Hi, everyone.

Anthony Fantano here, intranet's busiest music nerd. Hope you are doing well.

And today I'm talking about a very recent and excellent concert experience that I just had. Yes, I was at one of the kickoff dates for Olivia Rodrigo's new arena tour, the Unraveled Tour, basically the run of shows her and her team have put together behind her latest record, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. One of the best pop albums of the year, if not the pop album of the year. So I went into this show with pretty high expectations, despite not having seen Olivia Rodrigo live before.

And honestly, not typically being the kind of guy who goes out to a lot of, big mainstream arena shows anyway. I mean, I've been to some for sure, but usually I do prefer, like a small club, maybe a festival stage here and there. It's just that usually for my time and for my money, I typically don't see a lot of these massive and expensive productions being worth the traffic, the crowds, the headaches, the subpar sound, often the annoying backing tracks that are buoying the whole thing.

However, Olivia beat all of those expectations on this new tour for me. And I was pretty floored, not only by the quality of the performances, but all of the forethoughts and the conceptual vision that went into mapping the whole thing out. The set list, the layout of the stage, the specific visuals that went with each individual song in the performance.

Let me say before I get any deeper that this video will contain spoilers of the performance and the tour. So if you're hoping to see it yourself and not have certain surprises or moments ruined for you, let it be known: I'm going to spill the beans on some things.

But I bring up everything I saw and heard during this performance to just say this was a really fantastic show. Another thing I will say prefacing this video, likely if you are in my core audience and you do go out to one of these shows, you will stick out like a sore thumb. This performance is very much not going to be your space. You may have a ticket and a seat at the show from which you can enjoy everything happening on the stage, but you will be surrounded by teen and tween girls at this show, which is fine. Olivia's music is by and for the girls. That doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed and admired by everyone, though, and that there isn't a very impressive amount of effort going into this performance.

In fact, I think it's doubly admirable that Olivia and her band put in the sweat, blood and tears that they do into the show, because given the age range of people buying tickets and even the parents chaperoning many of these kids to the show, Olivia could easily just kind of step out in some normal outfits, perform the song straight as is with lots of heavy backing tracks.

And a lot of these kids, for the most part, would just be psyched to see her even with that, being the level she's operating at. But instead, her and her collaborators on the stage and the people doing production are emphasizing pretty much everything happening live in the moment and giving all of these songs on the new record the high level of extravagance and drama that they deserve. To start, I will say Olivia is working with a 10 piece band on this thing. Two string players, bass player, drummer, two guitarists, a keyboard player, and three backup singers.

And then occasionally Olivia Rodrigo is playing guitar herself. And there's even a moment toward the back end of the show where they roll out the little baby grand. So there's a real range of instrumentation on stage and you really feel the full brunt of all of those layers live.

There's no preset vocal backing tracks or anything like that, at least from what's playing out of the PA. Any background vocal or anything like that is being handled by a background singer. So it's all being done in the moment. And there was no discernible auto tune or anything from what I could hear. And for a lot of those, those tracks that really require that Olivia push her range, especially on the new record, she was hitting all those notes too.

So again, for a mainstream pop show, the amount of effort going into making sure that what's happening is being nailed and being done in real time is actually admirable. And the music performances across the show were great. There are little variations where some tracks get maybe a little bit of extra oomph, that kind of pop-punk punchiness that we remember from many other Olivia highlights in her back catalog and other tracks that are maybe just a little more stripped back and skeletal to emphasize kind of that, dramatic spotlit ballad type moment.

Interestingly, in the set list of the show, all of these different vibes and emotions are segmented out into four major sections which are represented by different seasons with the show and the set list obviously beginning in the midst of spring with a mix of cuts from Olivia's latest record and her first two that represent two that represent new beginnings. And then from there, we kind of go through this pattern of we go through a run of songs, she disappears, reappears with a bit of a costume change.

There's a giant visual that will play on a back screen that sort of relays images of a forest or a bunch of nature imagery signifying like a changing of a season or different weather. Boom, she returns costume change. It's summer. Disappears, more visuals. Boom, return. Costume change. It's fall. Where we are getting more acoustic tracks and songs in the set list that thematically represent the downfall that is noted in the relationship that you seem pretty sad, the relationship the album deals in. The most dramatic of all these costume changes happens toward the end of the set. It involves a bit of live rain.

Yes, man-made rain happening indoors, which gets pretty crazy and is led up to. Because during this winter section, that's when the piano comes out as we get a run of the big major piano ballads in the Olivia catalog up till now. And then we sort of like return with a big punchy regular girl pop punk finale that brings it all back to that spring moment. So we begin back at the start of the cycle. And also I have to note the details that come along with each individual song in all of these sections, because Olivia and her team weren't content to simply just be like, Oh, this is the winter section, so we're going to have a bit of a winter vibe here. No, there are specific visual and stage cues that happen depending on the song that is being performed. Like for example, “cigarette smoke,” there's a ton of fog machine action going on across the stage to represent the smoke.

Or there's certain routines, movements or ways that Olivia engages with the crowd depending on the song that's being performed. So it never quite feels like they're just jamming out on stage. Which again, even that would be enough to simply just do it live. And the other thing I want to point to is the way that these fake flowers are kind of placed throughout the stage, really covering most of it in a way to where you from the audience vantage point just looks like the band is playing amongst a field of very high rising flowers, which visually kind of change with the season cycle that the show is running through, depending upon how the stage the stage lights are hitting them.

There are certain sections of the show, too, where the flowers are removed or sort of like added back onto the stage. It's very theatrical.

But yeah, not only did Olivia and her band play through a majority of the track list on the new record or a lot of the deep cuts, too, but they also run through most of the major highlights from the first two albums as well. So it's a pretty thick set list and the way the You Seem Pretty Sad songs are placed throughout the different seasons. It's like you're experiencing the narrative of the album in person in real time, too.

Additionally, I would like to shout out Wolf Alice, who opened for Olivia during the date where I saw her. She has a handful of different openers for this tour, depending on the date. Personally, I would have loved to have seen Die Spitz as heavy and as loud and as over the top as they are, melting the faces of the audience hitting up the dates where they're going to be playing. But still, Wolf Alice was really groovy and their latest record, which I think has some of the most ambitious and over the top vocals on any of their albums so far, played so well live. And it was just awesome to see Olivia's audience, from what I could see, being introduced to a totally new to them rock act and hopefully go on to listen to more of their stuff after the show.

So yeah, overall, I was pretty blown away by the quality of the show and would absolutely go to another one of these performances, despite the only people there in my age range being parents.

Anthony Fantano, Olivia Rodrigo, Unraveled Tour, forever.