In her first public appearance following the successful debut of her all-women festival, Daisy Chain Fields, Olivia Rodrigo joined Cameron Crowe for a conversation on Tuesday at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. The event was held as a preview for the museum’s new exhibit, Olivia Rodrigo: The Cure Unraveled, which features the sets, artwork, and props that were fashioned for her music video for “The Cure,” released earlier this year.
“The concept of ‘The Cure’ was a feeling that I had been trying to articulate for a really long time, but I didn’t really know how,” Rodrigo told Crowe. “And that’s kind of the beautiful thing about songwriting, is it really just informs you how you feel. I feel like I don’t actually know how I feel about something until I’ve written a song about it, and so it definitely helps me be clear with my emotions.”
She recalled that, at the time, she wasn’t feeling up to writing. “But I’m kind of big on creative discipline, so I forced myself to sit down and grab the guitar … it turned out to be one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made.”
Rodrigo said she also enjoyed making the video for the song, which appeared on her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. “We worked really hard on that video. We were really excited about having everything be really tactile and practical,” she said. “So everything that you’ll see in the exhibit is handmade. It’s cardboard. It’s yarn. It’s made by artists. They put in hundreds, maybe even like a thousand hours of work into it.”
The exhibit, which opens on Sept. 2 and runs through Feb. 22, 2027, features storyboards and props from the set, such as the skeleton X-ray, outfits, hospital beds, medical instruments and a handwritten chart, and a series of decaying doorways she walks by in the music video. The installation will be expanded in the coming weeks.
Her conversation with Crowe was an opportunity to reflect on the previous weekend’s Daisy Chain Fields. She described her performance with Stevie Nicks as a highlight. “She is absolutely incredible and sharp as a tack, and so beautiful and so talented,” Rodrigo said of the Fleetwood Mac singer. “And her voice is just one of the best voices that has ever existed. And obviously, she’s one of the greatest songwriters that ever existed.
“She was just so kind to me too, which I she did not have to be, you know. But she’s lovely. She’s sent me pictures of her dog. She gave me a little necklace…. To get to close out that festival singing ‘Landslide’ with her was, I think, I don’t think it gets better than that, to be honest.”
Crowe commented that Rodrigo and Fleetwood Mac have both been able to make songs that feel universal. “That you guys chose ‘Landslide’ to make it your own is incredible,” he said. “I was lucky enough to write about them when I was just starting at Rolling Stone. They had just finished the Rumours album, and they were all kind of together realizing that they had put that drama from their lives into all these songs, and now it was present for everybody to know. It felt like the rawness that they put into making it was now no longer theirs, as it belonged to everybody. And you’ve written so beautifully about yourself and your songs and feelings and impulses that you’ve had, and you’ve put them out there for people in a generous way.”
Following her conversation with Crowe, Rodrigo performed five songs acoustically, backed by two musicians, including “Drop Dead,” “Stupid Song,” “Maggots for Brains,” “Less,” and “The Cure,” which she described as a thesis statement for the album.
When introducing “Drop Dead,” Rodrigo shared a story about her mom reminding her that she had been inspired by the museum back when she was an early teenager. “If 13-year-old Olivia knew that she’d have her own exhibit at the Grammy Museum, she’d be pretty stoked.”
