Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour Opening Night Setlist Included Covers of Avril Lavigne & Veruca Salt

Hannah Dailey
·3 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

At 19 years old, Olivia Rodrigo has three Grammys, two Hot 100 No. 1s, and as of Tuesday night (April 5), a headlining world tour.

Rodrigo kicked off her highly anticipated Sour tour with a sold-out show in Portland, Ore., and made her fans happy by delivering a setlist that left out none of the 11 tracks on her hit debut album Sour. There was even time for two covers, and so the “Deja Vu” singer filled the space with not one, but two punk pop/rock hits from the ’90s and early ’00s: Avril Lavigne‘s “Complicated” and Veruca Salt‘s “Seether.”

More from Billboard

According to Rolling Stone, “Complicated” was the fourth song in the show and came right after Rodrigo’s mega hit “Drivers License.” It’s a fitting follow-up to a ballad themed around driving when you consider Lavigne’s iconic lyric “I like you the way you are, when we’re driving in your car,” which the pop prodigy earnestly performed while sitting on top of a piano.

After scaling through a few more Sour tracks — including a mashup of “Enough for You” and the Taylor Swift-sampling “1 Step Forward 3 Steps Back” — Rodrigo strutted up and down the stage for her rendition of Veruca Salt’s gritty alt-rock banger “Seether.” She reportedly thanked her mom for introducing her to the band, which could have easily influenced her own edgier songs like “Good 4 U.”

The ’90s rockers were excited to see the young pop star cover their hit song, which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard‘s Alternative Airplay chart in 1994. “We’ve been belting out #brutal and #good4u in the car nonstop for the past year,” the group tweeted on Monday, along with a clip of the performance. “This made our day, @oliviarodrigo.”

Lavigne also caught wind of the cover of her song. She simply retweeted video of it and captioned her tweet with an orange heart and black heart emojis.

With the Portland show in the books, Rodrigo has 39 more stops to go. She and her opening acts — Gracie Abrams, Holly Humberstone and Baby Queen — will trek through venues across the United States and Europe between now and the first week of July.

These venues are notably all theaters that only seat a few thousand audience members, as opposed to arenas that would be able to fit more of Rodrigo’s millions of listeners. She explained this choice, which saddened some fans who were unable to score tickets, in a December interview with the Los Angeles Times, saying, “I don’t think I should skip any steps.”

See the full setlist to Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour, as performed on opening night, below, and watch her cover of “Seether” here, and “Complicated” here.

  1. “Brutal”

  2. “Jealousy, Jealousy”

  3. “Drivers License”

  4. “Complicated” – Avril Lavigne

  5. “Hope Ur OK”

  6. “Enough for You”/”1 Step Forward 3 Steps Back”

  7. “Happier”

  8. “Seether” – Veruca Salt

  9. “Favorite Crime”

  10. “Traitor”

  11. “Deja Vu”

  12. “Good 4 U”

Click here to read the full article.