Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour touched down in Columbus last night for the first of two performances at Ohio State University’s Value City Arena. Here are five takeaways from the evening:
1. This week Rolling Stone published its ranking of the 200 greatest rock songs of the 21st century to date. It’s clearly provocative clickbait, but they weren’t wrong to place “good 4 u” near the top. Rodrigo feels as much a rock artist as a pop star. That duality was obvious on the tour supporting 2023’s GUTS, which swung between guitar-fueled eruptions and tender, heart-on-sleeve ballads. And it’s even more evident on this run, which follows June’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The setlist reads as more cohesive, meaning it clusters loud and quiet songs into blocks. The night opened with eight consecutive high-energy numbers, powered by booming drums and walls of distortion, with a few tracks flirting with the new-wave textures that shaped the new LP. Some pop-production flourishes remained: multiple outfit changes, video interludes, a stage strewn with fake flowers, and Rodrigo often singing straight into the camera. The pinnacle of pageantry arrived during the climax of “the cure” on the auxiliary stage, when a rain of water soaked Rodrigo, washing one dress off and revealing another. Yet there was no choreography and no lip syncing. It was largely a showcase of a commanding vocalist and her equally formidable band rocking out. She even crawled toward her guitarist at one point, then dropped to her knees to revel in the six-string heroics. It may feel a touch old-fashioned to praise a young woman for choosing rock over pop, especially from a forty-something dad who attended with his daughter, so I won’t go there. I will say this: her creative output and professional ties keep steering in this direction, and it’s refreshing and intriguing to see a figure like that land in the mainstream.
2. Perhaps because I caught You Can See Everything two nights earlier, the performance of authenticity stuck with me. Rodrigo remains first and foremost an entertainer, and with that comes an act of emotion. She smiles during the upbeat songs, looks troubled during the sad ones, and pulls the audience into sing-alongs and group chants. The polished, Disney Channel lineage doesn’t vanish, nor does the influence of the singer who crooned about moving on with a broken heart. Rodrigo could be navigating a personal crisis and we might never know it because the show must go on. Yet I found her relative ego-lessness compelling on Thursday night. White confetti meant to resemble snow drifted down on her during “honeybee,” the first in a string of ballads she delivered from a seated piano late in the set. I was struck by her choice not to flick the bits of paper from her hair for the next two songs, letting herself appear less than flawless. Even more notable was the decision to perform the last three songs with wet hair after the stunt in “the cure.” You could spin it as either a rejection of artificiality or as evidence of someone who isn’t bound by it, but she did it when many of her peers would recoil from such vulnerability.
3. Another thing many of her peers wouldn’t attempt: a guitar solo. Rodrigo picked up instruments several times during the night, mainly strumming a guitar or tapping out piano chords, but at the peak of “maggots for brains” she delivered a Strokes-esque lead line that she’s been weaving into her sets lately. She’s not exactly Annie Clark up there, but it’s exciting that she aspires to that level and even more exciting that she gambles on it instead of waiting for it to come off as natural as the glory notes on “cigarette smoke.” And those glory notes were, to put it plainly, glorious. Don’t let her indie cred distract you from the fact that she can truly sing.
4. Rodrigo hasn’t drifted so far from her teenage ballads that they’ve become obsolete, at least not yet. At 23, she’s crossing into her mid-20s, which has me wondering how long her earliest material will endure within her evolving canon, particularly the heartbreak anthems spoken from a clearly adolescent vantage. For now, those songs still fit in the live show. The SOUR cut “traitor,” with its vitriol for a swiftly moving ex, might feel a touch juvenile. Yet the album’s deep cut “favorite crime” delivers one of the most potent climaxes in Rodrigo’s catalog, when her voice soars to its peak and she laments, “All the things I did/ Just so I could call you mine/ All the things you did/ Well, I hope I was your favorite crime.” On Thursday that moment remained electrifying. She then followed with “drivers license,” a track so monumental that it seems to outsize my concerns about Rodrigo aging out of it. I can imagine her continuing to perform it well into old age as a kind of youthful vignette, much like Alex Chilton singing “Thirteen.” Still, it was uplifting to see the show close with “expectations,” the No Scrubs-inspired track that serves as her current single, guiding her young fans toward higher standards rather than pining for a loser.
5. At the end of the show, Rodrigo wore a T-shirt endorsing Dr. Amy Acton’s campaign for Ohio governor. Earlier, she confessed that the day’s highlight was mailing in her ballot. A voter-registration table sat in the lobby. None of this came as a surprise, given Rodrigo’s history of speaking out for causes she believes in. Her recent Daisy Chain Fields festival raised about $20 million for women’s rights organizations. She’d also shown up at Tom Morello’s concert-as-political-rally a few weeks prior. She could have kept her show apolitical, but she’s compelling her audience to confront issues that extend beyond romance and heartbreak. The activism is unmistakable, yet it doesn’t drown out the entertainment value of her performance. If anything, the two strands reinforce each other, contributing to the sense that she’s offering up, if not her whole self, at least her authentic self. Good for her.
SETLIST:
“drop dead”
“u + me = “so american”
“good 4 u”
“my way”
“serena joy”
“bad idea right?”
“ballad of a homeschooled girl”
“vampire”
“purple”
“stupid song”
“maggots for brains”
“traitor”
“pretty isn’t pretty”
“begged”
“cigarette smoke”
“honeybee”
“favorite crime”
“drivers license”
“less”
“the cure”
“deja vu”
“all-american bitch”
“expectations”
