While performing “All-American Bitch,” her song about the impossible standards that young women are held to, Olivia Rodrigo, the 21-year-old Disney star turned certified rockstar, spins out and digs her Doc Marten boots into the ground, staking her claim on stage with the declaration: “I know my place and this is it!” Moments later, she invites the crowd to join her in a fit of communal rage. “Here’s the deal: Right now I want you to think about something or someone that just really fucking pisses you off, and when the lights go down, you’re going to scream as loud as you can and let it all out!”
What Rodrigo summons is a high-pitched primal roar that brings down the house and underscores that hell really is a teenage girl. It’s a moment captured in her new Netflix concert special Olivia Rodrigo: The Guts World Tour, out Tuesday, that perfectly demonstrates the ethos of her music. From her punk-rock perch, she invites her fans to come as they are, women and girls in particular, and provides them the space to feel the range of emotion that Rodrigo writes so poignantly about, from heartache to fury. “I feel like it’s a sense of community that is really special and I’m just so happy that people can come and feel like they can scream and cry and jump and stomp and do whatever the fuck they want to do,” she tells Vanity Fair from her home in Los Angeles. “I hope that it positively impacts their life in some way because I know watching it really positively impacts mine.”
It’s exactly this kind of connection at her live shows that the Grammy Award–winning artist had in mind when she started writing her sophomore album, Guts, back in 2022. “I wanted to make an album that you could kind of jump to and scream to and songs that could fill up an arena like that,” she says. With pop-punk, guitar-driven tracks like “Bad Idea, Right?” and “Vampire,” Rodrigo’s vision of a bigger and louder live show came to life as she ventured into the largest venues and audiences of her career on the Guts tour. As evidenced by the concert’s ambitious creative direction—which includes an electric live band, a crew of dancers, and a floating moon—no idea was too big. “It’s a creative person’s dream to just be able to be like, ‘You know what? I want a big shiny moon to travel around the room,’ and people will tell you, ‘Yes, here it is,’” she says. “It’s a crazy phenomenon and one that I’m lucky to have experienced.”
Giving everyone the opportunity to see the concert was always important for Rodrigo. “I’d go out and get coffee before a show and people would be like, ‘Oh, I really wanted to come tonight, but I wasn’t able to get tickets.’ That always made me really sad,” she says. But now, Rodrigo’s Netflix concert special, which is comprised of two hometown shows in Los Angeles and includes a special performance of “Hot to Go!” by tour opener turned phenom Chappell Roan, gives everyone a front-row ticket to the spectacle, whether it’s your first time attending or you’re tuning in to relive the memories.
If you were part of the Guts world tour this past year, you know that it’s a celebration of girlhood in all its forms, from glitter and bows to leather and lace and everything in between. Among the spectators are young girls who look up to Rodrigo, women her own age who have grown up alongside her, and older women who see parts of themselves in her. “One of the biggest honors that I have on tour is being able to look out in the audience and see all these girls who have been affected by my music and the things that I’ve had to say,” Rodrigo says.
During certain emotional songs, such as the breakup ballad “Traitor,” she’d look into the audience and see all of that reflected back at her. “There’s always some 6- or 7-year-old girls who are just bawling, crying, screaming the lyrics, and I think it’s so funny because you’ve probably never even held somebody’s hand and you’ve never been in a relationship. Nonetheless, there’s still this emotional depth and outpouring of feeling that I witnessed every night,” says Rodrigo. “I think that’s so beautiful, and to get to see the different generations of girls come together, it reminds me how much more alike we all are than we think. It gives me hope.”
Rodrigo’s live show, which bridges the gap between girlhood and womanhood (coincidentally the singer-songwriter turned 21 on the tour’s opening night), was many young fans’ first-ever concert, an experience that Rodrigo says she remembers vividly in her own life. “The fact that I get to be that for someone else and play that role in their lives is just so surreal,” says Rodrigo. “I would love to inspire somebody to pick up a guitar or start playing the piano and writing songs. I think that is the be all, end all. That’s the greatest achievement that one could possibly have in my line of work.”
