Olivia Rodrigo, an express celebrity

The gestation period of a star has been reducing. The latest record-breaking phenomenon proved that it takes just 36 hours to reach world fame. At 17 years old and with a broken heart, Olivia Rodrigo wrote Drivers License, a song that became an instant hit on TikTok and broke all the parameters of what until then was considered a hit on Spotify, reaching the top spot in streams in 31 countries. On YouTube, the music video for the song was the most viewed in 14 countries. Now, the artist has received seven Grammy Award nominations, including categories such as song of the year and best new artist. The album is also one of the 2021 favorites for critics of The New York Times.

At the age of 18, Olivia is not, however, a newcomer. For a few years she has been a Disney girl – now she stars in the series High School Musical on Disney + – and, like others of their predecessors (Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, all made in Disney) knew when and how to jump into adult entertainment.

Drivers License is the first single from his album Soul (which debuted at the top of the Billboard list), and in it the Californian singer-songwriter refers to a relationship ended, and a great disappointment. The sudden success and honesty of her lyrics led to parallels with Taylor Swift – whom she admires, as well as being a great driver of her career – and, going further back in time, with Alanis Morissette.

The singer with the award for New Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards.

Life itself. Olivia Isabel Rodrigo was born in Temecula (California) on February 20, 2003. She has Filipino descent from her father, and German and Irish from her mother, and from a very young age she began to take star steps: at the age of six she was already studying singing and acting.

His first appearance on the small screen was in a commercial for Old Navy. He had to wait some time, until 2015, to do his first most serious job: a leading role in the television movie An American Girl: Grace Stirs Up Success.

Just a year later she was chosen to be part of the cast of the Disney Channel series Bizaardvark, giving life to the character of Paige Olvera – for whom she had to learn to play the guitar – during the three seasons that the series had.

Although this role was already a nascent fame, she ended up making the leap to celebrity status in 2019, when she was chosen for the original Disney + series. High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.

At Show, a group of students prepares to participate in a musical and the protagonist, Nini Salazar-Roberts (whom Olivia gives life), was chosen to play the main role of the play, Gabriella Montez.

For this series, in addition to interpreting the successes of the original film, such as Breaking free, Olivia wrote the song All i want, which became popular on TikTok and became the most successful in the history of the Show.

The followers of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series They were already familiar with Olivia Rodrigo and used to hearing her show her musical talent. But for the rest of the world it was a surprise.

According to account in the minibiography that appears in his Web (oliviarodrigo.com), in the days before the confinement was decreed in the United States, in early 2020, he met with the Interscope / Geffen Records team, specifically with producer Dan Nigro, and signed a contract with the record company belonging to Universal Music. “It turned out to be a crucial day for so many reasons. I spent most of my quarantine writing songs in my living room and producing them in a garage, including Drivers License “, bill. “It was always a really special song for me, but I never expected the response it got. It completely blew my mind. “

With this outfit she dazzled at the Met Gala in New York.

The fictional plot of High School Musical, which at the end of 2019 showed her dating her co-star and also star Joshua Bassett – with whom she co-wrote another song for the series, Just for a moment-, crossed the screen and the love between them became a reality. The duo had a romance that ended in early 2020 and apparently it was the end of that bond that inspired the lyrics of Drivers License. The unease transmitted by the song would have been due to the breakup and a rumor – unconfirmed – that the reason could have to do with an infidelity of Joshua Bassett with another Disney girl, Sabrina Carpenter.

Joshua Bassett and Olivia Rodrigo met while filming the Disney series High School Musical. The breakup inspired the singer to write the hit Drivers License.

The romance ended up having a media end, but this time it was not the pink press that spread it, but the one involved with his song; a mechanism of catharsis for the artist who was also, although she did not imagine it then, the first brick for a solo career.

Strength and vulnerability. It might be thought that the insecurities exposed without qualms, in brief and accurate concepts, require a maturity and an introspection difficult to find in someone so young, but Olivia succeeds, and with the freshness typical of her age. With the same naturalness with which he expresses his pain, the song was received by the 76 million Americans who listened to it. Drivers License –the first single by Olivia Rodrigo out of High School Musical, which was released in January of this year — only in the first week. And also the rest of the world, since in Spotify, also in the opening week, it was the most listened to of the service of streaming of all times. “We definitely had no idea how big it was going to be,” Jeremy Erlich, Spotify’s music co-director, told The New York Times. “He just shot up into this monster, unlike anything he had ever seen before.” Today the song is included in 150 official playlists of the company.

Shortly after the explosion of his first hit, Olivia became the White House youth spokesperson regarding the importance of covid vaccination, and President Joe Biden invited her to take a personalized tour of his residence.

President Joe Biden gave her a personalized tour of the White House and named her youth spokesperson for the covid vaccination campaign.

Taylor Swift has fueled the singer’s career from the beginning. He had already expressed his support when he made a cover from Cruel summer, a song of his authorship (“I love it, thanks for your beautiful version,” he said then), and before the success of Drivers License He tweeted, “That’s my girl!”

The last few months have been a roller coaster ride for Olivia, and to reaffirm that parallel between her experience with sudden fame and that of Canadian Alanis Morissette, the magazine Rolling stone invited them to share a talk. The result of that conversation was published in the October issue of the magazine, with a portrait of the two illustrating the cover. Both Rodrigo and Morissette took their first steps as girl actresses, but their true revelation was in music, whose first expression was, for Morissette, Ironic, and for Rodrigo, Drivers License. “We had a similar experience, with a really successful debut album, which is strange. At least for me, it felt super fast. It felt overnight, and I’ve been working and writing songs since I was five years old. It definitely wasn’t overnight. But from ‘I’m writing songs in my room’ to ‘OMG, a lot of people know this song’ it was all very fast for me. Obviously I feel very lucky, but sometimes I feel that it has nothing to do with me ”, Rodrigo confessed to Morissette in the interview. Another coincidence that the publication points out is that, in addition, the debut video clip of both takes place in a car. If you look carefully at Olivia’s gestures in certain passages, with her long hair, you can see a clear inspiration in the Canadian’s interpretations in the 90s.

Rolling Stone brought the singers and songwriters together to discuss what they have in common: sudden fame and honest lyrics.

Olivia, who has more than 11 million followers on TikTok, has already won New Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards, Best New Artist and Song of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards, and Songwriter of the Year at the awards. what delivers Variety, and could win up to seven Grammys at the next ceremony, on January 31, 2022.

“I fully understand people’s curiosity for details such as who is talking in the song and what it is about, but that is not what is important to me,” he said in an interview with Billboard about the events that inspired Drivers License. “The song is resonant with people because it manages to move them, and I think that everything else does not matter,” he added; “Seeing that such a painful moment in my life has turned into something beautiful that can help those who are going through something difficult is very empowering.”

From EFE