In Palm Springs, Olivia Rodrigo opened her 2024 Guts Tour with a compact yet generous show that made good on her promise as an actual rock star.
“I don’t know if you guys know this, but I just turned 21,” Olivia Rodrigo told her audience during the opening show of her 2024 tour Friday night. (They knew.) “I’m really fucking excited about it — big birthday. I went to the gas station the other day and I bought a pack of cigarettes and a case of beer. I promise I didn’t consume it, but I bought it just ‘cause I fucking could.” There was no mention of whether the attendant making the sale did any kind of double-take after carding her and getting a gander of the most famous driver’s license in the history of pop culture.
Rodrigo was telling the story about her venture into the realm of AM/PM impulse purchases by way of introducing “Teenage Dream,” a song she wrote when she was 19 and, from the sound of the lyrics, wondering whether she might have already passed her prime (This is the sort of question that probably comes up more among child stars than the general population of adolescents.) But, she informed the crowd at Palm Springs’ Acrisure Arena, she was no longer dogged by these feelings, two years further on. “I think growing up isn’t so scary after all, and life just kind of gets better.” We’ll all shotgun a beer to that… or mime it, anyway.
Rodrigo has had a lot of reason since she wrote that troubled song to turn into a cockeyed optimist: “Drivers License” brought her as close to literally overnight sensationalism as is possible in pop. Her first album, “Sour,” was widely acclaimed — at least in poptimist circles — as an instant-classic debut, and the follow-up, 2023’s “Guts,” was maybe even 5% better than that. (She’s not even shackled anymore to the TV show that seemed to have fueled some of the angst of her early material.) What’s to feel angsty about? Well, for starters, bad boys and troublesome societal expectations, the twin tortures animating anthems from “Vampire” to “Pretty Isn’t Pretty.” But her infectiously giddy stage show is all about joy, not brutalism.
It’s a rock ‘n’ roll show, by the way — maybe the best rock tour we’ll get all year, even if the season is young. Rodrigo’s albums necessarily have to alternate her pop-punk thrashers and her ballads, to some degree, making for a little bit of whiplash for the few of us who still listen to albums in squence. But the concert setting all but demands the louder and brasher material is going to be front- and backloaded. So any show that starts with “Bad Idea Right?” and “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” and ends with the brass knuckles of “Brutal,” “Obsessed,” “All-American Bitch,” “Good 4 U” and “Get Him Back!” is going to be remembered by everyone attending as an electric guitar-ignited fireworks show, even if there’s just as much to be said for the balladic sparklers that made the show’s quieter mid-sections just as enthralling.
