Olivia Rodrigo has seen both of her first two albums reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200, but even if her upcoming third project You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love does not follow that same path, she says she is at peace with it, guided by a mindset inspired by a classic Camp Rock anthem.
In a Cosmopolitan cover story written by her close friend Madison Hu and published April 29, the singer answered a fill in the blank prompt about what would define a successful year for her. “Even if my album flops and nobody likes it,” she said. “If I feel like, ‘This is real, this is me/ I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,’ then it’ll feel like success.”
The lyric she referenced comes from the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit “This Is Me,” performed by Demi Lovato alongside Joe Jonas in their 2008 Disney Channel breakout film. Long before her own rise, Rodrigo was a devoted fan of Disney stars, later appearing on the series Bizaardvark with Hu. During her Sour Tour in 2022, she even shared a childhood photo of herself staging a mock concert, with a setlist that included “This Is Me” along with songs by Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez.
While Rodrigo has made it clear she is not measuring success purely by charts, early signs suggest the new album, arriving June 12, is off to a strong start. Its lead single “Drop Dead” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100, making her the first artist to open at the top with the lead singles from each of her first three albums.
Elsewhere in the interview, the Grammy winner opened up about how the creative process for her third album felt closer to her debut Sour than her second record Guts.
“With Guts, I was under so much pressure, like, ‘Oh my god, I’m never going to be able to make another good song,'” she said. “It wasn’t even making music to make music. It was making music to please people or prove something.”
“With this album, I actually was like, ‘I’m done with the sophomore one. Now I can have fun again,'” she continued. “I was writing songs the way I did when I was 16, purely for fun.”
See Rodrigo’s cover of Cosmo and photos from the shoot below.
