Sydney Hargrove

In the weeks before Olivia Rodrigo dropped her very first album Sour, I found myself nearing the end of my high school career, wondering if anyone had ever actually experienced a teenage dream.

“I guess some people just don’t get happy teen years,” I’d texted my mom on a particularly cold April day, the weather outside matching my demeanor at the fact of the matter. The years that were supposed to be the best of my life were about to be over and I could count the happy moments I’d had throughout them on one hand.

Two weeks later would see me with Olivia’s Brutal blasting in my headphones as I sat on the corner of the track while doing what I did best: not participating in gym class. The line I’m so sick of seventeen, where the fuck’s my teenage dream? brought unexpected tears to my tired eyes. It was one of the very first times in my life that I’d heard those thoughts out loud, that maybe, just maybe, these years aren’t the best of our lives. Quite the opposite, in my case. To this day, Seventeen years old remains the most difficult thing I have ever been, but it would have been a whole lot worse without Sour. 

The combination of the extremely common teenage phenomenon of feeling like you’ll never be good enough for anything, combined with your very first heartbreak, is a lethal duo that so many teenage girls are all too familiar with, myself included. If Olivia Rodrigo had started a religion on the weekend of my first breakup, I would have immediately joined. Honestly? I would still be a loyal part of it to this day. Even as I write this from my own apartment in a city far away from the pink bedroom where I spent many nights crying to Enough for you. Olivia has become a voice for my generation, with her gut (no pun intended) wrenchingly relatable lyrics and stunning voice that will somehow resonate with you long after you’ve forgotten the face of the high school boy who hurt you in the first place. 

When Olivia’s very first single Drivers License came out, it was actually the aforementioned high school boy of my life who had told me about it. “You know, the Disney Plus show,” he’d said as we drove too fast down a road to nowhere important and I picked at the holes in my jeans. “The High School Musical one? You haven’t seen it?”

I hadn’t, but the combination of the Olivia-mania that had taken over that weekend and the way her voice conveyed something I’d never heard before, inspired me to check it out. After binging nearly all of it the following weekend, I had reported my findings back to the boy in question: that it was adorable, and I couldn’t help but be an Olivia fan.

Music is healing, but it hadn’t exactly been in my world until I’d heard Olivia’s for the first time. There was already plenty of preexisting music out in the world when I found mine crashing down around me before I could even legally vote, so what exactly made Olivia different? It’s the notion that wounds that originate in your teen years are different. They reopen easier, with the painful reminders of how you got them, and the even more painful realizations of what you should have had instead. At her very core, Olivia conveyed this with the brutal honesty that acted as a warm blanket to everyone just trying to survive the uncomfortable road of teenage girlhood. Beyond her unparalleled talent for storytelling and her astonishing vocals, I think that our shared age and her unwillingness to pretend that teen years were all they’re choked up to be made the world feel less dreary, less hopeless. That is one of the many gifts of Olivia. 

It seemed that when Drivers License came out, every girl on the internet had a similar story to the one that she was telling. The stories that she tells are so highly detailed and specific, yet somehow, captivate mass audiences of people who relate on a level far deeper than the surface of the words.

By the time that Sour was released (on the same week as my senior prom), I had listened to Deja Vu and Drivers License so many times that even my grandfather could more than likely recite both songs perfectly. A friend of mine had just gotten a car and we’d planned to go to the beach and listen to the album on the drive, but it was cold out, so we went to the mall instead. We drove way faster than we should’ve down the roads that we’d gotten to know way better than any of us had ever wanted too and listened to every song except for Brutal, as it wouldn’t load due to a Spotify glitch. I’m thankful for that, as I’ll never forget that moment during gym class the following Monday, a moment of realization that I was far from the only person who feared they’d wasted something that they didn’t want in the first place. 

We’d taken our trip to the mall on Friday and on Saturday, we took the LIRR into Manhattan to visit the Sour Patch store where they were giving out special edition purple Sour boxes with a picture of a smiling Olivia on the box. I couldn’t tell you what was inside, as we arrived too late and didn’t get any, but I’ll never forget that day. We played the album as we walked through the street and I wore a blue skirt from Brandy Melville and a pair of 3D glasses with the frames popped out, for no reason at all, as we relished in the last few days before we’d graduate high school. My hair was longer than it had ever been as my friend recorded us on her dad’s old camcorder and talked about her upcoming plans to go to film school. It was one of the few times in high school that I didn’t feel temporary, like there was a world beyond the walls I’d grown accustomed to. I tend to think of that when I see sour patch wrappers or pass by the SoHo Brandy Melville. 

The tail end of my seventeenth year was much brighter. It saw me packing up the tear stricken pink room and moving to a brand new city (albeit into a room equally as pink), getting started on my journalism career, and finally shedding the skin that had previously held me down. But in the same way that the pink pillows came with me, Olivia and her music did as well. The heartbreaks and woes of seventeen were behind me, but her music still resonated with the growing pains that I don’t think I’ll ever shake, probably for the better. I quickly learned that she would be a constant in my life, the same way that my love for sunsets and New York City, and of course, the color pink would be.

Olivia seems to be commonly known as someone who writes heartbreak music. While true in a sense, her heartfelt music has stayed on my daily rotation years past my most recent breakup. On a chilly New York December night, I laid in my freshman year dorm bed listening to Hope Ur Ok, reflecting on everything that the year had changed me for. The sweetness of Olivia’s voice expressing I hope you know how proud I am that you were created, with the courage to unlearn all of their hatred has been a constant source of warmth in my life, even as the years went by. My building group chat (named ‘The Hotties of 92y,’ as we lived in the iconic 92nd street Y) pinged with a notification of the girl in the room next to me, reading “Sydney- are you okay? I hear you blasting Olivia, what did your boyfriend do?” Another notification came in from my friend Nikole, who wasn’t at the building at the time, reading, “I’m not even there and I can hear Sydney blasting Olivia.”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 07: Olivia Rodrigo attends as SPOTIFY x AMEX PRESENT: GUTS Gallery Pop-Up Experience in NYC on September 07, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Spotify)

To his credit, my boyfriend at the time hadn’t done anything (at the moment), the music was just comforting. The song was soothing in the same way it had been that day on the football field as I struggled to cope with the end of life the way I’d known it for so long. I iterated this to my hilariously compassionate friends, much to all of our laughter. I fell asleep that night to Enough For You, thinking briefly about all of the times that my younger self had cried over its sharp relatability.

It’s strange to think that the pink room isn’t even my most recent bedroom, there have now been four beds in between the nights of Traitor and Deja Vu underneath fairy lights taped haphazardly to a dome shaped ceiling. My bed in my current apartment still has pink pillows, and on the wall above them sits a poster of Olivia, clad in sunglasses and a balaclava and driving a car, a signature of hers that had been established after the virality of Driver’s License. There has been some sort of Olivia memorabilia in every room I have ever lived in, consistently paying homage to the girl who pulled me through the dark and dreary days of being a hopeless teenager. 

In the same way that Brutal defined the era in my life that mostly circled around my sparkly red prom dress and gut wrenching fear for the future, Vampire and Bad Idea, Right, have defined this far more comfortable period where I get to be a journalist living in my cozy midtown studio with sweet friends and no sense of impending doom. I’ve learned, throughout this time, that the future is my friend. 

While two and a half years ago may have seen me once again in the pink pillowed room with Sour on shuffle, two days ago I opened up an email that I assumed was simply a confirmation of my attendance at tonight’s Guts Gallery. A pop up experience in Manhattan celebrating Guts, Olivia’s new album which will release on Friday.

While the email was in fact confirming my attendance, there was a highlighted sentence underneath the address of the popup: Olivia will be making a surprise appearance!

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 07: A view of the venue as SPOTIFY x AMEX PRESENT: GUTS Gallery Pop-Up Experience in NYC on September 07, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Spotify)

Through my years as a journalist, I’ve gotten used to exciting tidbits of information being released onto my life, but few things could have prepared me for the contents of that email. I owe so much of the person that I am today to Olivia and her music, to the way it managed to pull me out of my cloudiest days and into a world that has been so kind. The girl on the football field on one of the last Mondays of high school, the girl in the backseat of her friends car as they drove through a neighborhood that would soon no longer belong to them, the girl in the blue skirt laughing in line at the sour patch store, and the girl who cried as her and her mom drove with Jealousy, Jealousy playing on the car speaker because she felt that every day shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was, felt so close by the girl sitting at the desk of her midtown studio apartment with the Olivia poster on the wall.  Just one girl, who’d managed to make it to the good part of life, with Olivia Rodrigo music constantly playing in the background.  

As Nikole and I walked out of school that night, I informed her that I would not be getting off at our usual stop. “I have to go buy an outfit,” I said. “I can’t tell you what it’s for, but it’s extremely important.” 

We scrolled through the Zara website as we waited on the subway platform, and she asked if I could at least give her a hint as to what we were looking for. I pointed to a purple plaid skirt and said “that would probably be perfect.”

The outfit I ended up choosing wasn’t purple or plaid, instead a pink and black bow ensemble that paid homage to this Olivia look. My texts to my mom as I shopped were very different than they were on that day in April. “I feel so giddy,” I said. “I guess this is what being a teenager was supposed to feel like.” 

Inside of the bright purple, houseparty themed Guts Gallery (which you can read all about here!) anyone would feel instantly transported back to high school, with the imagery so beautifully reminiscent of simpler (or in my case, way more complicated) days. As Olivia walked out onto the stage in the living room of the gallery to a packed room of excited fans, I couldn’t help but think of the seventeen year old girl that I was so recently. 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 07: A view of the venue as SPOTIFY x AMEX PRESENT: GUTS Gallery Pop-Up Experience in NYC on September 07, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Spotify)

Though it’s a tempting phrase, don’t tell any Olivia Rodrigo fan to not meet their heroes. If this weekend has taught me anything, it’s that Olivia is the epitome of grace and kindness. She’s poised and sweet, stating “I’m so nervous,” to the living room audience as the listening party to her new album was about to begin. “Thank you guys so much, I really appreciate it! It’s Guts eve, happy Guts eve!”

Clad in a long black gown covered in flowers, Olivia sat with Eva Chen to answer questions from fans, written on Spotify index cards in sparkly purple pen. If you consider yourself a Livie, you know that everything about that sentence is so brutally Olivia. The questions ranged from her creative process and her growth from Sour to Guts, all the way to her favorite pizza topping (anything but pineapple) and her love for boba tea. Two fans even utilized their question slot to ask if Olivia liked their outfits, to which she sweetly asked them to stand up and do a spin around. “Stand up, stand up! Do a twirl for us!” The verdict from Olivia was that the outfits were “cute!” with her glowingly exclaiming that it’s “mini skirt season.”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 07: Olivia Rodrigo and Eva Chen attend as SPOTIFY x AMEX PRESENT: GUTS Gallery Pop-Up Experience in NYC on September 07, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Spotify)

I’ll never be a seventeen year old girl again. On most days, I’m endlessly grateful for that. But there was something about sitting in a living room, far away from the one of my youth, across from the woman who’s music defined my life when I needed it most, made me feel like I could do it all over again. And out of all of the gifts of Olivia, that may be the biggest one of all.

Check out Guts Gallery for yourself here and stream GUTS here!