That backstage moment just confirmed what a lot of us already suspected.
When a superstar tells a 13-year-old girl backstage, “Without your mother, none of this would have happened,” that’s not just a sweet moment. That’s music history happening right in front of you.
Melissa Auf der Maur — former Hole bassist, Smashing Pumpkins member, and now author of her rock memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry — told NME‘s Does Rock N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! series exactly what went down. She got her daughter birthday tickets to an Olivia Rodrigo show. They got invited backstage. And Rodrigo said that line — directly to Auf der Maur’s kid, face to face.
Not in an interview. Not in a press statement. In person. That’s different.
Here’s the thing — Rodrigo has always name-dropped her influences. Alanis Morissette. Avril Lavigne. Paramore’s Hayley Williams. Fiona Apple. Lorde. Taylor Swift. Smashing Pumpkins. Fleetwood Mac. The list is long and she’s never been quiet about it.
But Auf der Maur pointed out something more specific to NME. She said Rodrigo’s two Billboard 200-topping albums — Sour (2021) and Guts (2023) — sound straight-up ’90s — the writing, the production, all of it. And then there’s the Sour album cover — the beauty queen imagery — which is a direct visual nod to Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This.
That cover connection already caused drama, by the way. Courtney Love — Hole’s frontwoman — called Rodrigo out on Instagram, saying she “stole an original idea” when Rodrigo dropped the sad prom queen visuals for her Sour Prom Concert Film. Rodrigo’s response? She commented back: “love u and live through this sooooo much.”
Fangirl mode. Full stop.
But yeah — Auf der Maur? No bad blood. She called that backstage moment “one of the proudest moments of my life.”
Now here’s where it gets interesting — Auf der Maur just released her memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry. This story gets legs.
That backstage quote is going to follow Olivia Rodrigo for the rest of her career — and honestly, it should. The Sour cover nod to Live Through This was never accidental. The whole sound of her first two records screams late-’90s alt-rock. Rodrigo didn’t just borrow the aesthetic — she built her whole image on it.
Auf der Maur recognizing that, in front of her own daughter, is genuinely kind of poetic.
Courtney Love threw a fit about the album art. Melissa just… smiled. Says everything about who actually understood the compliment.
So the real question is — when Guts‘ follow-up comes around, does Rodrigo go deeper into those roots, or does she pivot? Because right now, the ’90s rock girls basically made her. What happens when she outgrows them?
