“I’m Definitely A Lover Girl”: Olivia Rodrigo On Yearning, “London Vibes”, And Her Most Experimental Album Yet

From California to Camden, Olivia Rodrigo is the 23-year-old singer-songwriter the world fell for like no other. As fascination about her new album and life away from the mic hits fever pitch, Amel Mukhtar takes a walk on Primrose Hill with this decade’s biggest breakout to talk fame, reality and what it takes to chronicle all of our love stories. Photographs by Laura Jane Coulson. Styling by Jorden Bickham.

Curled up in the corner of a north London café, on a clear-skied winter’s day, Olivia Rodrigo is taking a moment to reflect on the near-incomprehensible scale of her fame. It’s been a few months since the 23-year-old Filipino American – by every metric one of the most successful recording artists of the 2020s – wrapped her record-breaking world tour for her second album. Seventy per cent done with recording her next, for the first time in her young life she is taking a moment to conceptualise the breadth of her reach: the Guts tour was the most successful of any artist born in the 21st century, all 100 headline shows sold-out, its 1.6 million attendees generating more than $200 million. Add to this her outsized chart success and a rabidly devoted fanbase, in thrall to banger after banger delivered in Rodrigo’s emotive, confessional yet artfully ambiguous style, and she has credibly placed herself as the top pop star of her generation. And yet, squirming over shakshuka, her nose wrinkles with displeasure. “I don’t think of myself as a star, at all,” she says.

And that’s not her doing a coy act. In fact – if you squint – it is a pretty valid takeaway from her perspective. Sure, night after night an ocean of people scream every intimate lyric back at her as she traverses the globe, far from her native California. But have they brought her to the conclusion that she is particularly special? No, because what she has learnt from the success of her songwriting is: “It’s not really about you,” she explains. The crowds instead reassure her of her normality – just look at the sheer amount of people who relate to her words! It might be her on the stage, but as she looks out across tens of thousands of faces she sees people wrapped up in their own stories, gripping their friends in ecstasy, choked up by their own heartaches. “It just makes you feel less alone. I think that’s what art is for: to make us all remember that we’re so interconnected.”

It’s just turned midday. We’d planned to get a pint at the pub a couple doors down (her idea), but Olivia only just woke up and isn’t ready for all that right now. “I need some real breakfast food!” For someone who, ostensibly, just rolled out of bed, she’s chipper and effortlessly fresh, in a stripy French-girl turtleneck, just a lick of eyeliner and very sheer red lip on her delicate doll face, the British cold applying blush on her nose. (I can see why Mrs Prada recently signed her to front a spring/summer Miu Miu campaign.)

She lives in LA, where the girls get a bad rep for their vapid reality-TV-ready voices, but Rodrigo is quick, dryly funny and only says “like” as much as anyone these days. She talks fast and oscillates between uninhibited intimacy and flashes of worry, pulling at her throat as she quickly calculates how much to share. “I lead a very private life, sort of… That makes me feel protected enough to be able to bare my soul in the songwriting.”

One thing she has discovered during her swift, sharp ascent to stardom is how little she is interested in the excesses of celebrity. “I do try to live a very chill, normal life,” she says, putting extra emphasis on each adjective. So LA can be a lot. (She gushes over the accuracy of last year’s Marmite HBO comedy I Love LA – she has met every one of its archetypes.) “I had an era, for sure, when I was going to weird parties and excited by the new town that I had just been invited into… and very quickly realised that that’s not my scene,” she says, grimacing. “Just weird clubs with weird fucking people.”

We’re walking through Primrose Hill, done with brunch. It’s sunny so the park is full of people, but not packed, and it’s vast and green and the sky storybook blue. It’s the kind of picture-perfect, romcom-worthy day that makes you fall in love with the city. But Rodrigo has long been head over heels for the British capital. “It’s a different dose of reality,” she says, smiling, a spring in her step. While she can start to feel hounded by paparazzi and “really intense” people on both US coasts, “I never feel that in London, which is like, ‘How wonderful is this?’ It’s a great little day we’re spending here!”

While it’s true that no one approaches Rodrigo, it’s not that they don’t recognise her. Even from under her retro Chanel sunglasses, now wrapped in a striped red scarf and thick dark wool coat, passersby keep giving long smiling looks and our waiters seemed a bit too attentive. (When Rodrigo realises she left her woven cloche hat at the café, we run back and find our kindly server waiting by the door like a sentinel, hat already outstretched in his hands.) As we hike up the hill, two men walking ahead awkwardly pirouette one after the other, holding their phones at a funny angle and trying to look casual about it.

Still, even days after headlining Glastonbury last summer, she could Lime bike around unbothered. “‘Maybe I’m not big in the UK!’ I had that thought when I first arrived here and no one was being weird to me. I’m like, ‘Do I need to do more press?’” she jokes. “But I just think British people are just cool – they don’t want to bug you.” She’s a “self-professed Anglophile. I love everything English, English culture and English people… I want to half move here one of these days.” (She grew up obsessed with Zoella and imagining “Boots has got to be the coolest store ever”.)

That Glastonbury headline slot was her biggest dream come true. “I didn’t think I would get it for [at least] another five years… All of my family and friends came from America to watch,” she says, all smiles. “I’m dying to go as a viewer, because this year I was so fucking nervous for the show I didn’t get to enjoy the festival.”

One of her musical heroes, Robert Smith, joined her to sing two timeless The Cure tracks: “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven”. Just as big a fan of hers, Smith was surprised and flattered to get the call. When he first heard “Drivers License”, “I bought Sour, and then Guts (both on CD!)” he writes to tell me. “Although most of the songs on those two albums are not really ‘aimed at my demographic’(!), they are all so good that it is hard not to fall in love with them.” They’ve stayed friends. “She calls me up quite a bit to talk about clothes and fashion – and we have enjoyed a couple of memorable nights in the studio together… I can’t wait to hear what she does next!”

There was one other big reason she fell for London so hard: a British boyfriend, actor Louis Partridge, who she shouted out on stage. It’s been a kind of public relationship that we kind of discuss, but never directly. (If you’re a fan of Rodrigo, you know she prefers to let you read between the lines.) “I’ve found a lot of inspiration from being in London,” she says. “I’ve spent so much time here over the course of making this album. It has a lot of songs that are London vibes, about experiences that I’ve had here.”

It was Partridge who inducted her into all the British things she now loves. In the years after they were first spotted together in 2023 (Partridge in the crowd at her shows before they appeared hand-in-hand at the Venice Film Festival and the Grammys), he was taking her to Manchester United games and Wimbledon, her Instagram suddenly full of grey skies, Yorkshire puds and lager. Fans have been obsessed with the pair from the moment their first blurry pictures together hit gossip sites. Although question marks were thrown up around their relationship at the end of last year to similarly hysterical effect, as ever Rodrigo prefers to let her art do the talking.

Fans have been decoding clues about “OR3” in her every move. Teasers are on the way, but for now they’re sure it’ll be love songs and have a new colour theme (a shift from the purple that has been her signature) and another four-letter title (bets are on Luck). As she enters this new fashion era, Rodrigo reveals “my Pinterest is all babydoll dresses and ’70s necklines. I want it all to feel fun and laid-back.” As a magpie for unique vintage pieces, her stylists, LA-based sisters Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo, write to tell me that they are “always on the hunt for special finds [for Olivia]. When we travel, we make a point to visit local vintage dealers.” Rodrigo is a personal fan of Lovers Lane and Vault Vintage when in Notting Hill, and Chloe and Chenelle add that, “Lately, we’ve been drawn to archive Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs.” They look to modernise the vintage references and create a style that is “effortless, feminine, with a slightly undone feel”.

There are still two or three songs to write. “It was a creative challenge to write from a joyful place,” she says. “When you’re experiencing that you’re connected to someone, or feeling really good, you’re not in your head thinking about bittersweet poems!”

We stop to sit on a bench. It’s time to hear for myself. “Gosh, I’m scared. I’m scared to play [it for] you,” she mutters, fiddling with her phone. This is the first reaction from outside her tightest circle. Her best friend, Madison Hu, heard most of OR3 in an In-N-Out parking lot. (Rodrigo “believes the sound system is the best in [her car]”.) Hu’s excited by its freshness, “And how honest she is!” she tells me over Zoom. “I’ve always been very in awe of how willing to spill to the world she is with her music.” To her ear, it’s about how “love is complicated. I think that’s what she learnt this year.”

Rodrigo hands over wireless headphones. “I’ll play three.” The winter sun shines bright and, from this vantage point, it feels like the city is at your feet. She presses play. The songs are instantly transporting, cinematic and so intimate that I can’t bring myself to look at her while I listen. She puts her hands in her pockets as I focus on the view and scrawl notes in my tiny Moleskine.

The fan theories were right: these are all love songs, but specifically about the obsession and anxiety of it – or the depression when your lover is gone. They’re “sad love songs”, she’ll later write over email. “I realised all my favourite romantic love songs were beautiful because they had a tinge of fear or yearning in them.”

The first is smooth, trippy soft rock about the spirituality of finding the man of your dreams. Her voice sounds so different – laid-back and mature. Once or twice, she tells me, she’s had premonitions of her relationships. It’s part feminine intuition, part manifestation, but also maybe the high achiever in her. “I’m very stubborn and if I like someone, I’m like, ‘Yo, this is going to happen. This is rare! Let’s do it.’” The kismet feeling is embodied in the chorus. “The person that the song is about is great,” she says, grinning.

Dreamier, hazier, the next traces the withdrawal symptoms of separation. The lyrics remind me of Phantom Thread – a film about poisoning your partner to keep them close to you – but is inspired by Miranda and Steve’s relationship in Sex and the City, and how much Rodrigo relates to her when she tells him: “Whenever something funny happens, I always want to tell you about it.” She absent-mindedly introduces the song by name (“Ah!”) and its chorus laments how grimly diminished you can become when you miss your other half.

Earlier, pushing around granola, Rodrigo explained that insecurities about her looks or value did not vanish with magazine covers, awards or acclaim. “I felt a similar way about falling in love, that the second I’m in a really great relationship, I’m gonna start feeling good about myself and this stuff is going to fall into place, but it just doesn’t work like that.” The final song is about that realisation: love won’t fix you. It’s dancier, the most experimental I’ve ever heard her. The orchestral end catches me off-guard and it’s so beautiful in this setting it almost brings me to tears. It’s my favourite of the three. Avoiding her eyes, I scribble down “Love!!” and “So pretty” (two underlines). It’s “what I think being in love feels like”, she says. “You’re getting to the core of all of your issues: how you feel about yourself, your insecurities, what makes you joyful. It feels like the most raw form of you, which is so scary and terrifying and uncomfortable, sometimes, but beautiful at times.”

Rodrigo has never had a normal life. As a child, she always loved singing and performing. (There are adorable viral videos of her aged eight and 10 absolutely annihilating talent contests, belting Barbra Streisand and Jessie J tunes with absurd amounts of sass and stage presence.) She’s been singing since she can remember, learnt to play the guitar at age 12 and the piano around eight, writing her first song on its keys the next year: a feminist anthem called “Superman” about how she didn’t need one to come save her.

Homeschooled and an only child (“double homicide”, we joke), she grew up a child actor on the Disney Channel and in 2019 played the lead in its meta teen romance High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, writing for it a promotional ballad that trended on TikTok and launched into the Billboard Hot 100. But, in lockdown, when filming stopped, her life dramatically shrank. Stuck in the suburbs, at home with her parents, she spent her senior year in isolation, doing tests on lifeless websites. “Love my parents to death, but it was hard,” she relates, with a comedy grimace. To top it all off, her relationship ended. “I wrote a lot of songs because there was just fucking nothing else to do, I guess.”

A dose of freedom came once she got her driving licence. Heartbroken, she drove around, listening to Gracie Abrams’ first EP “and just feeling so sad”. At home, she let it out at her piano. The rest is, quite literally, history. At the start of 2021, “Drivers License” debuted at No1 on the UK Singles and Billboard Hot 100 charts, and immediately smashed global records, becoming Spotify’s most streamed song ever on a single day (not counting holiday songs).

On her first try, Rodrigo had transformed her life. But, for a while, the only place she felt a change was in fast-food drive-thrus. “The person working would be like, ‘Hey, I love that song!’” Otherwise, it was the bewildering algebra of streams, likes and rankings on a screen insulating her from the metamorphosis at play. But the world that opened back up in the spring was suddenly rarefied: her first live performance of the song was at the Brit Awards, dressed in custom Dior haute couture. Then president Joe Biden invited her to the White House. And Rodrigo would win three Grammys for Sour, a No1 debut album that would confirm it was no fluke. Today, the six-times platinum record stands as Spotify’s most-streamed album by a woman and has spent more weeks in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 than any other debut record this century.

Put that way, it all sounds effortless and charmed, but Rodrigo – a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed optimist who rarely speaks harshly and finds gratitude in everything, most of all in the rare “luck” of her rise – frowns remembering a competing feeling. “This is weird!” Tabloids and TikTok sleuths fixated on unmasking the subjects behind her torch songs, and jumped on theories it was her costar Joshua Bassett and another fellow Disney star, a still-nascent Sabrina Carpenter. Adults fervently took sides in their imagined teen love triangle. “Sometimes I meet a 17 or an 18-year-old nowadays and I’m like, ‘Wow, you are such a baby,’” she says, laughing in shock. “I can’t believe people were that mean to me.” And while demand was skyrocketing, and the drama reached its peak, she was back to filming nine-hour days for the second season of their show. “I was going through a break-up, working a full-time job, making [Sour], a student in high school and taking, like, three AP [college-level] classes,” she reflects, bemused. “Looking back, I always think, ‘Wow, life will never be as hard as it was when I was 17.’”

In recent years, she’s been pictured chatting to Carpenter at award shows. “I think she’s great. I’m so happy for all of her success too. I love the album she’s put out.” While her praise sounds genuine, she seems tense, picturing the headlines. “No, no, no, it’s good. It’s just people just get weird and clickbaity – it’s all love, though. I’ve talked to her many times.”

Although the public image of Rodrigo is a kind of sweet, naive good-girl, she has a level-headed maturity, preternatural wisdom and real bite. “I worked nine-and-a-half hours a day since I was 12,” she explains. “I grew up on a set… It probably forced me to grow up a lot quicker than I normally would have, for better or worse.” Although she always felt protected by her teacher mother and family therapist father, and acting was very much her decision, she’s critical of the industry. “It’s a hard thing to put a little kid into. This world where you’re treated like an adult… You don’t know who you are. You don’t have any boundaries. You don’t know what the world is like,” she says, carefully. “We should examine that whole industry of child actors. It’s a very strange thing.” How has she avoided the child-star crash-out? “Still got time, girl! Who knows!” she teases. “Maybe I’ll have a phase when I’m 25 when I really go wild.”

She’s not totally joking: Rodrigo always imagined she’d be graduating college around this age. “I wish that I had a uni phase when I got drunk all the time,” she laments. “Sometimes I feel sad that I never got that opportunity to hang out with a bunch of kids your age and be stupid.” With all the time she’s spent in the UK, surely she’s had a sesh or two? “What’s that?” Uh… a party that never ends? “[Brits] really do [love to party]. I can’t keep up! One of these days I need to, though.”

Missing out on those classic coming-of-age experiences has been the price of her early ambition. Class for her had to be on the Disney set, 30 minutes to an hour between takes, about four castmates in a computer room doing online programmes. “I hated homeschooling,” she stresses. “If I had kids, I would put them in school.” Is she beginning to think about the family she would start? Maybe marriage, like she sings in “So American”? “Oh my gosh, long way from that, for sure!” She quotes Broad City: “What am I, a child bride?” She laughs. “I hope that young girls know that life is full of so much joy that is unrelated to a husband or kids. But, uh… that being said, I want to be a mom more than anything,” she admits. “I already feel like I’ve done a lot in my career that I’ve wanted to do and feel more mature for my age than maybe I should. So I don’t know…”

Right now, she prefers free-falling into love. “Romantic relationships, friendships, diving as deep into those as I possibly can.” The intensity makes up for lost time. “I never went to high school, so I didn’t really grow up around a lot of guys my age… I was behind my friends; I had to catch up at a faster rate than them.”

It was tricky to meet people, first properly entering the dating pool as a global superstar. “I felt I didn’t randomly run into people. I’m working in the studio with my producer all day… I’m more precocious with work – I had a lot of responsibilities [early] – but in stuff like dating I’m still really young and learning,” she says, sheepish. She had mistakes to make. Some time after Sour, she tried Raya for a month, but it took just one date to get her to bin it. “I was like, ‘Wow, never again. It was just so bad,’” she bemoans. “I didn’t even see anyone cool! I thought I would see, like, ooh, some really hot actor guy. I don’t even know any of these people… It’s [always] some weird ‘creative director’,” she says, sardonically. “Like, you just don’t have a job.”

She switched to alternative methods: “I would just, like, send DMs sometimes,” she says, slightly embarrassed. Good success rate? “I had a pretty high success rate at the time… But what does success mean? Going on a date? Sure. Were they good? No!” she groans. “It’s so cringe thinking about my younger self dating. I just want to grab my shoulders. Like, ‘Girl, what? What are you doing?!’” Her last album touched on her first situationships… Can I call them that? “Oh my gosh!” she sighs, wincing at the flashbacks. “I like to pretend they never happened. Relationships these days are so weird! I don’t know if you find that. I’m definitely a lover girl. Like, I want to be in something committed and so in love. And yeah, it’s hard these days.”

While that was just a few years back, it was already a lifetime ago for Rodrigo, who evolves at warp speed. “The difference between 17 to 22 confidence-wise is really big for me, just knowing who I am and believing in my ideas and opinions.” One of the most outspoken celebrities of her status, she’s never been shy about politics, addressing the Roe v Wade rollback in her first Glastonbury performance, condemning the humanitarian crisis in Palestine to her almost 40 million Instagram followers and, at brunch, brings up my piece about the devastating war in my homeland, Sudan. (After our chat, she buys her own vinyl at a record shop to sign as a contribution for the Freedom for Sudan fundraiser I’ve been organising.) The state of her own country is an enormous cause for concern right now too. She has had to call out the US government for using her song to soundtrack their cruel deportation videos. “That was awful. Dystopian,” she says, quieter. “The way that Ice is ripping apart communities and terrorising people is so disturbing. It’s a really sad, scary time.”

We walk over to where Madison Hu, “my bestest friend in the whole world”, waits for her. Hu is tall and striking, with a choppy haircut and khaki jacket, and flew over to hang with Rodrigo in London. She has a very nonchalant cool, the opposite of Olivia’s ultra-warm and chatty first impression. They met on an early Disney role: as the two stars of Bizaardvark. “I always say that if I didn’t have her I might have gone a little crazy,” says Rodrigo. “She knows every part of my life. We’re like sisters.”

It’s no exaggeration to say Madison has seen it all. In the audition room, Hu first approached Rodrigo because she thought she looked so nervous. “I was like, ‘Maybe I should help her out,’” she says, with a small laugh, in hindsight. Back then, Olivia “was a very deeply anxious child. I think, within her, she still has that, but now I’ll see her in meetings and she has a self-assuredness… that is really inspiring.”

Since then, when in the same city, they’ve seen each other pretty much every day and have not gone 24 hours without speaking. “We treat it like you would a romantic relationship, where you’re like, ‘I need to see you, and talk to you, and feel connected to you in some way.’” Hu gets choked up recalling the roller-coasters they’ve seen each other through. “This friendship with Olivia has been the longest, most meaningful relationship of my life.”

Before we part, quick questions. Favourite date spot in London? “I really like going to The Fat Badger. It’s so fun ever since Chiltern [Firehouse] burned down,” she says. “I’ve had some first kisses at Chiltern, for sure.” What does she hope for this new era? “I hope it shows a different side of me,” she says, with a twinkling smile. “Goals…? I want to be in London more.”

And with that she’s off, arm in arm with Hu, their heads buried together as they catch up animatedly, practically skipping into the sunset, the promise of her next chapter about to begin and love, as ever, in the air.

Via: Vogue