Looking at it now, Rodrigo sees the album as about hope—having it, then losing it—more than love. “The first half of the album, your hopes are just so high, and you’re dreaming about the future and dreaming about who you could be in this different environment,” she says. “And the last half is just that crushing feeling when you realize that your hopes aren’t gonna get met.” (I ask if the album is fatalistic in its view of love. Rodrigo says that in her mind the album ends hopefully, before drolly adding: “I don’t know right now in my regular life, but….”).
The bulk of the tracks on the album’s second half re-invent the classic Rodrigo breakup song: They’re largely about her own fault in her relationship. On “the cure,” the record’s centerpiece, she sings about the realization that a good relationship can’t fix her own insecurity. “When you’re knowing someone really intimately, the parts of yourself that you don’t really like come out—it’s not like, ‘Everything’s great.’ It really shines a mirror on yourself,” she says of the track. It expresses “something that I’ve been trying to say for a long time but didn’t really have the perspective to put it into words,” yet which she was finally able to unlock last year. “I think it’s impossible to make a song like that without being in a grown-up intimate relationship. I hadn’t had that experience and didn’t know any of that stuff about myself on the past few albums.”
Rodrigo’s friend, the singer Chappell Roan, tells me that Rodrigo has now “experienced heartbreak on another level, as we all do when we grow older—she has experienced that feeling when all the things you thought were answers weren’t actually the answer.” As she’s matured, “her writing keeps getting better and better—it’s amazing to see an artist grow from a child to a woman and for it to all be cataloged in her art.”
Some people in Rodrigo’s orbit were worried about her making a five-minute song like “the cure” a single. But, at this point, she feels like “making a song that doesn’t resonate or feel like it’s fulfilling some creative impulse is kind of boring.” She brings up Charli xcx as an example of an artist who is just “having a creative impulse and fulfilling it, even if it’s something that’s not fully expected.” I suggest that in the 20th century, artists like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell were allowed to spend years or entire decades in the woods without commercial popularity before coming back into the limelight. “For sure, for sure, I think that’s really admirable, it’s like true artistry,” she says, looking at me with a dazed expression. She’s propped up her head with her elbow on the table and looks, for the first time in our conversation, slightly absent-minded. “Sorry, I’m feeling like, Fuck, I got a little tipsy. I hope that I have interesting answers. It’s gonna be more free.”
Rodrigo will perform these songs—open fire hydrants of typically unspoken emotions—for hundreds of thousands of people on next year’s The Unraveled Tour. She’s already sold out 10 nights at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and 11 at London’s O2 Arena. Her approach to performing such intense music is, to put it lightly, chill. “I really do a good job of dissociating, for some reason,” she says, with the lightly curious affect of someone talking about being double-jointed. If you were to only hear her tone, you’d think she was just any other woman eating salmon crudo and drinking a spritz, as opposed to one of the biggest performers in the world talking about how she performs forensic investigations of her own psyche each night. “I had a psychic tell me once: ‘You can turn it on, and you can turn it right back off.’ I really am weird, I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
