Olivia Rodrigo is only twenty years old as Guts, her second album and follow-up to the massive success Sour, got released last month. It’s an immature and bratty mess of an album, but I don’t say that as a bad thing. In fact, all of those things show an intelligence to her that many of her peers did not have at her age. When she sings, “I know my age and I act like it” on opening track “all-american bitch”, she is not fucking around. It’s a promise and a threat and for her sophomore attempt, she follows through on it.
This is all to her credit.
Guts re-teams the pop star with Dan Nigro, her co-writer and producer and where her first album felt like it was using rock music as one of the colors in Rodrigo’s palette, this album is just laying every single rock reference out to bear. And that way, the title doesn’t just refer to Olivia’s ultra-confessional songwriting; it’s also her not shying away from the music she has clearly found a love for in the last two years. “all-american bitch” makes it pretty clear that someone (possibly Nigro) has directed her towards the Hole channel on Spotify. It’s a track that wouldn’t have been out of place on Courtney Love & company’s brilliant Celebrity Skin album. And the references don’t stop there. This album gives us shades of everything from L7 to Lady Gaga to Avril Lavigne and everything in-between. Even her lead single, the operatic “vampire”, gives us more bite and edge than “drivers license”, the song which brought her into the mainstream. It’s a song you could have heard Meat Loaf sing in the 1970’s.
What makes Sour an interesting sonic experiment is how all these pastiches scratch and claw against each other. “vampire” is preceded by the second single from the album “bad idea, right”, a song where Rodrigo barely sings at all, choosing to speak-rap the entire song. Nigro knows that Miss Olivia has a voice that could blow the ceiling off the room (she got her start with Disney, and you’ve gotta know how to belt the anthems to rock with the mouse), and it would not have been surprising had we gotten an album filled with “vampire” and “drivers license”-lite songs. But that clearly was not the album the two were interested in making. The best parts of this album choose not to focus on Rodrigo’s voice. They focus on her songwriting. And that’s fucking brave.
I’m in my fourth paragraph now, and I haven’t mentioned the one person most people talk about when they speak about Olivia Rodrigo and her references. Yes, Olivia took a page from Queen Taylor’s songwriting school (write as personal as you can without letting know with 100% certainty who your songs are about). But Taylor Swift came from a country background and had a lot of people around her for those first few albums, and I bet that the most important job of those handlers were to make sure she didn’t make an album as noisy and messy as Guts. To be fair, it’s entirely possible that Swift would never have wanted to make an album like that, and that is certainly her right. But Rodrigo is given a freedom here to be a 20-year old and make the kind of mistakes with her music that she is aware she is making in her personal life. Being not a girl but not yet a woman is a clusterfuck. But instead of pretending like she has everything under control, Rodrigo steers into the skid.
There is no better example of this than the best song on this album and one of the best songs of the year, “get him back!”. Everything in the song is a balance from a break-up anthem to a torch song. Even the title has us wondering if we want Olivia to get sweet revenge or want her back with this guy. The answer, of course, is simple: we want both. Or neither. Ok… I guess it isn’t that simple. “I am my father’s daughter, so maybe I can fix him”, Rodrigo sings, and we just want to hug her and let her know that she’ll understand how futile that is when she gets older. But Olivia isn’t interested in being older. She may not be totally happy where she is, but she also has the maturity to know she’ll only be 20 once. And this album shows she is going to make the most of it.
Sour isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s appeal is that there are cracks in the mirror that Rodrigo views herself in. And some of the ballads on this album feel more half-formed than anything else. But it is a big step forward from a young woman showing she can grow as a singer-songwriter. Olivia Rodrigo isn’t in a hurry to be a grown-up. And we should be grateful for that.
Fancy Boys Club 