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Filmmaker Cameron Crowe has biopics on the brain, being in late-stage development on his long-planned Joni Mitchell movie, the casting of which is still unknown. So he used his Q&A with Olivia Rodrigo Tuesday night
at the Grammy Museum to ask her about casting thoughts — not for his own film, but for a theoretical one about her.
“In the biopic, in the kind of Broadway musical version of this album,” Crowe asked, “who plays you?”
“Well, you’re directing it,” the pop superstar answered, to audience cheers. “I don’t know who plays me… Sometimes I see a picture of Monica Barbaro, and I’m like, ‘Ooh, that’s a picture of me! Oh, no, that’s Monica.’ So, maybe her.”
“Good choice,” Crowe responded. “But then, there’s also you.”
“Yeah, I could do it,” Rodrigo responded, before passing the buck: “I mean, you’re directing it. You have to cast it.”
Even if she’s an old soul, a biopic about the 23-year-old is something that’s unlikely to happen any year or decade soon, but in the theoretical world where it could happen this early, there’s little doubt that it would be a very bankable box-office attraction. Rodrigo — who is just a few days out from having successfully organized and presided over her own music festival, Daisy Chain Fields — is easily one of the most popular figures in pop music. One of the most respected, too, with her third album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” being one of 2026’s best-reviewed albums, on top of its preordained bestseller status. She’s going to need some kind of fall before she’s eligible for a movie’s rise-and-fall-and-rise storyline, but right now there are no blips in sight.
The small audience that gathered on the rooftop of the Grammy Museum for a conversation and acoustic performance shared a sense they’d won the pop lottery this week, sitting among an audience of about 200, instead of among the 45,000 who’d just attended Daisy Chain Fields (which had proven a pretty tough ticket itself, being an instant sellout). In the back of the outdoor room, meanwhile, were a couple of dozen noticeably older industry-fan types, some of whom will surely be shortly casting preliminary ballots for the Grammys, where Rodrigo is expected to enjoy a high profile this year.
In her roughly half-hour performance with the acoustic guitarist and pianist from her all-female band providing the accompaniment, Rodrigo sang versions of the recent album’s “Drop Dead,” “Stupid Song,” “Maggots for Brains,” “Less” and “The Cure,” all of which — not to foster any FOMO — even more stirring than their full-band versions in Irvine three nights earlier. (Actually, “Less” didn’t get sung at Daisy Chain. With it being acknowledged by Rodrigo as the saddest song on the album, and quietest too, it’ll be interesting to see whether it gets picked up for her soon-to-launch arena tour or left out.)
Prior to that mini-set, Rodrigo sat for 33 minutes of questions from Crowe, resuming his intermittent music-journo career, and praising the singer as ” someone who really knows how to use her popularity well. She truly makes the future even better than the best of the past.”
When Crowe asked how she was feeling coming out of her big weekend, Rodrigo, who is nothing if not professsional and polite to a fault, backtracked to explain that “I run this festival called Daisy Chain Fields,” as if there was anyone on the roof who hadn’t been there or tried. “Oh my gosh, I am on cloud nine, I’m so happy,” she exulted. Asked in a card submitted from the audience for favorite memories of the day, Rodrigo said, “Oh my gosh, so many. There’s images of girls braiding each other’s hair. There were girls at the Bikini Kill set that were singing along to every single lyric of ‘Rebel Girl.’ They were like 7 years old. It was incredible.”
Inevitably she got to the charity component, where $20 million was raised for 10 organizations partially or entirely benefitting women and girls. “This one’s kind of sad but really moving. One of the organizations that Daisy Chain benefited is National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is basically nannies and house cleaners, and they try to provide services and help them have a living wage. It’s just this really beautiful organization. I was watching this video of the founder, Ai-jen Poo, talking to one of the girls who had come who’d been a caretaker for her dad since she was 15, and she said that she always felt kind of alone in that job, and it’s obviously very hard and heavy. She came to Daisy Chain and started reading about all these stories of other domestic workers that National Domestic Workers Association was working with, and she said that it made her feel less alone. I think that that was the most beautiful story, and that was exactly kind of what I was hoping would come out of Daisy Chain — that girls could come there and feel like they were a part of a community, and know that people are out there that really care about them… To make someone feel less alone in the world, that’s some goodness out there.”
Crowe mentioned Daisy Chain coming to a close with Stevie Nicks joining Rodrigo for a final duet. “It’s amazing that you guys chose ‘Landslide’ and were able to make it your own. I was lucky enough to write about them when I was just starting at Rolling Stone, and they had just finished the ‘Rumours’ album, and they were all kind of together realizing that they had put that drama from their lives into all these songs, and now it was present for everybody to know. And I think it felt like the rawness that they put into making it was now no longer theirs; it belonged to everybody. You’ve written so beautifully about your feelings, and impulses that you’ve had, and you put them out there for people in a generous way. I wonder sometimes if you think, ‘Wow, I’ve been really honest with people.’ That’s a badge of honor, really, isn’t it?”
“You know, it is kind of a weird job description, to just air so many of your personal grievances on such a large scale,” the singer responded. “But I don’t know; I just love writing songs. It is truly my therapy; I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have that outlet. Most songs for me just come from a really personal place, and I’m just writing them to see how I feel, and because I love writing them. I only start to think about them being out in the world after the fact — that’s when it sets in.”
One tie-in for Rodrigo’s night at the museum was it being the eve of a exhibit opening Wednesday — but on view to the Tuesday night audience as a preview — dedicated solely to sets and artifacts from her music video for the song “The Cure.” (Solely for now, anyhow; the Grammy Museum is promising an expansion of the exhibit that will incorporate other aspects of her career coming some time this fall.)
“It’s my favorite song on the record. It might be my favorite song I’ve ever made,” she told the audience. “And it might be my favorite video I’ve ever made. We worked really hard on that video. We were really excited about having everything be really tactile and practical. So everything that you’ll see in the exhibit is handmade. It’s cardboard; it’s yarn. It’s made by artists and they put maybe even 1,000 hours of work into it. I think today there’s so much digital stuff, and it was really nice to have something that was really tactile. It felt really fresh and inspiring. So now you can go walk through the exhibit, which is so cool. I just walked through it for the first time, and I’m wearing my skeleton dress in honor of the little X-ray machine” that was in the hospital-themed video and is now on exhibit for a fan photo opp.
She addressed the conceptual nature of the recent album, which devotes its first half to the rise of a relationship and the second half to its fall, apparently reflecting real life circumstances during its making. “There’s this Fiona Apple quote where someone’s like, ‘Is it really hard to write these happy songs?’ And she’s like, ‘Well, yeah. If I’m having a good time, why would I stop what I’m doing and go sit down at the piano?’ Which I think is kind of true. But that was sort of the nexus of ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love’: I really wanted to challenge myself to write from a place of more positivity and a happier version of a romantic relationship. It kind of took a turn in the middle, but we’ll get to that later.” (Unfortunately for inquring minds, they did not get to that later, at least not directly.)
“I think that’s why it’s called ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love,'” she continued, “because over the course of trying to write these love songs, I very quickly realized that what made my favorite love songs so moving is that there was a bit of melancholy in them, or a bit of fragility or something broken in the love song. Like, I think the Cure does a really good job at that” — by which she meant the band, not her own song of that same name. “One of my favorite songs ever is ‘Love Song’: ‘However far away, I will always love you. However long I stay, I will always love you.’ It’s so heartbreaking because it’s kind of sad and fearful. So it was songs like that that taught me about grounding love songs in something sort of broken, and that was sort of the whole exercise of the album was me trying to toe that line.”
Rodrigo talked at length about the most ebullient song in the early part of the album, “Stupid Song.” She noted that “I wrote some of the lyrics, uh, about Steve and Miranda from ‘Sex and the City’,” but mostly it was personal.
“I wrote that song (after) I flew from London to New York, and I was really jet lagged. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, wide awake, and I couldn’t fall asleep. And I walked around New York City. I was living in Greenwich Village at the time. I felt a little funny walking outside. Sometimes people take pictures, and I always felt a little anxious. But at 5 in the morning, I was walking around and nobody knew who I was. There was nobody on the streets, and I literally was just doing twirls on the sidewalk. I felt so free. And then this guy came up to me, and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna ask for a picture.’ And he’s like, ‘You are so beautiful. Can I take you out on a date?’ And I was like, ‘No, but this is the best day ever!’ Oh my God, I was so happy. I was twirling around the sidewalks, and I went home and I sat down at my piano and I wrote that song. So I think that it has some of that element of freedom and New York vibes. It was a good feeling. I tried to bottle it.”
Yet that single was also the most extenuated song on the latest album, after the initial burst of joy. “‘Stupid Song,’ I swear to God, we were working on for a year and a half. It was such a hard one to pull off. We just kept editing production and melodies, and we didn’t finish it until maybe one week before we had to turn the album in. But I’m really happy with where it ended up, so it was worth it.”
There were goofy moments, she recalled, explaining how she and co-writer/producer Dan Nigro do overlapping comical character voices when they get to gang vocals. On the more serious side, Rodrigo admitted her long TV resume has affected how she is able to get her most sincere vocals, counterintuitive as that may seem.
“I was a child actor when I was younger, and so I’m very used to being in front of a camera. And so sometimes when I’m not giving an emotional enough performance, Dan (Nigro) will actually just set up the camera on his phone and film me, and I’ll always do a better job, for whatever reason. Muscle memory, I guess.”
Sometimes the emotions in the songs reach demographics beyond the ones she’s imagining when the records come out. Talking again about Daisy Chain, she said, “I think just being able to play a show and see young people in the audience and hopefully provide a space where they know that their feelings and their experiences are really important is very moving to me. … But I also think it teaches me that music is the great equalizer, too. I mean, even beyond younger people in the audience, it teaches me that we’re so much more alike than we are different. Even with a song like ‘Driver’s License,’ to this day I’ll meet a 50-year-old dad from Omaha, Nebraska who’s like, ‘When I went through my divorce, that’s exactly how I felt.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa. Our lives are so different!’ But at our core we’re all the same and we all experience these feelings of insecurity and heartbreak and love, and I think music is the most distilled form of that.”
Moving on to the performance segment, Rodrigo explained where she got the title for “Maggots for Brains.” “The idea for this song (came when) I was walking through a record shop and I saw a magazine that was called Maggot Brain. Interesting choice of words, ‘maggot brain.’ And so I wrote it down in my phone and when it came time to write the song, it came to memory.” Left unknown was whether she was made aware Maggot Brain is Jack White’s magazine, or that it took its title from a famous 1970s Funkadelic instrumental, but in any case, it’s a breakthrough to have the insects finally inspire actual lyrics.
The delicate “Less” may have been the high point of her Grammy Museum set, whether or not there’s an attempt to try to have it fulfill that role again in 18,000-seaters when her tour starts Sept. 25 in Connecticut. “This is known within my inner circle as the saddest song on the record,” she acknowledged. “Making this album, I was really interested in the gray areas of love. Not only the breakup song and love song, but the stuff that’s in between them. So this song was kind of about that, and it’s about how you could be breaking up with someone but still have really fond feelings for them at the end of the day and still love them. So, it’s a pretty sad one.”
Regardless of how many cameras were rolling, her actorly intensity was ramped up for a seemingly deeply felt performance of “The Cure” to wrap up the evening — including a high note added to the song’s climax that hasn’t been heard in previous readings of the song. And, although there’s been some speculation about which hit Rodrigo might submit for the Grammys, her talk about this song made it sound pretty certain it’s what she wants to emphasize.
“Like I was saying before, it’s my favorite song on the record, so I saved it for last for you guys — I just love this song so much,” she said. “It feels so me, and I think it’s a thesis statement of ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.’ It’s basically about this realization that I had that none of these external factors will fix problems that you have within, as cheesy as that sounds. You think that being in a perfect relationship or getting a new job or falling in love for the first time, it’ll suddenly make you feel better about yourself, and the song is about the pretty solemn realization that that is not true. And in fact, sometimes I think falling in love can actually make these issues in yourself even clearer to you, which is a really kind of curious, interesting part about falling in love.”
