In May of 2021, Saturday Night Live aired this sketch.

It came just a few months after 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo's debut single "drivers license" debuted at #1 on the Hot 100, making her the youngest artist to ever achieve that milestone. The sketch depicts a group of men shooting pool at a dive bar, only to be stopped in their tracks when one of them puts "drivers license" on the jukebox. They all slowly shed their egos and masculine pride as their appreciation for the song's naked vulnerability grows. "I got my driver's license 55 years ago. Why is this hitting me-a so hard?" asks a elderly Italian man played by Kate McKinnon.

The pigeonholing of Rodrigo as an artist that makes music for tween girls has carried on into her twenties. Were there flocks of girls with algebra homework due the next morning at her Sunday night Unraveled Tour show in Philadelphia? Absolutely. Do my demographic similarities with Rodrigo make me more predisposed to resonating with her music? No doubt.

But that's far from the whole picture. Dads donned merch, and appeared nearly as excited as the daughters they drove in with from the suburbs. I'd look down to see them singing along with their next of kin to songs inspired by the music of their own youths like The Cure and The Smashing Pumpkins, both of whom have reciprocated reverence for Rodrigo.

My +1 and I made friends with a straight couple behind us, as the boyfriend's Geese tour shirt implied we'd had the same double-header weekend of concerts. He called June's you seem pretty sad for a girl in love his "album of the year" and camped out with his girlfriend all morning to get last minute tickets from the box office. Hundreds of fans who'd missed out on the online sales have done the same at every tour stop.

I arrived to the recently renamed Xfinity Mobile Arena in south Philly around 4:30 after my anxiety of a potential snafu at will call got the best of me, walking through a sea of morose Eagles fans that just watched their team lose to the New York Giants. Soon enough the Kelly Green T-shirts turned to pink babydoll dresses and sequin skirts – from increasingly routine disappointment (it's been a rough season) to uninhibited excitement.

The stage design of the Unraveled tour requires the most coordination from stagehands while the show is ongoing. Hundreds, if not thousands of fake flowers dress the horseshoe-shaped stage in its entirety, being strategically removed in batches as the show moved through its seasonal framework. While this lens of song groupings wasn't as narratively sound as I would have liked (breakup banger "good 4 u" coming right after the lovesick "so american" felt a bit strange), it effectively separated high and low energy songs to allow for the audience to recharge in time for the confetti-filled encore.

Throughout the show, I often found myself peeking back at the pair of braces-laden tweens behind me. I thought about how I really could have used a pop culture figure like Rodrigo at their age: someone who doesn't shy away from their personal shortcomings ("bad idea right?," "maggots for brains," "ballad of a homeschooled girl,"), has the self-awareness to admit "I had big dreams 'till I tied myself to you," and make tangible changes to causes they care about. Minutes before they were tearing up to "honeybee," they were internalizing and singing along to the covert messaging of "serena joy" – "If they do it to them / They'll do it to you."

In contrast to the GUTS tour, Rodrigo ditches backing dancers for the eye candy of the aforementioned floral arrangements, stunning interstitial videos ushering in each "season," highly choreographed camera work, and an increased emphasis on her all-female band, who Rodrigo introduced one by one while manning a hand-held camera.

The melt-away dress during the final stretch of "the cure" – while a gorgeous and touching moment in and of itself – has more than made the rounds on social media at this point. I was definitely desensitized by the time the moment actually came. While I'm not asking Rodrigo to implement a phone ban like Phoebe Bridgers has this year, that certainly would've allowed the element of surprise to remain more intact.

The show ends with "expectations," a song hot off a boost provided by its Chappell Roan-featuring remix. Like much of Rodrigo's music, she leaves us with a mantra she commands every girl in the room to take with them: "These days I've got expectations."

Despite the comparison game people like to play with Rodrigo and her contemporaries, there is no career trajectory quite like her's. Her Disney beginnings feel like a footnote in her career as opposed to a qualifier because she never had to go through the motions of an iron-clad Hollywood Records contract.

As a result, Rodrigo has been able to conduct her career on her own terms, allowing her to live the life that inspires her music. She can sing her star-making teenage heartbreak ballads with a sense of nostalgic pride. They may feel a bit juvenile (especially "traitor") as she wades her way to more nuanced waters, but a packed arena singing "I still fucking love you, babe" and "I know you get deja vu" back to her is the mark of a growing catalog of timeless hits.

What a privilege it is to be the same age as Rodrigo and to come of age alongside her music.