ALBUMThe Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (Music From & Inspired By)Olivia Rodrigo, Rachel Zegler & Flatland Cavalry
Albums by Olivia Rodrigo
ALBUMThe Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (Music From & Inspired By)Olivia Rodrigo, Rachel Zegler & Flatland Cavalry
ALBUMGUTS (spilled)Olivia Rodrigo
ALBUMSOUR (Video Version)Olivia Rodrigo
Olivia Rodrigo's Popular Music Videos
drivers license
Olivia Rodrigo
deja vu
Olivia Rodrigo
good 4 u
Olivia Rodrigo
brutal
Olivia Rodrigo
vampire
Olivia Rodrigo
get him back!
Olivia Rodrigo
bad idea right?
Olivia Rodrigo
All I Want
Olivia Rodrigo
vampire
Olivia Rodrigo
good 4 u
Olivia Rodrigo
Artist Playlists
Olivia Rodrigo Essentials
Set List: Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS World Tour
Planning to scream-sing along with Rodrigo? Get the full set list here.
Olivia Rodrigo Influences
The Top 40 and alt-rock songs that shaped her confessional, hooky pop.
At Home With Olivia Rodrigo
From Elastica to Kacey Musgraves, songs that inspire the rising singer-songwriter.
Olivia Rodrigo: The Apple Music Awards Interview
Watch an interview with our 2021 Breakthrough Artist, Top Album, and Top Song of the Year winner.
Artist Biography
A few weeks after Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” became the biggest song in the world, Saturday Night Live ran a sketch that featured a bunch of middle-aged guys shooting pool in a dive bar. One puts “drivers license” on the jukebox. Another complains that it just sounds like a teenage girl sitting alone at a piano. By the end of their discourse, they’re all in tears, singing along. “I was driving around my neighborhood listening to really sad songs, like, crying in the car,” Rodrigo told Apple Music. “And I got home and I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll write a song about this: crying in the car.’” Rodrigo had tapped into a universal experience: The middle-aged guys weren’t teenage girls, but they’d also driven around listening to sad songs.
Rodrigo was just 17 when the song came out, but she had been getting ready for years. Born in Temecula, California, in 2003, she started lessons in piano, voice, and acting as a child, and went on to star in Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. But, really, what could prepare you for breaking the global single-week streaming record for a female artist? Especially on your first single? And getting a nod from Taylor Swift in the meantime? (Along with “drivers license” winning the Apple Music Award for Top Song of the Year in 2021, Rodrigo’s debut LP, SOUR, was the Top Album of the Year and Rodrigo herself was named Breakthrough Artist of the Year.)
Like Swift—and Lorde, too—Rodrigo has a knack for conjuring big feelings through small details: an ex singing along to their Billy Joel with his new love (“deja vu”), reading his self-help books “so you’d think that I was smart” (“enough for you”). Her content is all-caps, but her delivery is lowercase, lacing bedroom pop with a vulnerability and anger rare for teen pop: “Where’s my f*****g teenage dream?” she wonders on “brutal.” “I’m the biggest emo drama queen,” Rodrigo tells Apple Music. Maybe. But the key to letting it out is keeping it together.