A Southern California music festival featuring only women musicians and created by Olivia Rodrigo? That’s not such a bad idea.
Rodrigo, fresh off the release of her junior album, on Monday unveiled her Daisy Chain Fields music festival and the roster of all-women artists set to take over Irvine’s Great Park on Aug. 29. The lineup will include Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Katseye, Mitski, Doechii and special guests Karen O, Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks.
The 23-year-old Grammy winner and vocal advocate for women’s rights said in her post that her dream festival has finally become a reality and that earnings from the spectacular will go to charities benefiting women and girls.
“The lineup is truly insane and full of my heroes and friends,” Rodrigo said in her announcement. “I firmly believe that joy, community, and music can be the drivers of meaningful change and I’m hopeful this festival will be just that.”
Artists Bikini Kill, Die Spitz, Eli, Garbage, Not for Radio, Quiet Light, Rachel Chinouriri, Santigold and the Breeders are also set to perform. Fans hoping to snag tickets can sign up for pre-sale access on the festival’s website.
Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields comes to Irvine a month before the former Disney Channel star kicks off her massive Unraveled tour, promoting her latest release “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.” She will take over Inglewood’s Intuit Dome for four nights in 2027: Jan. 12, 13, 16 and 17.
In his album review, Times pop music critic Mikael Wood writes that Rodrigo’s latest release sees the singer-songwriter approach romance and heartbreak with “new wisdom, drawing sophisticated conclusions about why people in love do the things they do (and don’t do the things they don’t).”
What to do after writing some of this century’s most devastating songs about the torment of breaking up? Write some of this century’s most devastating songs about the ecstasy of getting together.
With her first two albums — 2021’s Grammy-winning “Sour” and 2023’s triple-platinum “Guts” — Olivia Rodrigo proved herself to be perhaps the most gifted of the many chroniclers of Gen Z romance to emerge in Taylor Swift’s wake. She could convey the hot sting of betrayal, as in her smash debut single, “Drivers License”; she could channel the injustice of watching an ex somehow carry on, as in “Good 4 U”; she could deliver a sick burn like somebody handing out Halloween candy, as in “Get Him Back!” (Because it deserves remembering: “He had an ego and a temper and a wandering eye / He said he’s six-foot-two, and I’m like, ‘Dude, nice try.’”)
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Yet on her thrilling third LP, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” Rodrigo, 23, turns to the pleasure that comes before the pain — and, in a feat very few in pop music are ever able to pull off, ends up with a number of first-flush-of-love songs as potent as any breakup tune.
She opens the album with “Drop Dead,” in which she compares a guy in line for the bathroom at a bar to an “angel on the walls of Versailles” — an early sign of how high the emotional ceiling is here. In “Stupid Song” she cycles through a series of metaphors to describe her lovesickness — she’s a car without a brake, she’s a heart made of melting wax — before finding a simpler but infinitely more vivid way of getting her point across: “You should feel how I feel when somebody says your name.” (Chills.)
“Maggots for Brains” is a song about how useless she becomes “when my baby goes away,” and let’s just take a second to savor the fact that Rodrigo is putting that title into the world less than four years after she was still a working Disney kid. The album’s next tune, “U + Me = <3,” is its high point: a euphoric promise of devotion that sounds like Sixpence None the Richer reborn as a Midwestern emo band. It’s got two young lovers carving their names into car seat leather, and it’s got a girl trying to impress her boyfriend’s older sister with her cynical humor and her taste in yacht rock.
More important, it’s got these lines of pure poetry: “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, F— it, whatever.” Kurt Cobain would be proud.
Working with her longtime producer, Dan Nigro, Rodrigo has expanded her stylistic palette to accommodate these new emotions; “You Seem Pretty Sad” pulls in chiming folk-rock and synthed-up new wave and even has a gorgeous wine-bar piano ballad, “Less,” that might put the scare in Rodrigo’s pal Laufey.
The cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s new album.
(Geffen Records)
The album is structured to trace the arc of a relationship, which means that the second half dips into the heartbreak we’re used to getting from Rodrigo. But she’s writing about familiar scenarios with new wisdom, drawing sophisticated conclusions about why people in love do the things they do (and don’t do the things they don’t).
In “The Cure,” which rides a strummed acoustic-guitar pattern that strongly recalls Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” she realizes a boyfriend can’t fix what’s broken inside her; “Begged” examines the limits of one partner’s willingness to look past the failings of the other. After hearing these songs, the happier ones at the beginning of the album reveal bits of shadow that Rodrigo has built into them to presage what’s to come — to presage what always comes.
It’s fitting, then, that Robert Smith of the Cure — perhaps pop’s most jubilant gloommeister — hovers over this LP like a patron saint: nodded to in “The Cure,” of course, but also “Drop Dead,” where Rodrigo name-checks the Cure’s classic “Just Like Heaven.” Smith himself turns up in “What’s Wrong With Me” for a duet with Rodrigo in which the two learn to accept that love, in the end, might be what kills them.
“My head is spinning and my stomach is sick,” they sing, and neither sounds like they’d have it any other way.
Some are calling the controversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s recent outfit choices babydoll-dress-gate, Olivia Rodrigo calls it “weird.”
The dress debacle kicked up in early May when Rodrigo released the music video for “Drop Dead,” in which she runs through the Palace of Versailles wearing a pink-and-blue ruffled babydoll set while singing about the intensity of a crush. Then on May 8, she wore a cottage-core pink-and-white floral babydoll dress with knee-high Dr. Martens during a live performance in Barcelona.
Rodrigo was drawing from subversive feminist and punk fashion of yore, but internet critics were quick to slam the “deja vu” singer, saying the ensemble was sexualizing child-like imagery. In an hour-and-a-half interview with the New York Times Popcast that dropped on Thursday, Rodrigo staunchly defended the dress and called the criticism disturbing.
“I have worn outfits that are maybe revealing on stage, like I’ve been on stage in a sparkly bra and little shorts — which is my right — that’s fun,” she said. “I felt cool and comfortable in that, and that wasn’t inappropriate, but me fully covered up in a dress that people deemed to be, like, childlike was inappropriate, and I think it shows how we really normalize pedophilia in our culture.”
Rodrigo further decried the criticism as rhetoric that girls are fed from a young age, “which is ‘don’t wear that, because then a man is going to sexualize your body, and it’s your fault’ — it’s so weird.”
Rodrigo said she didn’t think she looked “sexy” in the babydoll dress; she was going for a cool look à la Kathleen Hannah or like Courtney Love, musicians whom the pop star said are her heroes. Love appeared to defend Rodrigo on social media by resharing posts defending the singer-songwriter in since-expired Instagram stories.
“I just think if we start dressing in a way that’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t want some f— freak to think that I am sexy like a baby’ or some crazy thing like that, I think it’s losing the plot a little bit,” she said. “I’m very protective of younger women and girls, and I don’t ever want them to be fed that rhetoric. You shouldn’t be responsible for some guy sexualizing you in a way that was never your intention.”
Rodrigo’s third studio album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” which features hit singles “Drop Dead” and “The Cure,” will be released June 12.
