‘I’m a fangirl’: 5 artists that shaped Olivia Rodrigo

“One thing I’ve always appreciated about you is that you’ve been so forthcoming about your influences […] not all people are like that,” gushed Popcast host Joe Coscarelli in a recent interview with Olivia Rodrigo. It’s true. Despite her status as one of the biggest popstars of the 21st century, Rodrigo has always branded herself as a music fan first and foremost, citing historic artists like Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, The Cure and more as her key influences in her new Dazed cover story.

This devotion has sometimes gotten her in hot water over the years: perhaps the most prominent example of this arrived in 2021, when Love accused Rodrigo of plagiarising the cover art for Live Through Time – a 1994 album by her band Hole – in promotional images for Rodrigo’s SOUR Prom concert film. “Stealing an original idea and not asking permission is rude […] it’s bad form,” Love wrote on Facebook at the time, suggesting that Rodrigo’s use of prom imagery was a direct copy. “To be honest, I’m just flattered that Courtney Love knows that I exist,” Rodrigo responded, humbly, in a separate interview later that year.

Elsewhere, Rodrigo has drawn attention for retroactively adding writing credits to songs like “good 4 u” and “deja vu” after comparisons were made with similar tracks by Paramore and Taylor Swift respectively. But this all seems to spring from Rodrigo’s genuine love for music. “I’m a fangirl, I love music and no one can take that away from me,” she told Coscarelli last week. It seems that Rodrigo’s biggest crime is fangirling too hard. 

Below, in view of today’s cover story and Rodrigo’s upcoming third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, releasing next Friday, we break down five artists that have shaped the modern popstar. 

Rodrigo has repeatedly paid homage to English post-punk pioneers The Cure over the years, which has only amped up in recent months: “drop dead”, the lead single from her forthcoming, references “Just Like Heaven” in its lyrics (as well as having an eighties synth-pop vibe), and its followup is literally titled “the cure”.  While Rodrigo said that the title was just a “happy coincidence”, she still cites The Cure as a key influence on the maturity that underpins her new project in today’s cover story. Rodrigo also performed alongside Robert Smith during her Glastonbury headline set last year, and has said that the pair “talk every week”. Could there be a collab on the cards…?

When we asked Rodrigo if it was difficult to write from a more joyful place on her upcoming album, she responded with a direct quote from art-pop icon Fiona Apple: “When I’m happy, why would I want to stop what I’m doing and sit down at the piano?”. Evdiently, Rodrigo’s influences go beyond just sound, with her musical heroes shaping the way she thinks about her own creativity too. As Rodrigo said in a separate interview earlier this year: “‘Sullen Girl’ by Fiona Apple was one of the first songs that I learned how to play on piano. It gave me a lot of ‘sad girl’ inspiration.” 

📲 IG | Taylor Swift liked @Olivia_Rodrigo’s Instagram photo of Olivia wearing a homemade shirt with a photo of her and Lorde pic.twitter.com/Zl6er8rj6Q

— Taylor Swift News (@TSwiftNZ) April 23, 2020

Rodrigo has described Lorde as “the voice of a generation” and having “changed the trajectory of her life.” This deep-rooted love for Lorde began when Rodrigo first heard “Royals” on the radio when she was 12-years-old, and was struck by Lorde’s ability to speak candidly about teenage life in the life in the suburbs.

While the SOUR Prom concert video controversy of 2021 is likely now water under the bridge, last month Rodrigo and Love found themselves at the centre of a bizarre new controversy – this time started by other internet users. In May 2026, Rodrigo was accused of “normalising paedophilia” by wearing a babydoll dress on-stage in Spain – a dress that was first created in 1940s Europe as a means of conserving fabric during wartime and later worn by Love, among others, as a sarcastic form of hyper-feminity (known as the ‘kinderwhore’ trend). 

Rodrigo’s use of the dress positions her as part of a lineage female rockstars, particularly those associated with grunge and the riot grrrl movements. “It’s this rhetoric girls are fed since they were little, like ‘Don’t wear that because then a man is going to sexualise your body and it’s your fault’,” she told Popcast. “I was like, ‘I feel like Kathleen Hannah or Courtney Love’. Those people are my heroes and I felt cool and comfortable.” 

Alongside Apple, Rodrigo states that she had been listening to a lot of English rock singer PJ Harvey during the making of her latest album. In her Dazed cover story, Rodrigo describes Harvey as “special and raw and unfiltered”, and has elsewhere cites her as an “honest storyteller”. Harvey’s influence also segues into another key theme on the album: English rock music. “I wrote lots of the album in London; lots [of it] was inspired by my time there,” Rodrigo tells Dazed. “Maybe it’s because it rains so much that all you want to do is be inside with the guitar and write.”