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experience when making Sour, she held
firm in her belief that people want to
hear something honest. The songs had
to come from her. “I literally wrote them
in my bedroom,” she says. “And I think
you can tell.”RodRigo has a sense of humor about
what she’s laid bare to the world. Recently, her
therapist listened to “Brutal,” the teen tantrum an-
them, for the first time. “She was like, ‘That song is
like everything we talk about today,’ ” Rodrigo says.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh, no! Have I not grown at all?’ ”
She embraces a key quality of her generation:
messy, uninhibited vulnerability. It shows up in her
songs and in the way she shares her life. She talks
about her mental health, she watches Twilight,
she gets angry, she posts pictures of her parking
tickets—she does in the open all these things that
18-year-olds used to do in secret, making me ask my-
self why I was so ashamed to derive pleasure from
cheesy movies, to have needs, to make mistakes.
Like other young stars before her, she’s form-
ing her identity and figuring out how to run her
career in real time. “You definitely have to be a
businesswoman to be a musician,” she says. She
has a partnership with Geffen to be able to own
her masters, the copyright to the recordings of
her songs. Masters are typically held by labels—
a practice that has prompted Swift to remake her
albums so she can own the recordings. “There’s
a path for me to have a stake in the music and
art I create, which is only fair,” Rodrigo says.TikTok in late 2019, the hit of the season.
Instead of signing with Disney’s
Hollywood Records, once home to
Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, Ro-
drigo went with Geffen Records, which
had emphasized her skill as a song-
writer. The deal was announced in
January 2021, and she chose to make
her album with Dan Nigro, a producer who has
worked with alt-pop darlings like Conan Gray
and Caroline Polachek. Together, Nigro and
Rodrigo had already made “Drivers License.”
Nigro and Rodrigo bonded over shared refer-
ences: he and her mother are just a few years apart,
which meant that his nostalgic favorites were the
songs Rodrigo heard at home. “She knows the
whole Rage Against the Machine catalog the same
way I do,” Nigro says. And he respected her im-
pulse to continue innovating as they crafted the
songs that became Sour, even with the overwhelm-
ing success of “Drivers License.” “It made her feel
empowered to do other things, which felt so ma-
ture,” he says. When Rodrigo released the swoony
midtempo “Deja Vu” as her second single, she
became the first artist ever to debut both of their
first official singles in the top 10 of the Hot 100.
“Songwriting is the thing I take most seri-
ously in my life,” Rodrigo says. “It’s the most per-
sonally gratifying too.” She’ll return for Season 3
of the High School Musical series, which starts
filming in January, and maybe she’ll act more in
the future. But music is her priority. While she
was surrounded by adults with more power and