{"id":72991,"date":"2026-09-17T14:29:32","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:29:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/17\/olivia-rodrigo-is-the-best-arena-rock-star-in-years\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T14:29:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:29:32","slug":"olivia-rodrigo-is-the-best-arena-rock-star-in-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/17\/olivia-rodrigo-is-the-best-arena-rock-star-in-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia Rodrigo Is the Best Arena Rock Star in Years"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\t\t<\/span>livia Rodrigo<\/a> will never settle for being just another main pop girl. She demands to be your perfect all-American rock star. O-Rod has claimed her crown as the truest, realest, most shameless rock & roller of our moment. \u201cThere\u2019s something so special about rock music made by women,\u201d she said in December, in her conversation<\/a> with Bikini Kill\u2019s Kathleen Hanna for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame podcast. \u201cThere\u2019s a different emotional quality to it. The pain and rage and vulnerability that a woman can express through a rock song is an entirely different category. Growing up, I was so inspired by that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis former Disney princess has always reveled in her rock moves, ever since her first tour in 2022, when she was covering Veruca Salt and Avril Lavigne. Early on, she joined No Doubt and Sheryl Crow onstage. But she takes special pride in celebrating the Nineties feminist-\u00adpunk explosion \u2014 and claiming her place in it. This is the girl who told<\/a> Rolling Stone <\/em>her mom used to wake her up every morning by playing the 1990s grunge queens Babes in Toyland. (\u201cVomit Heart\u201d walked so \u201cDrivers License\u201d could run?)<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year was Rodrigo\u2019s \u00adfestival era, rampaging around the world with her lethal all-\u00adfemale band. She cranked up her \u00adfiercest arena-slaying bravado, belting \u201cAll-American Bitch\u201d as the bloodthirsty rock & roll animal she was always meant to be. She dropped to her knees to worship the guitar heroes in her band, Daisy Spencer and \u00adArianna Powell. She sang duets<\/a> with her idols, from Weezer to David Byrne. Best of all, she shared the stage with the Cure\u2019s Robert Smith at Glastonbury, calling him \u201cthe greatest songwriter to come out of England.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tBut she\u2019s always given it up to her rock inspirations. In June, when she made her surprise appearance at the Primavera Festival in Barcelona, she shocked the crowd by bringing out Robert Smith himself, who joined her to debut their then-\u00adunreleased duet \u201cWhat\u2019s Wrong With Me.\u201d She sang her Number One hit \u201cDrop Dead,\u201d with the line \u201cYou know all the words to \u2018Just Like Heaven,\u2019 and I know why he wrote them\u201d \u2014 then she sang a duet with the man who wrote them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tRodrigo obviously wasn\u2019t \u00adkidding when she kept saying how her new tunes were inspired by goth bands like the Cure and Joy Division. You can hear that all over her blockbuster album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love<\/a><\/em>. She digs deep into Eighties and Nineties rock sounds: the synth buzz of \u201cMaggots for Brains,\u201d the electro-punk aggro of \u201cMy Way,\u201d the post-punk guitar jangle of \u201cU + Me = <3.\u201d \u201cThe Cure\u201d might be her greatest song yet, simmering in the 1990s mode of Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair. This summer, she joined the Pumpkins at \u00adLollapalooza, singing the Mellon Collie <\/em>banger \u201cThirty Three and a Third,\u201d shortly before she was seen rocking out at a My \u00adChemical Romance show.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe has made a bold \u00adstatement with her Daisy Chain Fields<\/a> festival, a wildly \u00adambitious celebration of women in music, reaching back to legends like Stevie Nicks from the 1970s; Garbage, Bikini Kill, and the Breeders from the 1990s; and Karen O from the 2000s. The slate reached from \u00adDoechii to Katseye to Mitski, not to \u00admention her old doughnut-\u00adshop friend Chappell Roan. It\u2019s fitting that she sang a \u00adtriumphant duet with Sarah McLachlan, since she\u2019s upholding the spirit of the pioneering Lilith Fair.<\/p>\n

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\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tShe keeps showing off her wide-ranging sense of rock history, with her producer-collaborator Dan Nigro, who came out of the Long Island emo scene with his band As Tall As Lions. (She\u2019s said he suggested her joke on the album about her \u201cyacht-rock music taste.\u201d) Rodrigo\u2019s unfiltered rockness is an achievement to celebrate. May she stay this unrelentlessly upset forever.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story is part of our <\/em>Reasons to Love Rock<\/em><\/a> series, with all the sounds, trends, scenes, and artists that have us excited about rock music in 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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O livia Rodrigo will never settle for being just another main pop girl. She demands to be your perfect all-American rock star. O-Rod has…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":72992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop","article","has-excerpt","has-avatar","has-author","has-date","has-comment-count","has-category-meta","has-read-more","thumbnail-"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}