Olivia Rodrigo wants you to decide what her songs are about

For any young person, the handful of years that compose the transition from teen to young adult are bound to be awkward and emotionally fraught, even if they're a little exciting too. For Olivia Rodrigo, those gap years have been stranger than most, after the explosive success of her first album, Sour, turned an 18-year-old songwriter into much more: the youngest artist to ever debut at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, a three-time Grammy winner, billion-plus streaming sensation, Vogue cover girl and the artist The New York Times dubbed "pop's brightest new hope." All of which meant that her second album would, too, be more than an album: Whatever she delivered next would be her response to the discovery of her own talent, her relationship with success and, perhaps above all, a brand-new kind of pressure.

"I definitely had a chip on my shoulder the whole time. I remember for the first few months of sitting down and trying to write the album, I had all of these intrusive thoughts in my head: I would sit down at the piano and just think about what people would say, how people would criticize it," Rodrigo says.