song, Maggots for Brains, Less and The Cure.
Of the heartbreaking ballad Less, she said: “This is known within my inner circle as the saddest song on the record. Making this album, I was really interested in the grey areas of love. Not only the breakup song and love song, but the stuff that’s in between them. So this song was kind of about that, and it’s about how you could be breaking up with someone but still have really fond feelings for them at the end of the day and still love them. So, it’s a pretty sad one.”
Fittingly, given that she was being interviewed by a man some 45 years her senior but who’s still a fan of her music, Rodrigo also attempted to explain why her fandom crosses generations, using her debut hit, Driver’s License, as an example.
“To this day I’ll meet a 50-year-old dad from Omaha, Nebraska who’s like, ‘When I went through my divorce, that’s exactly how I felt,’” she revealed. “And I’m like, ‘Whoa. Our lives are so different!’ But at our core we’re all the same and we all experience these feelings of insecurity and heartbreak and love, and I think music is the most distilled form of that.”
