The shooting star from California hits the nerve of the times with teen pop. And the taste of Swiss youth, as the deafening concert in Zurich showed.
On her way from triumph to triumph, Olivia Rodrigo also stops in Zurich.
It’s not the first time that you’ve seen and heard something like this. There were others before her who had similar effects, similar surges. But after the few years without concerts, one is all the more impressed: A 19-year-old jumps and twirls across the not exactly small Zurich stage in Hall 622. And the audience has completely succumbed to her even before the first note. What’s more: it then sings along with the tones itself. Zurich has a choir of a good 3500 people this Wednesday evening – and it will hardly pause for the next hour. Californian singer Olivia Rodrigo’s first visit to Switzerland is a triumph.
Olivia Rodrigo owes her success to a series of songs that seem to speak to the soul of many of the teenagers present – mostly teenagers. Released over the last year and a half, they’re really all about one thing: the pain of separation.
TV series as a stepping stone
“I’ve been writing songs since I could speak,” Rodrigo told American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel a few months ago. “My mother has recordings of me singing a self-composed song about shopping.” She started playing the piano and working seriously on her songwriting at the age of nine and has been a series star in the USA since 2016. And this is how she finally launched her music career – she was able to contribute a song to the soundtrack of the Disney youth series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series”.
Today she sings about feelings that no longer know where to go. Because the one to whom they are addressed – together with gigantic expectations and idyllic ideas – no longer reciprocates them. That’s why her debut album “Sour”, awarded three Grammys and sold millions of times, sounds pretty bitter. But not only bitter, but also powerful, musically versatile and, yes, believable.
She finds good images in her songs. You can feel the lump in your throat and the lump in your chest. Sometimes the songs turn out to be letters to the ex, sometimes they are diary entries. In «Drivers License», Olivia Rodrigo speaks directly to her former boyfriend and tells him that now that she has finally passed her long-awaited driving test, she is driving past his street. Without him. He left her for another: “She’s so much older than me, she’s everything I’m insecure about” – She’s so much older than me, she’s everything that makes me insecure.
That sounds quite impressive and perfectly produced, intoned by pulsating piano playing and a tenderly moving voice that gets louder and louder and literally creeps into your ear. At the concert, she plays the song after just a few minutes. As if she were aware that here, in front of a hall full of fellow singers and accompanied by a five-piece women’s rock band, it doesn’t matter which song is played when. It really doesn’t matter. This audience is so absorbed in the songs that any dramaturgy would be fine with them. By the way, some parents also sing along. Or they film their daughters singing – with the big idol in the background.
Olivia Rodrigo interrupts the program several times because somewhere in the front ranks it is getting too cramped and stuffy. Some girls even lose consciousness. “Show me your thumbs if you’re ok!” the teenager asks on stage before singing the interrupted song again.
See you at the Hallenstadion
They are songs about a time when you still haven’t got your emotions under control. Can’t get a handle on it yet. Songs about experiencing a new spectrum of experience. Exaggerated songs. Cleverly produced, beautifully rounded, cleanly sung, embedded in an American pop show: every step is rehearsed. Sometimes the singer sits on the grand piano, sometimes she lolls on it. Then again she shows her legs apart in a victory pose.
At the end, after exactly one hour, confetti rain and her biggest hit “Good 4 U”, she played twelve songs. She’s gone quickly, moves on again quickly: It’s going to Milan now. Then she moves on all over the world to perform again in Zurich at some point. But then in the Hallenstadion. Anything else would surprise.