Moments into Olivia Rodrigo’s documentary Driving Dwelling 2 U, we see her activate a digicam within the shoebox-sized dwelling studio of her producer, Daniel Nigro, state the date – March 2021 – and squirm as he performs the primary track they wrote collectively, a yr earlier. “And I’m nonetheless not over it!” she says of the connection documented within the track. She appears much less embarrassed by the enduring heartache than with confronting a much less refined model of her songwriting – a craft she would hone into 2021’s largest hit.
Drivers License, Rodrigo’s lovelorn debut single, got here out on 8 January 2021 and broke the Spotify report for essentially the most one-day streams of any non-Christmas track inside 4 days. “My total life simply shifted straight away,” Rodrigo says within the movie, which appears to exist as a lot to assist the then 18-year-old comprehend that fast change as to entertain her followers. In addition to the studio footage, it reveals her road-tripping from Salt Lake Metropolis to Los Angeles, the locations the place she wrote her subsequent debut album, Sour, giving atmospheric performances in diners and deserts alongside the best way. Curiously, it by no means acknowledges why she was in Utah: Rodrigo is a lead character in Disney’s Excessive Faculty Musical TV collection, which shoots there. Though the documentary is produced by the Walt Disney Firm, it solely omits the early a part of Rodrigo’s profession on two of its reveals to border her narrative purely when it comes to her development as a songwriter.
The opposite unstated element in Rodrigo’s movie is the pandemic, noticeable solely within the dates that pop up onscreen and one scene the place she and Nigro put on masks to host two label execs who go to close to the tip of recording. Arguably, her evolution as a songwriter flourished as a result of cloistered working environments had been the one viable strategy to make music in the course of the top of the Covid-19 disaster – and so they had been conveniently closed to label interference or the hazard of a younger voice being crowded out in a busy room.
She wasn’t the one songwriter benefiting from these diminished circumstances: Driving Dwelling 2 U makes an fascinating companion piece to Charli XCX’s Alone Collectively, one other account of creativity persevering in the course of the pandemic.
Inside days of California imposing its first stay-at-home order in March 2020, Charli, a self-confessed workaholic, is coming aside. “I’m flailing, doing nothing, I simply have to be preoccupied,” she cries, filming herself on her telephone. So she units herself the problem of constructing an album inside 5 weeks, a course of which may often take a yr, calling it How I’m Feeling Now. What’s extra, she intends to doc each a part of it to let followers really feel as concerned as doable: proper all the way down to holding Zoom writing classes the place she toggles between rhymebrain.com and their recommendations within the feedback.
Charli’s fraught relationship together with her label, Atlantic, over the past decade has been properly documented: each events have vacillated between whether or not she must be a mainstream pop star or an avant garde influencer who innovates alongside shut collaborators akin to PC Music figureheads Sophie and AG Cook dinner. Unreconciled to at the present time (her new album Crash affords a meta tackle the matter), that identification flux is presumably what made Atlantic fund this experimental mission: it’s solely in character, and so the dangers are decrease.
You ponder whether the lane Charli has carved out additionally helped create area for Rodrigo to work with only one producer in his dwelling studio on her personal main label debut. To not point out, too, Beyoncé’s brains-trust course of, Billie Eilish’s homespun pop – as documented in her personal movie, The World’s a Little Blurry – and Ariana Grande staking her claim, in 2018, to “put out music in the best way {that a} rapper does” – ie quick and reactive. Bitter was initially meant to be an EP, however Rodrigo instructed her label Geffen that she was decided to make a full album to doc that interval of her life. Staying in contact with fresh-wound feelings requires intimacy and velocity, not the kind of diluting creation-by-committee course of that may significantly canine younger feminine pop acts who aren’t trusted with their very own work.
As New York Instances pop music critic Jon Caramanica has typically identified, main stars have began behaving extra like cult acts, understanding that doing so helps them shield their imaginative and prescient and communicate on to an invested viewers slightly than risking their distinctiveness by making an attempt to please allcomers: concurrently Rodrigo and Charli had been making these data, Taylor Swift was recording a pair of surprise albums at dwelling with a coterie of left-field collaborators (a course of that she additionally documented for Disney).
These movies have wildly completely different stakes: Rodrigo’s are extra about model positioning, establishing distance between who she is now and who she was once: she talks, strikingly, about taking part in the songs “in these locations that meant a lot to me and revisiting them with older eyes”, as if she had been trying again in her dotage and never from a take away of about 18 months. The main focus is on establishing her as a born songwriter, not a “former Disney star”, and dwelling on the emotional penalties of heartbreak slightly than the drama she obliquely alludes to that characterised a lot media protection of her breakout. It’s fans-only fare, for many who already know the small print.
Charli’s vérité movie has extra in danger: will she make her five-week deadline? What’s extra, it’s her first time cohabiting together with her on-off boyfriend – in seven years, they’ve by no means spent greater than 11 days collectively. It additionally coincides together with her soliciting a therapist to unpick the poisonous relationship between her work and her self-worth at what couldn’t be a extra acute second.
Nonetheless, documentation affords each artists, a decade aside in age, a type of safety: girls’s company within the studio is usually nonetheless undermined, and each movies go away little doubt as to Rodrigo and Charli’s authorship and function as equal collaborators. We see Charli establishing tools and studying tips on how to self-produce in addition to writing to beats despatched in by the likes of Cook dinner and Palmistry; Rodrigo advert libs to a riff that Nigro cash on a whim and comes up with one of the crucial beloved songs on her debut album. These look like solely empowered working environments, however having a digicam current within the studio additionally looks as if it must be an trade prerequisite, providing a type of safety – significantly for younger feminine artists working with older males – in an area that has traditionally been open to exploitation.
Of the 2 movies, Alone Collectively is by far the higher documentary. Rodrigo’s is hermetically stagey, and the wan interviews undermine her satisfaction within the messy emotional reality of her songs. The closing credit present photographs of her larking about with the all-female band that backs her “dwell” performances, and it’s laborious to not crave extra of that type of interplay: a bunch of ladies road-tripping and bonding collectively, not lonely vignettes of Rodrigo in boilerplate landscapes. Charli’s movie affords a wider time capsule of life below lockdown, significantly as she focuses on the experiences of remoted LGBTQ+ followers who discover inclusion in her mission and fan group. However they’re each appreciably devoid of any drama past making a inventive deadline.
For the reason that New York Instances launched Framing Britney Spears in February 2021, a cottage trade has emerged for documentaries that “redeem” feminine pop cultural icons (or pariahs) of earlier eras. And pop stars typically flip to their very own documentary vehicles once they’re in want of a redemption narrative (particularly once they’re managed by Scooter Braun). Refreshingly, neither of those movies supply a larger conclusion than: I made an album. Driving Dwelling 2 U doesn’t remedy Rodrigo of her heartbreak: “Hopefully I received’t be so unhappy within the subsequent report,” she tells Nigro once they end recording. Nor does Alone Collectively redeem Charli of her workaholism: “Lets do one other one?!” she jokes to her boyfriend and supervisor when she’s executed. Creativity alone is offered as a sound marker of non-public evolution. Their triumph lies in working inside self-imposed limits, not striving to flee anybody else’s.