84 Time December 27, 2021/January 3, 2022
2021 ENTERTAINER OF THE YEAR
She’s also found herself in the center of
an industry debate that’s growing louder. As
music-copyright claims have skyrocketed, artists
and labels have sought to avoid bad publicity and
costly lawsuits. Rodrigo, who took inspiration
from Swift for a Sour track and credited her when
it was released, faced Internet accusations that
there were similarities between more of her
songs and others’. She later added credits on
two additional tracks. For her, it was a lesson
in business, but also something deeper. “It
was really frustrating to see
people discredit and deny my
creativity,” she says. (Nigro is
more coy: “It seems like people
get funny about things when
songs become really popular.”)
The conversation about
ownership often collides with
questions about artistic influ-
ence. Music critics have iden-
tified echoes of Swift, Carly
Simon and Alanis Moris-
sette in Rodrigo’s visceral lyr-
ics, and tones reminiscent of
Avril La vigne, Lorde and Par-
amore in the punky inflections
of Sour’s melodies. She’s been
put in prestigious company—
but this also means she’s talked
about as if she doesn’t stand on
her own. Rodrigo knows the
latter is impossible to avoid,
but wishes it weren’t. “Young
women are constantly com-
pared to each other. I’m the
‘new this’ or ‘this woman meets that woman,’
and that can be reductive,” she says. “I’m just
Olivia. I’m doing my own thing. It’s meaningful
when people recognize that.”
Her idols do. She named Gwen Stefani as the
person she’d most like to write a song with. “I’d
be honored,” Stefani says. Morissette sees a “so-
lidity” in her. “She has a steadfast care about self-
expression. She’s not precious about it, nor does
she seem overwhelmed by it all.” And songwriting
legend Carole King, whose music Rodrigo discov-
ered through her mother, says she has “a gift of
knowing how to tell a story in a song.”There’s an undeniable saTisfacTion in
watching someone spin a heartbreak into a hit—
and Rodrigo is open about how incredible that
feels. At the same time, she’s aware that writingrevealing lyrics also means inviting questions
about the people she addresses in her songs.
When I ask her what, if anything, she feels she
owes those people, she laughs, her tone shifting.
“At the core of it, all my songs are about me and my
experiences and my feelings,” she says. She un-
derstands the alchemy at work for the listener—
how anyone could take her words and apply them
to their own life. Naming names would only ruin
the effect. “It’s an important lesson in control-
ling your own narrative too,” she says. People
write stories about her that she
can’t control. Songwriting is a
way of reclaiming her power.
And listening to Rodrigo’s
music can be a way for her au-
dience to reclaim theirs. She
tilts the frame away from the
people who’ve let you down
and the disappointments
you’ve faced and back toward
the person who matters: you.
Her songs offer validation—
a kinship in knowing that your
heartbreak, rage or self-doubt
is universal. Young people feel
seen, and adults get a potent
reminder of how we all feel like
that insecure deflated kid ver-
sion of ourselves sometimes.
For an artist, it’s an impres-
sive trick—time travel for the
listener. In the vintage store,
she moves through the de-
cades herself, skimming con-
fidently through things of the
past. Now there’s a pile of clothes on the counter:
the spy-plane shirt and another top for me; a slip
dress, feathery tank, leather skirt and graphic tee
for her. Everything in Rodrigo’s haul has Winona
Ryder vibes—as a kid, she was more into the Au-
drey Hepburn look, but now she’s fascinated by
the ’90s and Y2K. “It was the last time people
could exist without being hypersaturated on so-
cial media,” she says. “People seemed cooler be-
cause they weren’t sharing every aspect of their
lives.” She wraps the waist of the skirt around her
neck to see if it will fit—a trick she saw on TikTok.
She’ll give it to a friend if it doesn’t work out. As
we walk to the back door, we stop to take a selfie.
Rodrigo purses her lips, lifting her bag of clothes
into the frame. At 18, she already knows: every-
thing old becomes new again. —With reporting
by mariah espada and simmone shah