Olivia Rodrigo says she has changed the way she approaches songwriting after the pressure she felt while making GUTS. Speaking at the Grammy Museum, the singer explained how her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, helped her rediscover the fun of making music, trust imperfect ideas and stop expecting every song to arrive fully formed.

Olivia Rodrigo says one of the biggest lessons she has learned as a songwriter is that perfection can get in the way of the song itself. Speaking at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on September 1 with Cameron Crowe, Rodrigo looked back at the pressure she felt while making GUTS and compared it with the much freer process behind her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. The difference, she explained, was not that success had suddenly become easier to handle. It was that she had stopped treating every idea like it needed to be perfect from the moment it appeared.

That pressure was very different from the atmosphere around SOUR. When Rodrigo made her debut album, there was no previous Olivia Rodrigo record for people to compare it with and no giant commercial legacy sitting behind every new song. After SOUR became a global breakthrough, the situation changed. GUTS arrived with expectations already attached to it. Rodrigo knew people were waiting to see whether the first album had been a one-time explosion or the beginning of something that could last. At the Grammy Museum, she described that period as full of pressure, anxiety and too many voices in her head. She did not speak about GUTS as something she regrets. What she focused on instead was how hard the creative process had become.

With You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Rodrigo says she found her way back to the part of songwriting that had started to disappear under all that pressure: the fun. She described making the album as a genuinely joyful experience and reminded the audience that music is still her favorite thing in the world. That may sound simple, but for someone whose first two albums both debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, it represents a major shift in mindset. Instead of approaching every song as proof that she deserved her previous success, she allowed the work to feel messy, unfinished and uncertain for much longer.

Her comments about perfectionism made that change especially clear. Rodrigo said she is trying not to treat every musical idea as something too precious, because the need to get everything right can actually make writing harder. Sometimes she can finish something she thinks is bad and later realize that one lyric inside it is worth keeping. That single line can then move into another song and become the start of something much stronger. In that sense, a failed draft is not really wasted time. It becomes part of the larger process, and the useful piece may only reveal itself later.

That attitude feels especially interesting coming from a songwriter whose work has been examined in intense detail since “drivers license” became a breakout hit. Every lyric can become a headline, every emotional detail can turn into a fan theory and every new project arrives with huge expectations attached. It would be easy for that kind of attention to make the writing process more controlled. Rodrigo seems to have moved in the opposite direction. Her third album, which became her third consecutive No. 1 in June, appears to have been made with less obsession over controlling the result and more trust in whatever happens while she is writing.

The stories behind individual tracks show how flexible that process can be. Rodrigo revealed that “honeybee” came together quickly, while “stupid song” took around a year and a half to finish. Even close to the album deadline, its production and melodies were still changing. Those two songs could not have had more different paths. One arrived with speed and clarity, while the other demanded months of revisiting, changing and questioning. Rodrigo no longer seems interested in deciding that one method is more valid than the other. A song is not automatically better because it came quickly, and a difficult song is not a failure because it refuses to reveal itself on schedule.

“The Cure” may be the clearest example of that philosophy. Rodrigo said the song began on a day when she did not particularly feel like writing. Instead of waiting for inspiration to arrive, she picked up her guitar and started playing anyway. She found a chord progression she liked, kept following it and eventually ended up with a song that became one of her favorites she has ever written. The story is not built around a sudden dramatic burst of inspiration. It is about discipline, curiosity and the willingness to start before you know where the song is going.

That story also fit naturally with the setting of the conversation. Rodrigo’s appearance at the Grammy Museum was part of the exhibition Olivia Rodrigo: the cure unraveled, which explores the handmade visual world behind the song’s music video. Yet the event became much broader than a discussion about one track or one video. With Crowe guiding the conversation, Rodrigo talked about how she writes, what she throws away, what she saves and how songs slowly change shape. In that context, “The Cure” became less like one isolated single and more like proof of the creative habits she is trying to protect.

The freedom Rodrigo describes does not mean the new album is emotionally lighter. In fact, she said that when she began writing it, she challenged herself to try more positive love songs. That plan did not last very long. She quickly realized that the love songs she connects with most are rarely completely happy. There is usually some sadness inside them, or a feeling that something could disappear, break or change. That emotional tension seems to be much closer to the kind of writing she naturally trusts.

That idea is already built into the title You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. The contradiction is the point. Someone can be deeply in love and still feel fear, uncertainty or sadness at the same time. Rodrigo has always been drawn to emotional details that do not fit neatly into one category, and that has been true since “drivers license.” What feels different now is not necessarily the emotional world of the songs. It is the atmosphere in which they were made. The album can hold sadness while the process of making it still feels joyful.

That is also why the third album does not need to be framed as a correction to GUTS. Rodrigo herself is not setting the two records against each other. She is describing two different creative periods. GUTS came after a debut that changed her life and created an enormous level of expectation. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love came after she had already survived that pressure and learned something from it. By the time she reached album three, she could allow herself to write a bad song, take a year and a half to finish another one or begin working on a day when inspiration was nowhere to be found.

There is something almost rebellious about that attitude in a pop industry that constantly rewards speed, instant hooks and immediate results. Rodrigo is talking about giving ideas time to fail, keeping pieces that may not make sense yet and trusting that one useful lyric can survive inside a song that never works. It is the opposite of treating songwriting like a clean production line. For an artist whose work is consumed and judged almost immediately, that slower and less perfect process may be one of the most valuable forms of creative freedom she has found.

The Grammy Museum event eventually brought the conversation back to performance. Rodrigo played five songs from the new album: “Drop Dead,” “Stupid Song,” “Maggots for Brains,” “Less” and “The Cure.” After spending much of the evening talking about anxiety, unfinished drafts, patience and the usefulness of imperfection, hearing those songs live gave the ideas a more physical shape. They were not just examples in a conversation about songwriting anymore. They were finished pieces that had survived all the uncertainty she had been describing.

That may be the clearest sign of where Olivia Rodrigo is creatively right now. She is not claiming to have removed pressure from her career, and she is not pretending that every writing session now feels easy. The change is more practical than that. She has learned to trust unfinished ideas, to let songs take different amounts of time and to stop demanding perfection before the work has had a chance to become something. As the songs from You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love move further into live performances and the next phase of her career, that looser relationship with songwriting is likely to become just as important as the album itself.