Olivia Rodrigo says she is 60% deaf in her left ear

Olivia Rodrigo says she is “like, 60% deaf in my left ear,” and she even gives a practical instruction: if someone needs to tell her a secret, “go right ear.” The disclosure came during a chat with KISS FM UK’s radio show earlier this week promoting her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, and Rodrigo delivered it with a laugh, not a spotlight-grab.

She explained the mechanics in plain terms. If you sit on her left side and try to tell her something important, she said she could not make out what you were saying. “So if you need to tell me a secret go right ear.” That is the kind of detail that sounds personal, but it also lands like operations: how you communicate, where people stand, and how quickly misunderstandings can happen when performance life moves at full speed.

This is not the first time Rodrigo has discussed her hearing loss. In 2023, she told The Hollywood Reporter she learned about it during a hearing test in kindergarten, when she was told, “‘Oh, you’re a little hard of hearing.’” In other words, this is not a new complication that arrived mid-career. It is a long-running reality she has navigated since childhood, and she has described it with a mix of matter-of-fact humor and creative reframing.

In the same 2023 conversation, she compared her situation to her friend, photographer Petra Collins, whose bad vision Rodrigo said they joke about. The basic idea is simple: when one person has a sensory limitation, you build a life where your different strengths still show up, loudly. Rodrigo said, “we always joke that I make music because I have bad hearing and she takes photos because she has bad vision.” It is a personal detail, but for anyone in the executive orbit of entertainment, it is also a reminder that talent does not operate in a vacuum. Studios, rehearsals, promoters, and on-site crews are constantly translating needs into systems.

The timing also matters. Rodrigo’s new album features a duet with her mope rock hero, Cure singer Robert Smith. Together, they lament a love so strong that, in the album’s framing, it “makes them sick.” And while the hearing-loss comment might read like a detour from the music story, it actually complements it. When you are building songs around emotion and precision, the performer’s relationship to sound is not incidental. Rodrigo is gearing up to play big rooms too: she is launching the 65-date Unraveled Tour, hitting arenas for multiple night stands in North America, Europe and the U.K., with a run that kicks off on Sept. 25 at PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford, Conn.

Executives should also note how she is already moving through the promotional machine. Rodrigo dropped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! for the second night of a two-night stand on Thursday (June 11) to perform the world premiere of the new album track “Stupid Song.” The performance format was specific: she played the moody ballad on the piano before being joined by a full band for the urgent, up-tempo second half. Even without going into technical setup details, the structure itself shows what matters in large-scale production: sequencing, timing, and predictable transitions, all of which reduce the chance that communication gaps turn into on-stage problems.

In the same KISS FM UK interview, Rodrigo also leaned into her playful, candid side when asked, “what is actually wrong with you?” She replied, “There’s quite a lot that’s wrong with me,” then added a second joke: she thinks “lying is fun,” describing how friends might lie to strangers at parties or “lie to the Uber driver and be like, ‘Yeah, you know, I, like, go to college across the street and I’m like, blah, blah, blah,’” The point for leaders is not whether the jokes are relatable. It is that Rodrigo can talk openly about vulnerabilities while still driving an efficient media cycle and a heavy tour schedule.

So what does this mean beyond the celebrity moment? First, partial hearing loss is an everyday constraint, and Rodrigo’s example shows how quickly it turns into logistics. Second, her long history with the condition suggests her team likely knows how to plan around it rather than react to it. And third, when a performer with a defined sensory reality enters increasingly complex live environments, the operational questions get sharper for everyone involved: routing communication, managing staging cues, and ensuring rehearsals and performances remain consistent enough that the show still feels effortless to the audience. In a world where live music is a high-stakes, high-cost machine, the most useful stories are the ones that remind you that the “small” details are the ones that prevent the big breakdowns.