Go Behind the Scenes of the Rock Concert

At most huge pop tours, there’s a moment when shrieking fans reach a true fever pitch — when the lights dim right before the show begins, or when the intro to the artist’s biggest hit kicks in, or during the break before the encore. All of those happened at Olivia Rodrigo’s first arena tour — but her favorite part of the show was when those eardrum-rattling cries were, in fact, mad as hell.

“When we play ‘all-­american bitch,’ ” Rodrigo tells Billboard, “there’s a part at the end of the song where I ask the audience to think about something that pisses them off and then tell them to scream about it when the lights go off.” On the opener to her 2023 album, GUTS, Rodrigo juxtaposes folksy, facetious calm in the verses with enraged pop-punk in the refrain as she lays out society’s double standards for young women before unleashing a piercing wail. For nearly a hundred nights this year, the singer-songwriter has closed her main set by adding her own scream to an arena already full of them. “It’s definitely cathartic for me,” she says, “and I hope it is for the audience as well.”

The same could be said of the entire GUTS tour, where Rodrigo’s fans worldwide found the space to release their pent-up energy, as well as their excitement about one of the decade’s biggest new superstars. After bursting into the spotlight in 2021 with her debut album, Sour, and its No. 1 smashes “drivers license” and “good 4 u,” the former Disney+ TV star won the Grammy Award for best new artist in 2022 and quickly ascended to pop’s A-list. Yet the 2022 tour supporting Sour primarily played theaters, had to navigate lingering COVID-19 concerns and catered to a limited number of international markets, as Rodrigo, then 19, found her sea legs as a live performer.

Two years later, the rock-fueled GUTS became another commercial triumph: Lead single “vampire” also topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the album scored one of 2023’s 10 biggest debut weeks. And this time, Rodrigo was prepared for arena audiences. The GUTS tour featured more than double the number of dates as her Sour trek while traveling to four continents (South America will become the fifth in March 2025) and grossed $186.6 million, according to Billboard Boxscore — even with its 1.4 million tickets sold at an average price of $128.81, in line with price-conscious acts like Coldplay and P!nk, and less than that of several major pop arena shows.

As for the show itself, “I actually made GUTS with the concert in mind,” Rodrigo says. “It’s so much fun to play songs that are more driving and heavy. I had a great time performing that aspect of the show every night.” Here’s how it all went down.

‘She Knew Exactly What It Was That She Wanted’

As GUTS came together, so did plans for an accompanying tour that amplified every aspect of Rodrigo’s previous live run — bigger venues, more countries — all guided by a more defined point of view from the superstar at its center.

Aleen Keshishian (co-manager, Lighthouse Management + Media founder/CEO): Olivia had creative tour ideas when she was still writing GUTS, even before we had signed a deal with Live Nation or hired anyone for the tour. She already had visual references, voice notes, images.

Zack Morgenroth (co-manager, Lighthouse Management + Media partner): That gave us a lot of time to plan, and put together the right team, and get the show right.

Jason Danter (tour production manager): I connected with Zack and Aleen in March 2023; at that point, I was deep into getting the Beyoncé [Renaissance] tour up and running. I met Olivia when she came to the Beyoncé show at SoFi Stadium [in Inglewood, Calif.].

Tarik Mikou (creative director, Moment Factory): We’ve been working with Olivia for a while — we did her first live TV performance [on Saturday Night Live] and did the Sour tour, so I was really happy to get a call back for the GUTS tour.

Melissa Garcia (choreographer): They called me in for the Sour tour, and Olivia and I really meshed. A trusting environment [and] being able to have back-and-forth conversations is so important, especially when it comes to movement and putting artists in vulnerable situations.

Jared Braverman (senior vp of touring, Live Nation): It was very clear from initial conversations that the goal of this tour was to be global — to get to markets that Olivia had never been to and continue to grow by not just focusing on major cities. [Olivia] is massive everywhere. That’s a challenging thing to navigate — making time and space for all of these markets.

Morgenroth: The Sour tour was her first time out on the road and was a huge underplay, given the success of the album.

Dave Tamaroff (partner, WME): Her last tour could have been in arenas, based on everything she had going on.

Michelle An (president/head of creative strategy, Interscope Geffen A&M): There were a lot of conversations about [arenas] on the last tour, and ultimately, Olivia was the final decision-maker — she felt like she needed to do the theater run to get to know the fans in a more intimate way.

Morgenroth: There was so much demand from fans this time around that Live Nation said to us that arenas now felt like an underplay — we probably could have done stadiums everywhere. That being said, there was so much preparation for an arena tour: choosing each venue, making sure we had a good cadence for her. We tended to do only four shows in a week and never three shows in a row.

Tamaroff: We were surgical in our approach to the routing.

Morgenroth: Olivia cares so deeply about the fan experience, and that was also so key in the pricing of the tickets, which could have been priced for so much more. Everything, from having the Silver Star program — where fans could get a limited number of tickets everywhere around the arena for something like $20 — to looking at the landscape of touring artists and trying to price our tickets somewhere in the middle of them, was very intentional.

Keshishian: [Silver Star] was something that Coldplay had first done with Live Nation. Jared Braverman suggested it and Olivia loved it.

Braverman: [Pricing] takes a level of restraint, where you look at what you can do versus what you should do. You’ve got a young audience that’s very connected to Olivia, and we wanted to make this tour accessible for them.

Keshishian: We spent a lot of money on this tour, [but] we were incredibly judicious, going over every single line item in the budget to make sure we were spending money on the things that mattered to Olivia.

Garcia: Olivia is the captain of the ship — right from the very beginning, she knew exactly what it was that she wanted.

Mikou: We had like, 15 meetings, in Zoom and in person. She had reference boards on Pinterest. She would show us an image and be like, “I would love something like that in the show,” and give us these leads.

An: We definitely wanted fans to get to know the album. It wasn’t straight from the album release [in September 2023] into the tour [which began in February 2024].

Heather Picchiottino (costume designer): Olivia’s songwriting progression from Sour to GUTS felt very raw and up-front, so we wove punk rock through [the tour’s production].

Olivia Rodrigo: I tried to make the concert feel like my own spin on a rock show. My dream was for people to jump and scream and be all sweaty by the end.

Mikou: When you get to the dress rehearsals and start seeing the ideas pushed forward — we knew we had something special with this show.

‘It’s So Much Bigger in Every Way’

When the GUTS tour kicked off at Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs, Calif., on Feb. 23, Rodrigo unveiled a multi-act, visually striking stage show with dancing, wailing guitars and even a giant, suspended crescent moon for her to sit on while circling the audience.

Daisy Spencer (touring guitarist): We rehearsed so much leading up to the kickoff. We were so ready and eager to finally perform the show in front of people who were hearing it for the first time.

Garcia: Instead of reaching a few thousand people, she was in a much larger environment — which puts a lot more pressure on her.

Keshishian: There’s no comparison between theaters and arenas, in terms of prep.

Spencer: It’s so much bigger in every way. The energy on the Sour tour was palpable, like we were beginning something very exciting and everyone in the room could feel it. But I couldn’t have ever imagined what the GUTS tour would be like.

Rodrigo: An arena feels wildly different than a theater to me.

Garcia: One of the big notes that I would say [to Olivia] was “Invite the audience in”: Open your chest up, allow them in. And she absolutely did that. Between the Sour tour and this tour, she is absolutely way more comfortable in her skin.

Picchiottino: Olivia had so many iconic looks on the Sour tour, and some of the detailing in them were bows or little ruffles or tulle fabric. We really contrasted that with GUTS, with references to punk rock through clean, ’90s, minimal silhouettes, made out of fabrics that were metal mesh jewelry as opposed to a tissue fabric.

Mikou: We worked on creating four acts in the show. We start really strong with an energetic vibe, but we also go into her vocal range early on with “vampire” and “drivers license.” And then in the second act, we embark on a visual journey with dancers.

Keshishian: In terms of choreography, she didn’t want it to feel like a traditional pop show where the dancers can sometimes overpower the music. I think the dancers are only in six numbers.

Danter: It’s primarily a younger audience that wants to see her and hear her, so it doesn’t have to be overly complicated visually.

Garcia: We wanted to create a visceral reaction from her fans, and for Olivia, a rock approach was extremely important, so she wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to use dancers. We came up with utilizing the dancers in a very unique way to match her creative intention.

Mikou: And then in the third act, she’s flying on the moon.

Keshishian: From the very first conversation we had with her, she said, “I’d love to fly on a moon over my audience.”

Mikou: We had about 60 stars all around to create this immersive vibe in the arena, and the moon was on a 260-foot linear flying track and was a light box as well.

Garcia: Riding around the venue on the moon — that was another way for her to feel like she really gave every single person her time.

Mikou: That act has these big visual moments, but it’s also really simple and elegant at times, like “making the bed,” where’s she rising alone on a lift, surrounded by fans and their iPhone lights.

Keshishian: And then you have these beautiful acoustic moments where she’s just with Daisy [who’s playing] guitar at the edge of the thrust, and it’s just about the lyrics and her voice.

Spencer: That was all Olivia’s idea, and I feel so honored to sit next to her while we all have a giant group therapy session together on “happier” and “favorite crime.” I’m almost on the verge of tears when we finish that section because it’s such a beautiful feeling to hear everyone singing along with us.

Mikou: We ended with the punk-rock vibe in the fourth act, exploding everything at the end with the full band and fire on the screens.

Picchiottino: I think my favorite moment is the start of act four, when the chaos comes into the show. Olivia enters in this red romper in this foil fabric, and with the color of the lighting, it just signals this incredible energy.

Mikou: My personal favorite moment is probably “obsessed.” She gets on the plexiglass and starts to look at her audience, but with the camera below [the stage, feeding into the arena screens], it’s just such a strong image. That’s Olivia 2.0: so rock’n’roll, so much guitar, so much attitude.

Danter: Olivia turned 21 a couple of days before opening night, and as somebody with such short touring experience, she’s very, very professional.

Keshishian: She gets to the venue every single day six hours early. She practices the piano, she does vocal warmups, she does cardio. She does her sound check before literally every show, even on multiple nights in the same venue, which very few artists do.

Danter: Most artists don’t get that discipline until they’ve got a number of tours under their belt. But by [the opener in] Palm Springs, we were all like, “We’ve got nothing to worry about here.”

Rodrigo: The first dozen shows or so, it was a big adjustment for me, energywise. I had to really learn how to look up and take in the space. You definitely perform differently when you’re performing to that many people.

Danter: And now she’s an arena headliner, and it’s as if she’s been doing it for a long, long time.

‘These Gatherings Have Become Like a Ritual’

As Rodrigo traveled North America in early spring, Europe before summer, North America (again) in July and August, and Asia in early fall, fans around the world learned about the tour’s unofficial dress code, viral moments, philanthropic goals — and the superstar-in-waiting who opened its first leg.

Keshishian: Tour support is something that we talked about very early on. The Sour tour had Gracie Abrams opening, and then Chappell Roan opened in San Francisco on the last Sour date in North America.

Remi Wolf (opener, GUTS European leg): I was told that Olivia very carefully curated the openers for the show, so it was a major deal when we got the original call.

Keshishian: Olivia has this incredible knowledge of and reverence for female artists, in particular people who paved the way for her, like Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow and Bikini Kill. Her mom introduced her to a lot of these artists, including The Breeders. I went with her to see them play at the Wiltern [in October 2023] and was so excited to meet Kim and Kelley [Deal] backstage, and they agreed to open for her in New York and L.A.

Kim Deal (singer-guitarist, The Breeders): [Olivia] has talked about how, you know, “The Breeders broke my mind — there was pre-‘Cannonball’ and there was post-‘Cannonball.’ ” And I think she likes loud guitars — in this day and age! She finds loud guitars exciting and wants to be around them.

Tamaroff: She did four shows [with The Breeders] in New York and six in Los Angeles, and she really could have done a dozen more, based on demand.

Morgenroth: [The openers] are, in part, a tribute to Olivia’s ear. She’s known Chappell for a while. She’s always thought she was an incredible artist.

Rodrigo: Having her on the first leg of the GUTS tour was so much fun. I’m inspired by her so much as an artist, but she’s also been such a good friend to me over the years and she really helped me through some of the more stressful parts of the tour.

Braverman: We all knew what a talented artist and great performer [Chappell] is and hoped that fans would be as excited as we all were for her to be joining on these shows. The initial response was positive, but it wasn’t until the tour got underway that we started to see a shift that literally grew more each and every show.

Keshishian: Chappell was a surprise guest in L.A. [in August, after opening for the tour in February and March]. People asked us if we were going to have guest performers at all six shows in L.A., and we didn’t feel that we needed surprises just for the sake of it. But having Chappell come back and seeing her perform in front of Olivia’s audience after all this time, after so much had happened [in her own career]? It was really fun.

Rodrigo: It’s been incredible to watch her get the recognition she so rightfully deserves. She’s just further proof that being unapologetically yourself always pays off.

Morgenroth: From the moment people arrived at the show, we wanted them to have a great experience, and that’s everything from the merch, where things were customized for each city, to activations outside on the [concourse] and outside of the venue, like the interactive tour bus that we put together with Interscope and partners like American Express.

An: As we continued putting out singles and videos from the album [before the tour], fans got a better idea of what to wear and how to style themselves, and then they all connected by the time the tour came.

Keshishian: It became a really fun night for fans to get dressed up in creative outfits that Olivia inspired.

Garcia: Olivia has created a very unique vocabulary, and I think that’s why songs like “love is embarrassing” became so large on social media, with people trying to learn the dance from the show.

Keshishian: Her “love is embarrassing” dance went viral, and all these kids were doing the dance with the little “L” on the forehead.

Morgenroth: There was this viral TikTok trend, “Am I Too Old To Be Here?,” that would be used at the shows because there were so many people of different ages attending. And then we have this “Dad Idea, Right?” moment, where the kids get a kick out of how many dads are enjoying the show.

Keshishian: In every city, she wore a different tank top [during the encore] that had these cheeky jokes about the city, like “Phuket, It’s Fine” in Bangkok or “Bad Idea, Innit?” in London.

Picchiottino: That was Olivia’s idea: “How fun would it be to have a new slogan for each city and make each show feel special?”

An: I think for the Livies, these gatherings have become like a ritual. They can scream at the top of their lungs about what’s bothering them and be a little more alternative or punk, but at the same time be feminine and girlie. You just see everything that Olivia stands for being celebrated.

Keshishian: Before the tour began, it was important to Olivia to add a charitable component and do something that would have a lasting impact after the tour was over. That became the Fund 4 Good, and it was focused on what is important to her, which is helping women and girls. We vetted each organization in every country that Olivia toured in, and we wanted to have a very localized impact because obviously women in different countries have different needs.

Rodrigo: Being on tour [so soon] after Roe v. Wade got overturned made activism very important — especially considering I performed in many states that currently have abortion bans in place, I wanted to do everything I could to support organizations in each territory that are doing essential work in providing access to health care and other human rights.

Morgenroth: We’ve tied it beyond the tour already — she did an Erewhon smoothie, and all of the proceeds from her side were given to the fund. This is something that is going to be part of everything from here on out.

Keshishian: Olivia performed in the Philippines for the first time in October — which was a dream of hers, as a Filipino American — and she wanted to do it as a gift, so all net proceeds will go to a local charity [women’s health care organization Jhpiego] through the Fund 4 Good.

Rodrigo: Through the fund, I’ve met lots of incredible people who are making such positive changes in the world, and I’ve learned so much. I look forward to learning more and continuing to champion causes I care about.

‘She’s Revealing Another Side of Herself’

As Rodrigo wrapped the GUTS 2024 run and prepares for the Oct. 29 release of its Netflix tour film, she has snapped into focus as a new-school arena rock performer with a fastidious streak.

Danter: When you get to rehearsals and everything starts to fall into place, a lot of artists and managers go, “OK, this is the show.” As we got closer to opening night, we were still getting notes from Olivia, Zack and Aleen. It’s that search for perfection, which is refreshing.

Garcia: There was that younger vibe about her on the Sour tour, a little sillier, and on the GUTS tour, she definitely is thinking more and every detail matters more, no matter how microscopic.

Picchiottino: I’ve really enjoyed the process of refining and refining, being so specific about the tour visuals. I think I have over 60 sketches on my iPad, for five looks.

An: You could really feel that she was more confident this go-round because she understood how things worked and knew what conversations to have. She was the boss of this.

Mikou: The evolution from the last tour, it’s almost like she’s revealing another side of herself.

Braverman: In a lot of ways, it’s like a throwback rock show. I don’t think a lot of these fans had experienced anything like that.

Keshishian: Most of the band was on the Sour tour, and every member is female or nonbinary. So for all these people watching, to see them rocking out in an arena, I think it’s really powerful.

Deal: She’s very respectful of the younger members of her audience — she knows they’re there, she’s very sweet with them, and she does not talk down to them at all. There are some cusswords and there are some loud guitars, and she expects them to be where she is. And I thought that was very cool.

Keshishian: Regarding the film, there are tens of millions of people that did not get tickets to this show, and we wanted to make sure that all of Olivia’s fans had the ability to see it. So we set up 22 cameras for the last two L.A. shows, and we chose Netflix to be our partner because they have the largest global reach.

Tamaroff: Watching her prove who she is as a global superstar… she’s one of the most talented singer-songwriters on the planet already, but being able to showcase her talent as a performer, hearing people say that this was one of the best nights of their lives, that’s why we all do what we do.

Garcia: With age comes a little bit more pressure, and I think it’s coming from herself: to be better, to figure out the next challenge for herself, to see where she can break through next. She just keeps growing.

Rodrigo: I wanted to make sure that I could still connect with the audience, even in a venue as big as an arena.

Rodrigo will be honored as 2024 Touring Artist of the Year at the Billboard Live Music Summit & Awards in Los Angeles on Nov. 14.

This story appears in the Oct. 26, 2024, issue of Billboard.