Olivia Rodrigo Names Jack White, Kathleen Hanna, and St. Vincent as Mentors
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The post Olivia Rodrigo Names Jack White, Kathleen Hanna, and St. Vincent as Mentors appeared first on Consequence.
Olivia Rodrigo might most often be labeled a pop star, but her rock tendencies are indisputable. So it makes sense that she’d turn to Jack White, Kathleen Hanna, and St. Vincent as mentors while making her upcoming album GUTS, as she revealed in a new profile with The New York Times.
Rodrigo has long gushed about White — her “hero of all heroes” (and Consequence’s July 2022 cover star) — and she found his advice particularly helpful when she was feeling the pressure of following up her debut album SOUR: “He wrote me this letter the first time I met him that said, ‘Your only job is to write music that you would want to hear on the radio,’” she said. “I mean, writing songs that you would like to hear on the radio is in fact very hard.”
But Rodrigo also takes inspiration from some less radio-friendly acts, one being Bikini Kill, whose vocalist Kathleen Hanna feels a mutual admiration: “She’s a revelation,” Hanna said in the same profile. “To be my age and cry at something that someone so young wrote — like listening to ‘Drivers License’ for the first time and sobbing in my car.”
Hanna went on to praise Rodrigo for condemning the overturning of Roe v. Wade at her Glastonbury set last year, and for channeling “riot grrrl iconography” into her stage design. “It’s a fascinating thing to watch these young women, and especially Olivia, because she seems to be so advanced as a songwriter, expressing themselves in these really complicated ways,” she said. “That’s so great, to see this underground musical style being graphically referenced in the mainstream by a person who’s actually a music lover.”
St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, who recently accompanied Rodrigo to a Tori Amos concert, seems to concur with Hanna’s sentiments. “I’ve never met anyone so young and so effortlessly self-possessed,” Clark said. “[She] knows who she is and what she wants — and doesn’t seem to be in any way afraid of voicing that. And just a really lovely girl too… I’ve never heard her say a bad word about anyone.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Rodrigo fawned over Snail Mail, Joni Mitchell, Rage Against the Machine, and Sweet, admitting that she “listened to ‘Ballroom Blitz’ 10 times today.” We approve! She must have been saving all her badmouthing for the lyrics on GUTS, which is out September 8th. So far, we’ve heard the singles “bad idea right?” and “vampire.”
Olivia Rodrigo Names Jack White, Kathleen Hanna, and St. Vincent as Mentors
Abby Jones
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