“Hometown show, baby — it’s very, very special.”
That was Olivia Rodrigo onstage at Inglewood’s Kia Forum on Tuesday night, not long into the first of six L.A.-area gigs that will wrap the U.S. leg of her world tour behind last year’s chart-topping “Guts” album.
Because the tour launched in February — and given all the action in pop music this summer from the likes of Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX — it’s been easy to forget that Rodrigo’s been out there doing her thing this whole time. (“We spent 2½ months in Europe,” she pointed out Tuesday. “We got to drink wine in France and eat pasta in Italy.”)
But for the very vocal capacity crowd at the Forum, where the 21-year-old Temecula native said she grew up going to concerts, that just created an opportunity to welcome her back.
“L.A., you guys are gonna make me blush up here,” she said.
Here are nine highlights from the concert:
1. Opening her first arena production with one of her best singles — as Rodrigo’s been doing on this tour with the slyly funny “Bad Idea Right?” — would be an impressive flex even without the blistering nü-metal breakdown she threw into the song Tuesday. But that was just the start of a bold introductory stretch in which the singer dispensed with two of her three No. 1 hits — “Vampire” and “Drivers License” — within the show’s first 20 minutes.
2. Among the celebrities in attendance Tuesday were Tobey Maguire, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Adam Sandler, the last of whom whipped out his phone during “Good 4 U” to shoot a video of his daughters and their friends singing along with Rodrigo. (That + Sandler’s basketball shorts = big dad energy.) Also in the house: Universal Music Group boss Lucian Grainge.
3. Although it’s still got plenty of recovering-theater-kid ballads, “Guts” leans into vintage pop-punk and alternative rock more than Rodrigo’s 2021 debut, “Sour,” did. Here she played the album’s most ’90s-coded cuts back to back, jamming “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” into “Love Is Embarrassing” as though we’d suddenly been dropped into a gig by Lush.
4. Rodrigo descended into the crowd for “Jealousy, Jealousy,” shaking hands and posing for selfies with fans in the front row, including one woman who rather familiarly placed her hand on the singer’s waist — only to have it quickly (if gently) removed by a security guard. The lady’s chagrined reaction, as caught by a cameraman and transmitted to the giant screen at the rear of the stage, was like a little one-act play about access to stardom in pop’s parasocial age.
5. One song Rodrigo’s added to her set since the tour launched is “So American,” a zippy neo-new wave number from the deluxe edition of “Guts” that she set up at the Forum with a bit about how good it felt to return from Europe and “have a f—ing In-N-Out burger” on the way home from LAX. Patriotism!
6. What with all the headbanging, Tuesday’s gig didn’t always showcase Rodrigo’s singing, which at its best puts her among the most dramatic and exacting vocalists of her generation. Then again, “The Grudge” — a slowly building piano ballad that may or may not be about her fraught relationship with Taylor Swift — was powerful enough to remind you of that all on its own.
7. “One of my secret talents — perhaps maybe my foremost talent — is I am a wizard at the art of Instagram DM,” Rodrigo said while sitting cross-legged on the stage next to her guitarist. She added that she’s met many of the people she’s dated that way — “some of them a little questionable, so maybe that’s not a good example” — as well as her best friend and her trusted producer, Dan Nigro, whom she said DM’d her after she posted a clip of her song “Happier.”
8. The simple message emblazoned on the white tank top Rodrigo changed into for the show’s encore: “VOTE.”
9. Rodrigo brought Roan (with whom she shares a collaborator in Nigro) on the road as an opening act at the beginning of this tour, arguably sparking the flame that’s since developed into full-blown Chappellmania. For these L.A. gigs, she has the Breeders, the great veteran alt-rock band whose 1993 classic “Last Splash” can still startle 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 at my life as before I heard it and after I heard it.”) Led by twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, the Breeders roared through their set on Tuesday at a thundering volume — loud enough, possibly, to be heard with appreciation by the many Gen X parents waiting outside the Forum for their kids.
