You wouldn’t have known it by watching her, but before Olivia Rodrigo took the stage for her triumphant 2025 debut Glastonbury headlining set she was seriously freaking out. In an interview with BBC promoting her upcoming third studio album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love — due out on Friday (June 12) — the singer said she had a full-on “anxiety attack” before ruling the Pyramid Stage.
“I remember having a near anxiety attack in the bathroom, like, ‘How am I going to do this? I don’t know if I’m ready,’” said Rodrigo, 23, who knocked it out of the park during the set that included collabs on two Cure classics (“Friday I’m in Love,” “Just Like Heaven”) with her rock idol, Cure singer Robert Smith.
“But something overcame me the second I stepped on stage and started singing,” she said. “I felt totally calm and so in my element. I’m not very spiritual or religious, but it’s moments like that where I feel music is just so magical that you just can’t really describe it.” Rodrigo made her Glastonbury debut in 2022 on the Other Stage, but the bump-up to the main stage made for one of the most memorable nights of her musical life.
“I have such a reverence for the festival and the incredible heritage and artists that have played on that stage, so I put so much love and care into that set and spent so much time thinking about it,” she said of what turned out to be “probably the best weekend” of her life. “The fact that it translated it was totally a dream come true.”
Earlier this week, Rodrigo recently penned a heartfelt fan letter to Smith ahead of the release of the new album, which features a duet with the pope of mope called “What’s Wrong With Me.” In the handwritten note sent to her fans on her email subscription service, Rodrigo described debuting the unreleased song during her Primavera Sound set in Barcelona last weekend. “I’ve been insanely excited to tell you guys about this song & it’s been so hard to keep it a secret!” she wrote. “It’s the first feature I’ve ever done on an album and I actually cannot believe I got to do it with Robert Smith!”
This story originally appeared on Billboard
