Olivia Rodrigo Heals Wounds and Draws Blood in Triumphant Unraveled Tour Opener

By Rob Sheffield

Rob Sheffield

It’s official: Wounds are healing. Olivia Rodrigo kicked off her Unraveled Tour last night in Hartford, Connecticut, with an opening-night triumph that proved she might be feeling unraveled, but totally unvanquished. What a night — O-Rod held the stage for nearly two hours, going on at 8 p.m. sharp to storm through 23 songs, without an encore or a dull moment. She did nearly every song from her new You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love — it was a barrage of one killer tune after another, from her three already-classic albums. Flowers. Rain. A dissolving dress. Now that’s a rock star — it’s the most alive she’s ever been.

It’s a totally bonkers show — the whole night is full of her Fuck It, Whatever energy. The stage is covered with flowers. Tons of flowers. So many flowers. Olivia has to be the only pop star I’ve seen with her own flower roadies — by my count there were 16 people in the gardening crew, coming out between songs to gather or rearrange the foliage, or else to bring more. You have never beheld so much vegetation onstage. Guess Olivia really does have a favorite florist?

The Unraveled Tour is a world away from the brazen glam-punk bravado of her summer-2025 festival run, barely a year ago, where she kicked off every night with the grunge headbanger “Obsessed” — a song she hasn’t touched all year. In that show, she was absolutely on top of the world, lit up with superhuman rock confidence. She’s in different territory emotionally these days, going for a pastoral mood. After Wolf Alice’s high-energy opening set, her pre-show soundtrack was a loop of chirping insects and birds.

Olivia made an unforgettable surprise entrance — the band stretched out the intro to “Drop Dead” forever, until Olivia sang the first verse while entirely hidden in the flowers. For the first chorus — “One night I was bored in bed” — she arose from deep in the garden, like a May Queen. Before long, the guitars were blasting away while purple confetti fell. She rocked out in a white dress with an empire silhouette, giving total Pride and Prejudice vibes, if there were a sixth Bennet sister who hung out in pubs and knew all the words to “Just Like Heaven.”

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Quite honestly, Olivia could have left the stage after “Drop Dead” and it would have been a fantastic show. But she was just starting, slamming right into two of the greatest (and rockingest) love songs she’s ever written, “U + Me = <3” and “So American.” “U + Me” was lifted high by the crowd screaming the key lines, maybe Olivia’s all-time killer couplet if not her entire philosophy of life: “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor/And to that I say fuck it, whatever!” The video screen helpfully displayed the lyrics, but nobody needed a prompt. She raced to the keyboard to play a piano solo. At one point, she lifted her dress to show the crowd her underwear, decorated with a pro-Hartford message: “HFD + me 4ever.” (Note: There is no known evidence of anyone ever feeling this way about Hartford in real life.)

“So American” was a shocker in the setlist — it seemed like a song she was guaranteed not to do, since it’s very much set in the pre-You Seem So Sad era, but it brilliantly raised the emotional stakes. The three-song interlude of romantic bliss hit a nasty snag with the pop-punk rage of “Good 4 U”; it led to a costume change while the band vamped on the “Deja Vu” intro and the flower roadies pruned the garden.

The show is grouped in six different sections, loosely (very loosely) based around the four seasons. She kept the energy level high with her all-woman band, starring guitar heroes Daisy Spencer (whom she introduced as “the coolest girl in the world”) and Arianna Powell. There was hardly any stage banter, especially in the first half, where she rarely said a word between songs — she’s never talked so little in a show. Her outfits ranged from princess dresses to Nineties-style streetwear. The indie-sleaze aggro of “My Way” zipped right into the amazing new “Serena Joy,” a righteously pissed-off feminist broadside with a very early-Eighties new wave groove, very Martha and the Muffins. “Purple” began with Olivia curled up into a ball on the floor, by the lip of the stage, until she was jumping around waving a sparkler by the end.

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You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is a highly plot-driven album (a plus or a minus, depending on your mindset or mood), but she avoids that narrative in the live show, taking care to switch back and forth between falling-in-love songs and break-up songs. “Cigarette Smoke” actually comes before “Honeybee,” which is a daring move since it reverses the album’s apology imagery. But she didn’t say anything about the album’s much-discussed premise, staying away from any comments that might seem conceptual or thematic. The one new song that got an introduction was “Begged,” which she prefaced with a sweet story about writing it “in a hotel room in a foreign country at 4 a.m.,” while her best friend Madison Hu was trying to sleep. (She apologized to Hu, who was in the audience, saying, “Sorry, Maddie, for keeping you up.”)

She also led the crowd in a birthday tribute. “This is a special night, because it’s opening night,” she said at her piano. “But also because it’s my mom’s birthday.” Since her mom was there in the house, she had everyone sing “Happy Birthday,” but quipped, “I can’t put her on camera — she’d kill me!”

“Bad Idea Right?” and “Vampire” were highlights, with Olivia reprising her iconic Guts-era stage crawl during Powell’s guitar solo in the former. For “Stupid Song,” she moved to a heart-shaped side stage (with a ring of flowers, of course). “Maggots for Brains,” one of the weirdest, saddest, and best moments on the new album, killed, with Olivia playing the Cure-style guitar solo. (Robert Smith did not show up tonight, and sadly, neither did “What’s Wrong With Me,” the only omission from You Seem Pretty Sad). Olivia sat alone at the piano for the rapturously received “Favorite Crime” and “Drivers License.” 

The show climaxed with the one-two punch of “Deja Vu” and “All-American Bitch,” two of her toughest ragers. The set omitted some of her bad-attitude rockers like “Brutal,” “Obsessed,” or “Get Him Back!,” any of which might have added some spice to the ending, since “Expectations” doesn’t quite have the knockout punch for a finale; at least a few people in my section began singing “Brutal” before realizing this was a different song with a similar beat.

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