The song blew up on TikTok, and labels came calling. Rodrigo proceeded carefully. The road from Disney girl to pop artist is one of the most treacherous in the industry, studded with traps and pitfalls involving control, impossible expectations, the brute-force monetization of girlishness and sexuality. There have been mini-epochs, each micro-generation of girls getting a little less flattened in the machine: phase one, Britney Spears; phase two, Hilary Duff; phase three, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus; and in phase four, Ariana Grande—the first to quickly shed the Disney mantle and establish an independent musical identity. When Rodrigo signed with Geffen she included control of her master recordings in her contract. She insisted on releasing an album first, rather than an EP, to display more of her range, and wrote every song on Sour, working with Dan Nigro, the emo lead singer turned producer whose other collaborators include Sky Ferreira, Caroline Polachek, and Conan Gray. And Rodrigo managed to do this all while still working for Disney: She finished filming her third and final season of HSM:TM:TS in 2022.
Talking to Rodrigo at the record store, it seems to me that she’s propelled herself into superstardom in part because of her ability to be exactly where she is: behind a piano, heartbroken; lying in bed, refusing to look at her Spotify numbers or follower count, knowing that her whole life is changing. Right now, she’s just in the East Village on a rainy day, telling me about her newfound Tori Amos obsession. We pull out a Bruce Springsteen live recording of a concert in Toronto in 1984. “He’s my biggest celebrity crush of all time,” she says. On the album cover, Springsteen is wearing a sweatband and a T-shirt that says “Warning! This record contains noises of an explicit nature that may be offensive and should not be played in the presence of minors.” The title, in black and white, says “p*rn IN THE U.S.A.!” Rodrigo giggles. “I think I might have to get this for my new apartment.” She tucks it under her arm. “Yeah, you’re coming home with me.
I’m surprised, in the record store, when Rodrigo brings up a piece about abortion I wrote last year. The reproductive rights rollback, she says, feels “actually insane—I think it’s sickening.” We talk about how many girls in her generation, and in my daughter’s, and in mine, will be “forced to give birth if they get pregnant,” she says. “It is so scary. It’s such a terrifying reality.” We talk about volition, and choice, and how that makes all the difference in bodily experience. (At Rodrigo’s 2022 Glastonbury performance, she brought out Lily Allen to sing Allen’s song “f*ck You,” which she dedicated to the five conservative Supreme Court justices who had just invalidated Roe v. Wade. “So many women and so many girls are going to die because of this,” she shouted, onstage.) In 2021, Rodrigo spoke at a White House news briefing to encourage young people to get vaccinated for COVID; she plans to use her platform to get out the vote in 2024. As we pay for our records, unfurl our umbrellas, and walk a couple of blocks in the rain to Café Mogador, she asks me about what it’s like being a working mother. “I’m so excited to experience motherhood one of these days. I think about it all the time.”
At Mogador, a decades-old brunch staple on St. Marks, Rodrigo tells me that she recently watched Meet Me in the Bathroom, a documentary about music in Strokes-era New York City—she loves the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, of course—and that it was part of what made her so excited to move to the city. We order coffee, hers with oat milk, and she asks me how I met my husband. Funny enough, I say, I met him when I was 20 years old. “I want to meet my husband now!” she says. I’m grateful, I tell her, that my heart has been treated gently, and that I’m not currently dating 35-year-old adolescents. “Peter Pan boys,” she says sagely. But I wonder if, never having experienced heartbreak, I’ve missed something essential on the spectrum of human experience.
She notes that heartbreak comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘My boyfriend dumped me and I’m heartbroken.’ ”
That is the classic form, though, I say.
“Well, there’s still time,” she says, dryly.
The thing Rodrigo says most often during our time together is that she’s lucky: lucky to have parents who tell her they’d be just as proud of her if she were going to community college in Temecula, lucky to have friends who call her out on her bullsh*t, lucky to have a house in Los Angeles—she’s been baking a lot of banana bread and spending time on interior-design TikTok. The thing she says second-most often is: “You don’t realize how young you are when you’re young.” She kind of can’t believe her own self, at age 12, “being on sets, surrounded by 40-year-old guys, talking about the traffic and the weather, learning to make small talk like an adult.”
I wonder if she’ll feel this distant amazement, in a few years, about herself at 18. Her first music festival—and the only one she’s attended to date—was Glastonbury, when she played it. The first time she ever performed her own songs live, it was at the BRIT Awards; the second time, it was on Saturday Night Live. She tells me that she had never been more scared in her life than she was in the dressing room, that she was literally crying from nerves. And still, that night, she crushed it—ably managing a stage whose tricky acoustics flummox veteran acts all the time. “She’s a professional in everything she does,” says Carole King. “She’s been a professional for a long time.”
But now, Rodrigo is learning, in a particularly high-octane way, that adulthood doesn’t mean having life figured out. “I remember being in meetings when I was 13,” she says, “and they were asking me what I wanted my brand to be, and I was just like, ‘I don’t even know what I want to wear tomorrow.’ ” Back then, she thought this was a problem. Now she understands that confusion is necessary, that the unknown is generative. She forced herself not to write at all for six months after Sour came out; she’s aware that she needs to live a life in order to be able to write about it. She’s been reading Meg Jay’s cult-classic psychology book The Defining Decade, which is about how the tumultuous change in a person’s 20s can guide them into a steady future. The new album is a time capsule, Rodrigo says, commemorating a moment that feels like it’s “about figuring stuff out, about failures and successes and making mistakes.”
Can she tell me more about these mistakes? She laughs. “You’ll have to listen to the rest of the album,” she says.
The server at Mogador comes with two plates of halloumi eggs—Rodrigo confesses that she’s never had halloumi before, but just thought it sounded good—and a side of bacon. In Los Angeles, bacon has played a regular role in her self-care routine. “I wake up and make my little matcha and I make bacon for myself, and then I sit at the piano and try to write something, even if it’s sh*t,” she says. This solitary discipline is a point of pride for her. After the success of Sour, she had to deliberately stop herself from crowding her life with distractions. “I would hang out with my friends every single night and have a sleepover, or I’d cling to a boyfriend, anything to not process what was actually happening in my life,” she says. When she returned to songwriting, the act felt different. “I’m not going on 17, going through my first heartbreak, crying, with words just pouring out of me,” she says.
