A-List Pop 2021

“I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter's going through,” Olivia Rodrigo told Apple Music days before the release of SOUR, her full-length debut. It feels safe to say that no single this year was quite as transportive or transcendent as “drivers license,” the breakup song that became a viral, closely studied sensation the moment Rodrigo quietly released it in January. Since then, it’s been The Year of Olivia in a lot of ways, the 18-year-old singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and star of Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) making her presence felt across pop culture, from the success of SOUR to an audience at the White House to the sound of the song's now legendary bridge bringing a barroom of tough guys to tears on Saturday Night Live. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record SOUR because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they're still very real, but I'm definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You're okay now.’”