She is no bland cookie-cutter pop star and she showed that Tuesday in Montreal.
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Well, that was the loudest crowd I’ve ever heard at the Bell Centre.
Really. If you’re not a teenager or don’t have teenage daughters, you might not realize just how intense the Olivia Rodrigo fan base is. The 21-year-old singer took the stage at the Bell Centre at almost exactly 8:30 Tuesday night for the first of two shows, and the jam-packed arena went totally nuts. They all got to their feet and started shouting at the top of their lungs and, well, that’s kind of how the evening went.
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It was actually kind of great. People never returned to their seats. They did stop screaming — but only because they started enthusiastically singing along to every single song.
Rodrigo set the tone for the night when she said right at the beginning: “Welcome to the Guts world tour. I want to jump up and down and scream and feel everything you’re feeling.”
And that’s pretty much what it was all about. I’ve spent years — or is it decades? — telling people that pop music isn’t about musical chops or vocal prowess. It’s about emotion. The song either moves you or it doesn’t. You love Elvis or Rod or Aretha or Joni because they speak to you.
And Rodrigo speaks to millions, particularly female fans in their teens or early 20s.
“Every song has something in it that I can relate to,” said one young woman at the Bell Centre. “I like that she’s engagé. She speaks to me. She fights for women’s rights.”
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Just before the Montreal show, Rodrigo announced on X that she would be donating a portion of the proceeds from the Canadian dates on the tour to Women’s Shelters Canada, “which supports over 600 shelters across the country. And they help women and children who are fleeing abuse and violence.”
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In 2022, when she played the Glastonbury festival in England, she performed a duet with Lily Allen on Allen’s song F— You during the week the Roe vs. Wade decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Roe vs. Wade gave American women the right to terminate a pregnancy. Rodrigo dedicated the song to “the five members of the Supreme Court who have shown us that, at the end of the day, they truly don’t give a s— about freedom.”
In short, Rodrigo is no bland cookie-cutter pop star, and she showed that Tuesday. There weren’t any explicitly political proclamations like the one at Glastonbury, but the feminist statement was right there on stage, with her all-female band and all-female dance troupe.
Her two albums, Sour from 2021 and Guts from 2023, have garnered her a huge audience and speak directly to her young listeners. Two of her biggest and best songs, Vampire and Drivers License, are emotional, heart-on-her-sleeve songs about relationships gone south, and, in an unusual move, she played both early in Tuesday’s set.
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Rodrigo has a very self-assured presence on stage, though frankly it was hard to judge her vocals, given that she had 20,000 backup singers belting out every word of every song.
“Wow, Montreal, you guys got pipes on you,” she said at one point.
It really wasn’t about the music. It was a communion between her and her fans. She talked about how at 19, growing up seemed like the scariest thing, and then said: “I just had a big birthday. I’m 21 now and I’m so happy. I feel I know myself so much better.” That led into, appropriately enough, Teenage Dream, accompanied by images of her performing as a little girl.
One of the sweetest moments was when Rodrigo asked the crowd if there was anyone there with their mom or dad, which elicited a huge roar of approval. She then said if so, please give them a hug and say you love them. And loads of kids did just that. How can you not adore that?
There were quieter moments, like singing Happier sitting at the front of the stage with just a guitarist, but the most fun were the big loud pop-punk ragers, like the ferocious All-American Bitch that closed the set.
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But in the end, the real show was in the stands. Two teenage girls screaming along as they captured the moment on their iPhones. A mother filming her daughter doing a pretty good Olivia Rodrigo imitation. Everyone singing along all the time. People got the (girl) power.
bkelly@postmedia.com
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