“The show in your hometown, darling, is very, very special.”
That was Olivia Rodrigo onstage at the Kia Forum in Inglewood on Tuesday night, shortly after the start of the first of six Los Angeles-area concerts that will close out the U.S. leg of her world tour behind last year's chart-topping album “Guts.”
Since the tour kicked off in February, and given all the action in pop music this summer with artists like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX, it’s been easy to forget that Rodrigo has been out there doing his thing this whole time. (“We spent two and a half months in Europe,” he noted Tuesday. “We got to drink wine in France and eat pasta in Italy.”)
But for the crowd that packed the Forum, where the 21-year-old Temecula native said she grew up going to concerts, it simply created an opportunity to welcome her back.
“Los Angeles, you are going to make me blush,” she said.
Below are nine highlights from the concert:
1. Opening her first stadium effort with one of her best singles (as Rodrigo has been doing on this tour with the fun and clever “Bad Idea Right?”) would be an impressive showing even without the blistering nu-metal break she launched into on the song Tuesday. But that was just the beginning of a bold performance that saw the singer dispense with two of her three No. 1 hits (Vampire and “Drivers License”) in the first 20 minutes of the show.
2. Celebrities in attendance Tuesday included Tobey Maguire, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Adam Sandler, the latter of whom whipped out his phone during “Good 4 U” to record a video of his daughters and their friends singing along with Rodrigo. (That plus Sandler’s basketball shorts = major dad energy.) Also in attendance was Universal Music Group boss Lucian Grainge.
Tuesday's show at the Forum was the first of six that Rodrigo will perform in the Los Angeles area.
(Timothy Norris / Kia Forum Photos)
3. Though still heavy on recovering theatre-kid ballads, “Guts” leans more toward classic pop-punk and alt-rock than Rodrigo’s 2021 debut “Sour.” Here, he played the album’s most ’90s cuts back-to-back, mixing “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” with “Love Is Embarrassing” as if Lush had suddenly thrown us into a concert.
4. Rodrigo reached out into the crowd to perform “Jealousy, Jealousy,” shaking hands and posing for selfies with fans in the front row, including one woman who, with some familiarity, placed her hand on the singer’s waist, only to have it quickly (if gently) removed by a security guard. The woman’s disgusted reaction, captured by a cameraman and beamed to the giant screen at the back of the stage, was like a tiny one-act play about rising to stardom in pop’s parasocial era.
5. One song Rodrigo has added to his set since the tour began is “So American,” a high-energy neo-new wave track from the deluxe edition of “Guts” that he performed at the Forum with a bit about how good it felt to come back from Europe and “eat a damn In-N-Out burger” on the way home from LAX. Patriotism!
6. For all the headbanging, Tuesday’s show didn’t always showcase Rodrigo’s voice, which at its best places her among the most dramatic and demanding vocalists of her generation. Then again, “The Grudge” — a slowly building piano ballad that may or may not be about her strained relationship with Taylor Swift — was powerful enough to remind you of that on its own.
Olivia Rodrigo acts.
(Timothy Norris / Kia Forum Photos)
7. “One of my secret talents, maybe my most important talent, is that I am an expert in the art of Instagram DMs,” Rodrigo said as she sat cross-legged on stage next to her guitarist. She added that she met many of the people she dated that way — “some of them a little questionable, so maybe that’s not a good example” — as well as her best friend and trusted producer Dan Nigro, who she said DM’d her after she posted a clip of his song “Happier.”
8. The simple message printed on the white sleeveless T-shirt Rodrigo wore for the encore of the show: “VOTE.”
9. Rodrigo brought Roan (with whom he shares a collaborator in Nigro) on the road as an opening act at the start of this tour, arguably lighting the flame that has since blossomed into full-blown Chappellmania. For these L.A. shows, he has the Breeders, the great veteran alt-rock band whose 1993 classic “Last Splash” can still shock you with its off-kilter intensity. (Last year, Rodrigo described the album’s unlikely MTV hit, “Cannonball,” as “one of those songs where I look back at my life as both before I heard it and after I heard it.”) Led by twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, the Breeders roared through their Tuesday performance at thunderous volume — loud enough, arguably, for the many Gen X parents waiting for their kids outside the Forum to hear them appreciatively.
