Sydney Hargrove

This fall, in Downtown Los Angeles, 2,795 miles away from my home in New York, the breath-of-fresh-air vocals that can only ever come from Olivia Rodrigo could be heard radiating through a small hotel venue. Inside, she performed most of the songs on her latest album, Guts, for the very first time. A little less than seventy-two hours prior, I stared at a computer screen from the corner of a sound studio at my school and decided that, no matter what it took, I would be in the audience when she did.

The show, warmly titled American Express Presents; An Evening with Olivia Rodrigo, was an acoustic, unplugged, rare gem of an experience that I’ll undoubtedly carry with me for the rest of my life. And if you’d asked me at seventeen what life lessons Olivia Rodrigo had taught me, I’d probably have a pink notebook filed from cover to cover and would take up your entire afternoon. She’d been the first artist, and quite frankly one of the first people in those days, to have gotten through to me. She taught me that I wasn’t the only person in the world who was suffocating under the weight of the perpetually messy teenage girlhood experience, that young heartbreak wasn’t going to be the death of me, and that one day, there would be an entire world outside the four walls of my bedroom. 

If you’d asked me around three weeks ago what she’d taught me, I’d have an updated notebook. That the inevitability in growing up is scary no matter who you are, that it’s okay if there’s an infinite number of things that you still wish you had or were or will be, that teenage dreams don’t go away when the teen years get left behind. And that, at the very end of the day, all of these things are perfectly fine. 

If you asked me today, we’d need more than an afternoon. My notebooks have been forgone in favor of notes hypothetically inked on my skin to be carried wherever I wander these days. In recent days, Olivia has taught me how to live in a way I once thought wasn’t entirely possible. To catch a flight across the country with a day’s notice. To ride on a golf cart through the Hollywood hills. To see flowers you’ve never seen before to take pictures on a tiny digital camera and to remind yourself, time and time again, that there is an infinite number of emotions still left to be felt. 

How exactly is Olivia Rodrigo responsible for any of this? Bear with me, we’ll get to that.

When I was somewhere near fifteen years old and my journalism career only existed in my daydreams, I spent a great deal of time imagining red carpets, sparkly dresses, and the way the California mountains would look through a plane window, a view that I planned to memorize on my many trips back and forth to Los Angeles. I pictured myself, looking far older than I do now, having an understanding of the world that I do not currently have, following events, shows, and the artists that I loved from coast to coast at the drop of a hat. To my young self, the idea of hopping onto a plane to chase something exciting felt so blissfully simple. 

With time, I learned that there wasn’t much of a need to do so. Nearly every artist that I admired tended to make a stop in my home city, causing me to trade planes for subways or sneakers. Still, the memory stayed in the back of my mind. How beautifully grown up would it feel to step onto a plane on my very own to spend a day or so on the other side of the country, in a city lined with palm trees and the golden glow of the midday sun? At the time, growing up was a novelty. 

An Evening with Olivia Rodrigo was exactly what it sounds like. A night spent with just five things: Olivia, her producing partner Dan Nigro, three backup singers, one guitar, and one piano. In between songs, Olivia and Dan told the story of how they were created, from heartwarming interludes featuring Dan’s 6-month-old daughter (who can be heard at the end of Teenage Dream) to the frustrations of crafting the album and all of the emotions that went into it. “We cried just because we were frustrated,” Olivia said. “We were really toiling.”

When it comes to me, at the risk of sounding like a complete cliche, Olivia heals all. From the release of Sour following my very first heartbreak by an alleviating three weeks, to Guts validating my constant fear of growing out of my teen years and being unaware of what awaits me on the other side. Our shared ages have made her music feel like a guiding light throughout a tumultuous teenage-turned-new-adult life. In recent times, primarily the fearful anticipation of my twentieth birthday, I’ve felt myself looking for the guidance and comfort that the artist once granted me at seventeen. 

The aforementioned birthday was a cake-filled interlude to what has been a complex season of life. I’ve admittedly feared the number twenty for a few years now. It’s absurd, really, but my teen years and the youthful ones prior were all that I’ve known for all of the years of my life that I can vividly remember. Guts tells a similar story, with Teenage Dream illustrating the perils of growing up so beautifully. It seems that, in my world, Olivia’s albums are constantly coming just at the right time. From a heartbroken seventeen-year-old to a girl right on the verge of adulthood, Guts and Sour have continually been the soundtracks to some of my most monumental moments in time.

In the last few late nights of my teens, I couldn’t sleep, and instead spun my bright blue Guts vinyl over and over again, repeating Teenage Dream. The line But I fear that they already got all the best parts of me has remained in my ears since I first heard it, sitting a few feet away from Olivia at Guts Gallery back in September. Last night, however, the best parts of me couldn’t have felt closer as I walked to my seat inside of The Ace. The 1600-person venue was packed with fans who, much like myself, felt extremely lucky to be there. Many of whom had also been on a journey of cars, trains, and even planes, since the news had been released the morning prior. The kind-eyed girls behind me had flown to San Francisco from Toronto and then rented a car to make the six hour drive, while a boy who I chatted with in the hallway had come from Las Vegas. 

Forgive my change of scenery here, but for the context of just how I ended up in Los Angeles in the first place, I’ll need to take us away from the Golden State and over to a particularly cloudy day at a college in New York. The story starts with me having a professor this semester who, albeit in somewhat kinder words, told me that she doesn’t like anything about the work that I create. I was in the aforementioned professor’s class on Thursday morning, my back against the wall in our on-campus news studio with my chest filled with the sort of heavy feeling that only comes about when you’ve just turned twenty and you’re struggling to grasp why you can’t seem to stop thinking about a number.

Before my trip this weekend, I’ll admit that I’d been thinking about California quite a bit. New York is everything to me. It’s been my home for my whole life and it’s where I’ve done all of my dreaming. But some days, I had struggled to get the image of a series of mountains I’d seen in Palm Springs a number of years ago out of my head, and I had begun to wonder if the answers that I’ve been desperately searching for aren’t behind me after all, maybe just simply on a different coast.

I had been halfway between pulling the trigger on a weekend trip but knew I’d be far too scared to at the end of the day. I was also halfway in this particular thought and the fact that the studio was far too hot and it was causing the hair to stick to the back of my neck and how I found that extremely annoying, when my computer pinged with an email from the incredible team at American Express, informing me of Monday’s concert. 

I’d like to tell you that I thought it over for longer than five minutes, but the amount of time between the aforementioned email and confirmation text about my plane tickets is two minutes less than that. When class came to an end a few minutes later, my friend Nikole asked me to grab her bag for her as she hopped off the anchor desk. “Sure,” I said, handing it to her. “Oh, also, I’m going to LA. Day after tomorrow.” 

Though I wasn’t able to tell anyone the reason for my trip, I’m sure that everyone who knew me well enough could conclude that if I was doing something as wild as that, it most likely had something to do with Olivia Rodrigo.

Last week, Olivia did a cover of Noah Khan’s Stick Season during her performance at the BBC Live Lounge. Two days after I booked my whirlwind trip across the country, that cover is what played through my headphones as the sun rose through the plane window. As we flew over the mountains that I had missed so dearly, I jotted down the following in my notes app: 

at the moment I’ve found myself looking out the plane window to the California mountains and wondering why I feel strangely somber. but then again, I do have an answer, as just a few minutes ago I was fifteen, hiking up one out in the deep desert of Palm Springs, stopping every time I saw a flower so I could weave it into my hair. 

I listen to Olivia’s cover of stick season now and think about how then, I didn’t know who she was, and I didn’t know who most of the people I’ve truly loved in this lifetime were, either. why does fifteen feel so young, but when I look at the pictures, I don’t think that I look different at all? the mirror alters my reality, shows me that I look far older. I look like I’m twenty, maybe older on a good day. I look like I live in my own apartment with a job that allows me to wander off to LA for a few days when I’m in search of something that I can only hope I’ll find. 

The aforementioned job fills me with so much joy. The last thirty minutes of a whirlwind first day at my new internship a few weeks ago ended up being the very first time I’d meet Lexy White. We chatted via a somewhat glitchy Slack call, and I remember thinking that the background of where she sat in her LA apartment resembled mine. The walls contained an array of colorful posters, clearly reflecting on some of the things she loved in the same way mine did, a world and a half away from the office that I sat in. I’m not really sure how Olivia had come up, but somehow, we spent most of the call talking about our shared love of the artist. Well that sucks, I thought as I packed up my laptop to head out of the office. That might be one of the coolest people I know now, and I’ll probably never meet her in person. 

With the way I tend to live my life, I should probably remove probably never from my vocabulary. A thought of I should ask her to grab coffee while I’m in LA turned into us riding through the backlots at Universal Studios on a golf cart before accidentally wearing nearly the exact same outfit at The Ace that night and not realizing it until we arrived. She’s hilarious, so unbelievably kind, and luckily for me, the type of person who’s willing to spend the entire day with an intern, which I assume is pretty few and far between. I consider myself extremely lucky to know her. 

Teenage Dream and Making The Bed have been my most played songs on Guts, despite Lacy and Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl being my undoubtable favorites. I blame the fact that they seamlessly narrate my fears these days, making them two of the most relatable songs I’ve ever heard. As I rode through the backlots of Universal Studios on a golf cart and subsequently sat in a theater listening to my favorite artist of all time play an acoustic set of an album I loved more than anything, I was reminded of how deeply I once wanted this life, and how recently it was when all I could do was want it. How I had planned on not stopping until I’d achieved these things, and how I assumed that it would be far later on this path. That I would be much older than twenty years old. In the moments where I’m supposed to be basking in the joy of this, I sometimes find myself worried instead. Where do we go from here, will all of this continue to mean what it does as I get older? I have found, in growing up, that time, experiences, accomplishments, can feel fragile when you spend too much time thinking about them. 

In her own way, Olivia has found this as well. I’d been feeling this way on a Tuesday night around three weeks ago when a New Yorker article popped up on my Twitter feed. In it, she says, “It happened so young in my career. […] I was nineteen, and I was, like, Wow, I’ve done so much that I wanted to do. I’m only nineteen. But, in a way, that’s also sort of freeing. Maybe that sounds weird, but it’s so nice to have accomplished those things in the last album cycle. […] Now I just get to make music for me.”

Yet another Olivia lesson, that I need to figure out my own version of making music for me. I think that, in some capacity, I’m well on my way.

What was unique about this particular show wasn’t entirely its intimacy or the Q&A portion, but more so the unplugged, acoustic nature of it, and the unspoken agreement from the crowd to sit back and let Olivia’s own vocals carry the night away. We remained seated for the majority of the show, only getting up at the direction of Olivia, who exclaimed “get up, get up!” during All American Bitch. The soothing, intimate nature of the evening says a lot about what sets Olivia apart from many other artists: her effervescent kindness. The young star has a way of lighting up a room by simply flashing a smile and saying hello in a warm, kind voice that you’d expect to belong to a Disney princess. One would expect flowers to bloom in her path and maybe they do, but we’re all far too busy noticing everything about her to realize what’s going on alongside. 

Dan brings up Olivia’s “revisionist history” when it comes to making the albums, and it reminds me of my own overwhelming nostalgia. “Even today, just talking about it, I’m like, ‘We had so much fun,” she says. “We had Taco Bell every day, hanging out!’ We were toiling, though, in the real world.” 

And with that, the feeling in my chest that had been there since my birthday gives way into something new, something warmer. She has a way of channeling relatability in a way that makes sense in every scenario. Forgive my simplicity here, but Olivia is a warm hug. The notion that no matter how old I get or how much my life grows and changes, there will always be a connection to the shy eyed teenage girl I once was. 

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about which of the Olivia lessons have been the most prominent in my lifetime. Was it the ones that resonated at seventeen, or the ones that resonate now? The way that I am currently choosing to see it, is that somewhere in a very different version of life, a different universe maybe, a younger version of me sits on the couch as Olivia plays in the background. Completely unaware that there was a world not all that far in which she is playing at The Ace Hotel in Los Angeles and I am sitting in the orchestra, despite the fact that tomorrow, I’ll need to be at school in New York. There’s a world in which I can and will make that class and there’s a world in which my hair was once blonde but not anymore and I love people who I once didn’t know existed. There is a world in which I get to be here for the earlier days of a global superstar who will only continue to grow. There is a world, the one that I am currently in, where there are countless more Olivia albums to release, countless more shows to be played, and countless more lessons for her to teach me as I grow, both literally and theoretically. 

In that case, I’m going to need more notebooks. 

An endless amount of thank you’s to the amazing team at American Express for putting on this unparalleled concert and for having me in attendance. Check out the conversation and bits of the concert for yourself on Olivia’s youtube channel!