Every Olivia Rodrigo Song, Ranked

A sensitive account of the social anxiety that can get left over from the isolation of her home-schooling days—not to mention a clever salute to Bob Dylan, one of her songwriting idols, who inspired her with “Ballad of a Thin Man.” The glitch is the unfortunate chorus “social suicide,” a klutzy line that doesn’t work as a hook or a joke at all, and gets in the way of the song living up to the title’s promise. As for Olivia singing “every guy I like is gay”? Best-case scenario.Best line: “I’m on the outside of the greatest inside joke.”

Olivia interpolates the 2017 Taylor Swift classic “New Year’s Day,” from Reputation. A haunting and powerful chronicle of a bad romance. She realizes it’s time for her to step off this emotional roller coaster, while she’s got the chance. But it’s difficult, because “the roller coaster’s all I’ve ever had.” The day after she wrote this song, the dude dumped her. Good riddance.Best line: “Like, am I pretty? Am I fun, boy? I hate that I give you power over that kinda stuff.”

O-Rod was the hit of last summer’s Glastonbury Festival, but she really sealed the deal when she brought out a local hero. “He’s probably the best songwriter to come out of England!” she announced, as The Cure’s Robert Smith ambled onstage. The whole world was stunned by the sight of the goth elder grinning from ear to ear—not something you see every day—as he sang a couple of Cure classics with her, including the 1992 hit “Friday I’m In Love.” They preserved their duet on a stand-alone vinyl single as well as her essential Live at Glastonbury album. In the liner notes, Liv called her set “the most exhilarating 90 minutes of my life.”Best line: “Always take a big bite/It’s such a gorgeous sight/To see you eat in the middle of the night.”

Near the end of You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, she tries to move on, cruising the bars of Silverlake looking for her next Mr. Bad Idea Right? She vows, “Past mistakes are just new information.” (Speaking of mistakes: pop stars complaining about people with “fake jobs”… in 2026? In a chorus? A sign of how fast she was rushing to crank out those final songs.) The Eighties production has a camp touch with the robot-boy vocal choir, in the style of Madonna’s “Material Girl” or Lene Lovich’s “New Toy.”Best line: “So I hit the new year like a single girl at a Vegas bar/Rocking my minidress with a vodka cran and an open heart.”

An early sign of Olivia’s flair for cover versions, from one of the funniest-titled Christmas albums ever: High School Musical: The Musical: The Holiday Special: The Soundtrack. Liv gives a taste of things to come by singing Joni Mitchell’s Blue classic about a bummed-out December, feeling weak in the knees. It’s got a whole new resonance now after You Seem Pretty Sad, since “River” sounds like the template for her new break-up songs. (Yes, I said in the intro that HSM songs don’t count, but I guess this is cheating, and I’m still a traitor.)Best line: “I’m selfish and I’m sad.”

A charity song for the 2026 War Child benefit compilation Help (2). Olivia sings the modern-day wedding standard from the Magnetic Fields’ master tunesmith Stephen Merritt, made famous by Peter Gabriel. She called it “one of my fav songs ever.”Best line: “The book of love is long and boring/No one can lift the damn thing.”

When Olivia headlined Lollapalooza in Chicago, she brought out a surprise guest: her childhood heroes Weezer, the very first band she saw in concert as a little girl. (She was born in between “Dope Nose” and “Beverly Hills.”) They played two Blue Album bangers that she released as a vinyl 7-inch, turning “Say It Ain’t So” into a cross-generational pop-punk full-circle moment.Best line: “Like father, stepfather, this son is drowning in the flood.”

But the next song was even better, as she sang, “I look just like Buddy Holly and you’re Mary Tyler Moore!” (One of her power moves, when it comes to cover versions: she never changes the pronouns or gender roles. Always the way to do it.) Olivia singing “you need a guardian” to Rivers Cuomo—was she wrong? A reminder that she makes such a brilliant pop star because she’s a brilliant pop fan, first and foremost.Best line: “What’s with these homies dissing my girl?”

Technically a High School Musical song, but it makes the cut since (1) she wrote it by herself and (2) she still occasionally does it live, which makes it canon. What could be a realer 16-year-old lyric than “I miss the days when I was young and naive”?Best line: “All I have is myself at the end of the day/And all I want is for that to be okay.”

A limited-edition single for Record Store Day — Olivia and Noah Kahan interpret each other’s tunes, recorded in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge. She sings “Stick Season,” while Noah sings “Lacy” on the flip side — beautifully proving they’re mutual fans who’ve listened close to each other’s voices. They also sang this together onstage at her Madison Square Garden show; she’s called it one of her favorite concert moments.Best line: “Now I’m terrified of weather ‘cause I see you when it rains.”

The morose finale of You Seem Pretty Sad — she resists the temptation to give a tidy ending to the story, or to wrap it up with a bow, instead choosing to let it all hang out with a stream of chaotic, messy, vague, hit-or-miss images, dashed out in haste while the break-up pain is still fresh. (Including an out-of-nowhere “her” that probably wouldn’t have survived a second draft.) The beautifully muted arrangement covers up the glitches, making it work as a mood piece. Best line: “It’s a real quiet house with the shower left on/Five beers in the fridge and the second car’s gone.”

All through her awesome summer-2025 tour, Olivia kept inviting her heroes up onstage, but she outdid herself at New York’s Governors Ball. Qu’est-ce sue c’est? David Byrne, who joined her for a jubilant duet on the Talking Heads’ 1983 space-funk classic “Burning Down the House.” She released it as a vinyl single, along with Byrne’s Fear of Music-style version of “Drivers License.” (So…the rest of the Sour covers project? Is that still even happening? David would probably cover the whole album if she asked.) OliviByrne were definitely making flippy-floppy, trading their best moves in a long, touching, and hilarious dance-off. Note: Byrne wasn’t the only New York CBGB punk legend she honored at Gov Ball. Her encore ensemble was a tribute to Blondie’s Debbie Harry, who wore the same outfit for her famous 1976 Punk magazine photo session.Best line: “Strange, but not a stranger.”

Olivia taps into the same empathetic spirit of Fiona Apple’s “Shameika” on Fetch The Bolt Cutters, or Taylor Swift’s “Seven” on Folklore — living with the complex memory of a childhood friend. She sings about queer kids getting rejected by their families, and tells them long-distance, “I hope you know how proud I am that you were created/With the courage to unlearn all of their hatred.” Believe it or not, not so long ago (like, oh, let’s say the entire freaking 20th century), hearing words like this from a teen pop star would have been totally unthinkable. Best line: “Address the letters to the holes in my butterfly wings.”

“It took you two weeks to go and date her/Guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor.” Your honor, the prosecution rests.Best line: “While she’s sleeping in the bed we made/Don’t you dare forget about the way you betrayed me.”

Do you get deja vu? The best of her live-cover singles, with Robert Smith joining her for one of the Eighties’ saddest songs — while she wore a T-shirt saying, “You Know All The Words to ‘Just Like Heaven.’” (It would take nearly a year for the world to figure out that reference.) She’s a lifelong Cure superfan — who can forget the footage of teen Liv in the car belting “Boys Don’t Cry”? After they sang this duet, she posted a photo of them backstage downing shots — that’s so American of her. Robert Smith, we’ll meet again — higher up on this list.Best line: “Spinning on that dizzy edge/Kissed her face and kissed her head.”

“Here’s the part where the girl gets pissed,” indeed. Olivia goes off on a hilarious rant against a suspected rival, the only time on Pretty Sad she shows her OliviAggro fangs, and it’s the closest she comes to a pop-punk snarler, despite the excellent synth-pop buzz. “My Way” is deliciously petty, self-mocking, irresponsible, and misogynistic, in the “Misery Business”/“Better Than Revenge” tradition. But given how much Olivia worships Blondie, her role model sounds like it must be Debbie Harry’s sneer in “Rip Her To Shreds.” Fun fact: the most famous cover version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” is the punk makeover from the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. In the biopic Pistol, it’s sung by the actor playing Sid: Louis Partridge. Best line: “Maybe I’m a petty bitch, but you made me resort to this! That’s it! I win!”

Olivia sings about the kind of compare-and-despair self-loathing that results from excessive phone addiction. She sings about it with all her typical sympathy and wit, especially when she’s scrolling through “cool vintage clothes and vacation photos.” Plus one of her first killer bridges. The studio version is stiff, but “Jealousy, Jealousy” really took off as one of her live hell-raisers, with a punked-out Clash-style attack, as she chants, “Co-comparison is killing me slowly.”Best line: “A pretty face, a pretty boyfriend too/I wanna be you so bad and I don’t even know you.”

A torchy change-of-pace piano weeper in cocktail mode, mourning the burnout of a relationship, including a failed getaway to Big Sur. Who among us HASN’T broken down in a crying fit on the curb at LAX?Best line: “Maybe I’m a stubborn overthinker, but I’ve been thinking over this a lot.”

A moving confession about growing up, maybe even getting famous, from the POV of a hyper-responsible only child and Disney starlet. She got what she wanted, but she doesn’t like who she’s turning into, always pretending she’s older than she is. “Getting drunk at a club with my fair-weather friends,” she sighs. “Push away all the people who know me the best/But it’s me who’s been making the bed.” Best line: “I tell someone I love them, just as a distraction/And they tell me that they love me like I’m some tourist attraction.”

A skeletal demo of a song written after her third album was turned in, released as vinyl-collector bait on the flip side of “The Cure,” but a very different story about a generic cad. The guy in “The Cure” tries hard to suck out her toxins, but this guy isn’t trying at all, leaving her to wonder, “Naked in your bed/Baby, where have you been?”Best line: “We both do our best/It’s a shame that my best is much more.”

She talks tough to an ex — but only after their break-up, as she rehashes their old arguments in front of her bedroom mirror. “I was just driving to the studio,” Olivia once said. “And I was listening to the Smiths and there’s this lyric [in ‘I Know It’s Over’] where he says, ‘It takes courage to be kind.’ I was really upset at the time and I was like, ‘What if I don’t what to have courage and what if I don’t want to be kind?’” She wrote the lyrics at the next stoplight: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.”Best line: “Hurt people hurt people/We both drew blood, but man, those cuts were never equal.”

Her great soundtrack theme for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. It fits the pastoral acoustic folk-horror mode of the franchise — definitely cut from the same cloth as Taylor Swift’s “Safe and Sound” with the Civil Wars. She sings from the perspective of the heroine Lucy Gray, but she puts her own stamp on it. It’s yet another Olivia song about an older man who planned on picking her up and tossing her away, only to find that she still haunts him long after she escapes.Best line: “I bet you figured I’d pass like winter/Be something easy to forget.”

A powerfully candid tale of negative body image and torturously low self-esteem. It’s almost a foretaste of “The Cure,” dissecting the destructive thoughts that can prey on an insecure young mind, as she laments, “I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy/I chased some ideal my whole fucking life.” The heavily flanged guitar is very 1985, a clever sign of producer Dan Nigro’s ever-fruitful Eighties inspiration.Best line: “It’s in my phone, it’s in my head, it’s in the boys I bring to bed.”

She can lie to everybody else about her feelings — even the boy in her arms, who she doesn’t really love. But this girl can’t fool her guitar, because it knows all her secrets and gives her the truth. (“You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people,” as Paul McCartney once told Rolling Stone. “And it will answer you with things people can’t tell you.”) It’s a muted acoustic ballad with some Ladies of the Canyon swoops in her vocal. Best line: “I’m so scared of my guitar/Because it cuts right to the heart/It knows me too well, so I got no excuse/I can’t lie to it the same way that I lie to you.”

The massive finale of Guts, a piano confession building to the climactic lighters-up chorus. Olivia blows out the candles as she turns 20, singing, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t always be your teenage dream.” (Three years after she sang “I’m so sick of 17/Where’s my fucking teenage dream?”) But she’s got tough questions for the future, asking, “When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years? And just start being wise? When am I gonna stop being a pretty young thing to guys?” Best line: “When does wide-eyed affection and all good intentions start to not be enough?”

“Purple” starts out as a sweet love buzz, with a new wave benediction from Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” the 1982 banger that Olivia says she’s already picked as her wedding song. But she rewrote it with a post-break-up outro, where this modern English romance gets bogged down in her self-doubts and anxieties. (It’ll be so interesting to compare when we get to hear the original demo version.) The outro goes acoustic, so it segues just perfectly into the opening strums of “The Cure” — a moment that really shows the brilliance of the Rodrigo/Nigro team as expert album-crafters.Best line: “I melt with you, your red and my blue/Now I see the world in purple.”

A heart-tugging tale of a young girl realizing her devotion is totally one-sided, and that her boyfriend is a drag. No matter how many times you hear “Enough For You,” her voice always touches your soul when she rages, “Stupid, emotional, obsessive little me.” Preach, Olivia: “I tried so hard to be everything you like/Just for you to say you’re not the compliment type.” That is technically the “already a middle-aged asshole for life” type. Best line: “Don’t tell me you’re sorry, boy/Feel sorry for yourself/Because someday I’ll be everything to somebody else.”

An excellent Guts (Spilled) break-up tale, and like some of the others, it goes for a hippie-folkie vibe of incense and patchouli, as opposed to the original album’s electric-youth mall-punk. “Stranger” is a wonderfully smug kiss-off to an ex, telling him, “You’re just a stranger I know everything about.” Bonus points for the Jewel-like breakfast scene where she sips her morning coffee and asks herself, “How did that happen?… For just some guy? Like, you’re just some guy!”Best line: “You are the best thing that I’ll ever keep so far out of my life.”

Can we talk about how insanely underrated “Logical” is? It’s the most powerfully raw ballad on Guts. Like so many of her Guts songs, it’s a story about a young woman getting twisted, molded, and humiliated by a “master manipulator” of an older man. Rodrigo’s voice shakes when she wails, “Said I was too young, I was too soft/Can’t take a joke, can’t get you off.” Best line: “Loving you is loving every argument you held over my head/You brought up the girls you could have instead.”

The emotion is all in the hushed calm of her voice, with a beautifully intricate vocal arrangement. Sonically and melodically, an update of “Favorite Crime” from her debut, but with more adult pain. The acoustic guitar lifts it high, with Nigro going for the Aaron Dessner touch.Best line: “What a shame you’re not here to witness my devotion/And my endless well of needs.”

Olivia fesses up to the chaotic romantic melodramas she plays out in the privacy of her mind, over “some second-string loser who’s not worth mentioning.” She rips him apart, but aims all her wittiest barbs at herself, admitting, “I’m planning out my wedding with some guy I’m never marrying.” “Love Is Embarrassing” just keeps sounding better and better over time, as she keeps refining it onstage. One of Dan Nigro’s most impeccable Eighties new wave productions, in the guitar/synth meld of the Cars or the Motels or Missing Persons, complete with a perfect Dale Bozzio hiccup in her voice. Best line: “You found a new version of me/And I damn near started World War III.”

She goes for coffeehouse Joni vibes here, strumming and chirping over the bongos as she breaks the heart of yet another Look At You, Cool Guy who thought he had this sweet young thing under his thumb. She kicks around some brilliant taunts, from “I can’t say I’m a perfect ten” to “I’m a candle in the wind” to “I’ll turn you out, I’ll turn you in.” But you have to love her heel turn, as her voice drips with sadistic malice.Best line: “I have captors I call friends/I got panic rooms inside my head/And I get down with crooked men/But I am the girl I’ve always been.”

Even an album full of obsessive Cure worship, “Maggots for Brains” really goes off the deep end. This lands right in the zone between the Cure album that really sounds like New Order (The Head on the Door) and the New Order album that really sounds like the Cure (Brotherhood), and you know what? Nothing wrong with that zone. This is electro obsession at its best, which fits a song about the loneliness of missing someone in a long-distance relationship, feeling like a zombie in your body.Best line: “I went to a party but only on principle.”

One of the most quizzical and enigmatic tunes on Guts, a vulnerable tale about getting obsessed with a powerful woman, either a fantasy figure or a real-life crush. (Or both.) Olivia can’t get “Smart Sexy Lacy” out of her head, a “dazzling starlet/Bardot reincarnate.” She’s desperate for Lacy’s approval, yet she ends up feeling poisoned, lamenting, “It’s like you’re made of angel dust.”Best line: “I despise my jealous eyes and how hard they fell for you/I despise my rotten mind, and how much it worships you.”

An exquisitely quiet love song, as a girl and a boy hop a fence in the park to take a night-time stroll, in their blissful “sticky-sweet tangerine” solitude. “Honeybee” totally captures that intimate mood. When she sings, “Pick me up, walk me home,” the sound is so hushed and unhurried; these lovers have all the time in the world.Best line: “I hope I never see what your face looks like going/A face I swear I could spend my whole life knowing.”

A rocked-out guitar tantrum, with some of Olivia’s shadiest shade: “He had an ego and a temper and a wandering eye / He said he’s 6-foot-2 and I’m like, dude, nice try.” When she sings, “I wanna meet his mom, just to tell her her son sucks,” that is some zoomer-Joni level shit. (On Blue, Joni Mitchell has the same conversation with Leonard Cohen’s mom, though not in those exact words.) Famous last words “I am my father’s daughter, so maybe I can fix him?”Best line: “I wanna key his car, I wanna make him lunch.”

A gorgeous guitar ballad in Nineties indie-rock mode, with a chorus that cleverly tweaks Pavement’s “Here” for an Olivia tune that’s truly slanted and enchanted. “Favorite Crime” explores one of her favorite lyrical themes: how tough it can be to stop blaming yourself for other people being mean to you.Best line: “Doe-eyed as you buried me/One heart broke, four hands bloody.”

You seem pretty sad for a goth so in love. Like so many sad kids over the decades, Olivia takes her most private fears and anxieties to The Cure guru Robert Smith — this dream duet is basically the conversation so many of us have had with Robert in our angsty teenage minds, so kudos to Olivia for turning her baby-bat fantasy into this just-like-heaven song. (Love the way she begins “staring at the ceeeeei-ling,” a clever nod to Staring at the Sea.) The moody synth-pop malaise comes from The Top or Japanese Whispers; so does the puckish humor. He really did show her, show her, show her how to do that trick.Best line: “I should talk to a friend, but I can’t get out of bed.”

“I’m sensing some undertones” — now there’s a brilliant way to kick off a love story. Olivia flaunts her wit in a devilishly catchy Eighties synth-pop bop about romantic obsession, the kind that you try to talk yourself out of in vain, even if it’s the biggest lie you ever said. Best line: “I’m sure I’ve seen much hotter men / But I really can’t remember when.”

A New York valentine where her heart melts like wax in the sun, with a soaring Pulp-style chorus and a Lover-worthy bridge, setting off sparks in the dark. “I’m a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake” is such a memorable image — one of the surprisingly rare times in her songs that Ms. I Drive Alone Down Your Street actually uses her drivers license. Best line: “Every night like the one before/I dream of you from like 1 to 4.”

“Good 4 U” was her third hit, after the huge surprise impact of “Drivers License” and “Deja Vu.” So people tried to prepare themselves for this one. But “Good 4 U” was the hit that really established Olivia as the all-purpose modern pop star, updating classic grunge feminist pop-punk for a whole new era. She goes for Nineties Alanis/Courtney/Veruca Salt realness, savaging a “damn sociopath” for the fatal mistake of pissing her off. After “Good 4 U,” nobody would ever underestimate her again.Best line: “It’s like we never even happened? Baby, what the fuck is up with that?”

A glorious nugget of Eighties new wave, the kind that Southern California girls appreciate like nobody else. “So American” rocks in the mode of the Go-Gos or Blondie or Devo. It evokes the Devo banger “Come Back Jonee” — a song that Debbie Harry covered on SNL in 1980. (And of course, Debbie Harry just returned to SNL in May to introduce Olivia. This girl always knows her history.) “So American” celebrates the eternal mutual crush between London boys and the Cali girls who adore them, as she sighs, “Oh God, it’s just not fair of him to make me feel this much!” She played it last summer at Glastonbury. “I love English music,” she told the crowd. “And as luck would have it, I also love English boys.” Best line: “Feet on the dashboard/He’s like a poem I wish I wrote.”

The most underrated highlight on Sour, a fantastic Fifties-style doo-wop weeper with a mean streak. Olivia shows off her uniquely masterful flair for lines that come out of nowhere to deliver a sucker-punch. No matter how many times you hear this song, there’s never any way to be prepared for the disturbing moment when she casually sneers, “Think of me fondly when your hands are on her.” Best line: “Do you tell her she’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen? And eternal love bullshit you know you’ll never mean?”