Olivia has said before that she appreciates constructive criticism, and she reiterates that point, calling it one of her favorite things. “My favorite people in the world are people I feel like will be totally honest with me and care about me enough to be like, ‘Oh, you can do better,’” she says, referring specifically to Sour producer Dan Nigro. “It’s just about finding people you can trust and whose opinions you can trust.”
That also seems like part of getting older — how do you figure out what advice makes you a better person? If you’re predisposed to being hard on yourself, how do you know what is useful vs. what will send you spiraling? If you’re trying to do everything right and foresee bad moves before you make them, how do you cope with mistakes? “I just had this conversation with my therapist yesterday morning,” Olivia says. “Shit’s real.”
Being a young star has reinforced the idea for Olivia that there is no room for error. “That’s something I’ve always felt confused over [while] growing up,” she says. “When you’re in the industry, you’re sort of treated like a child but expected to act like an adult. That’s a really terrifying thought, to think that I’m not allowed to make any mistakes, because I think that’s how you grow as a person. I’m no different from any other 18-year-old out there. I’m definitely going to make a lot of mistakes in my life and in my career probably too. That’s just life.”
A few months ago, Saturday Night Live comedian and writer Bowen Yang interviewed Olivia for V Magazine. He asked her about existing as an Asian artist (Olivia is part Filipina), and how she thinks about her career from that standpoint. “I sometimes get DMs from little girls being like, ‘I’ve never seen someone who looked like me in your position.’ And I’m literally going to cry. Like, just thinking about it. I feel like I grew up never seeing that. Also, it was always like, ‘pop star’ — that’s a white girl.”
Olivia has said similar things about her identity before, but this particular phrasing struck a nerve with some after that quote was aggregated by outlets like Page Six. The criticism was layered: Olivia grew up in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when nonwhite pop stars like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and more not only existed but were taking over the charts. To many, her words felt at best confusing, at worst like erasure.
Olivia has seen this discourse, and thinking about it makes something like anguish cross her face. “That was really sad for me to see,” she says. “I really feel like my words were taken so out of context ... What I was saying is that it was cool to see girls of Filipino heritage DM me and be like, ‘Oh, it’s so cool to see someone that looks like me, and that’s really empowering.’”
Perhaps she said it a bit more clearly in an interview with The Guardian in May: “It’s hard for anyone to grow up in this media where it feels like if you don’t have European features and blonde hair and blue eyes, you’re not traditionally pretty,” she said then. She’s still figuring out how to talk about race, ethnicity, and having a platform beyond a statement she repeats twice: “I think representation is all about adding. I don’t think it’s about taking anything away from anyone.”
Along with bigger criticisms and worthwhile conversations come a slew of smaller ones, including that everyday brand of speculation, gossip, and shaming. Olivia has been vocal about her many influences: Taylor Swift, Lorde, 2000s pop-punk. She interpolated Swift’s “New Year’s Day” on Sour, crediting the musician on “1 step forward, 3 steps back.” But then, months after her single “deja vu” came out, she added Swift, Jack Antonoff, and St. Vincent to that song’s credits — all three wrote “Cruel Summer.” In April, before the credit, she had praised Swift’s “yelly vocals” in the bridge as inspiring her own. Then it happened again. The pop-punk “good 4 u” became a massive hit, drawing comparisons to a variety of artists who popularized the genre; months later, Paramore’s Hayley Williams and ex-guitarist Josh Farro popped up in the credits for writing their 2007 song “Misery Business" (their teams had been talking before the song came out).
On a personal level, she takes care of herself by separating who she is as a person from her social media presence and how she’s perceived online. She has struggled with feeling like that was her whole identity, numbers and pictures determining things about herself.