Olivia Rodrigo Went From Plucking 'The Climb' On Guitar To The Top Of The Mountain

Few people have had as good a year as Olivia Rodrigo. The singer-songwriter and star of High School Music: The Musical: The Series created 2021's first big hit in "Drivers License," a No. 1 coming-of-age heartbreak tune that explores the backstreets before revving up to a shout-along coda — the sort of built-in drama that understandably inspired a TikTok trend. Right after, she went experimental on her kaleidoscopic follow-up "Deja Vu," which became another Top 10 hit and saw her diving into conceptual territory for the music video.


However for all her recent success — yes, that includes passing her road test — she still can remember her humble beginnings: plucking one note on a "terrible, awful little pink guitar" to play along to the first of Miley Cyrus's "The Climb." "It's legitimately one note. It goes dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, 'I can almost visualize it,'" the 18-year-old Rodrigo tells MTV. "I would literally just play that one note over and over again and sing 'The Climb.'"


Despite her protestations, piano lessons followed at her parents' insistence, and although she cried before every session, she's grateful for the structure right now that she's writing chart staples with her trusted collaborator Dan Nigro. Rodrigo, who is the MTV Push artist for May, says songwriting inspiration can come from anywhere — a conversation, a poem — nevertheless because the self-proclaimed straight-A student also notes, the act of crafting music often works best as soon as it's treated as a discipline.


"I really think that more or much less forcing yourself to write a song some days is really rewarding she says. "I think you can't rely on those lightning bolts of concepts to strike you all of the time." However as soon as they do? That's as soon as the discipline pays off. The end result of that practice finds Rodrigo with a forthcoming debut album called Sour, out May 21, full of songs that stem from a period in her life any time "everything that I had that was, like, really awesome and good in my life went really sour."


you could hear that acrid taste in both "Drivers License" and "Deja Vu," despite the pop sweetness that covers both songs like a glaze. The work that goes into making that sonic sheen can't be overstated, she says, which is what makes the subsequent success so wild. "I don't think anybody goes into [making] a song with expectation like that." Although that mixture of sour and sweet is precisely what Rodrigo hopes will connect with listeners.


"I just hope that people visualize bits of themselves in my songwriting, hopefully, or categorize kind of become engrossed in the stories I'm telling," she says, "because those are my main go to songs to listen to." Or as her original inspiration Miley once sang, "Keep on moving. Keep climbing."


Get to know Rodrigo further in her MTV Push interview above, which also incorporates a stripped-back, Rhodes piano version of "Drivers License" along with a full-band efficiency of "Deja Vu."