Olivia Rodrigo said on June 4 that she is 60% deaf in her left ear, turning a private hearing condition into a public aside with a joke about where people should sit when they speak to her. The singer said that if someone is on her left side and tries to tell her a secret, she cannot make out what they are saying, so the message, as she put it, is simple: use her right ear.
The disclosure landed during a KISS FM UK radio appearance and quickly became the new answer to a question fans are now searching: what's wrong with me olivia rodrigo. Rodrigo tied the moment to a line from her new song, “what’s wrong with me,” from her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, and said, “There’s quite a lot that’s wrong with me,” before explaining the hearing issue.
Rodrigo said this is not a sudden problem. She said in 2023 that she never knew until kindergarten or so, when school hearing tests were done, that she was “a little hard of hearing,” and that she has been navigating the condition since childhood. In that earlier conversation, she also joked with her friend Petra Collins, a photographer with poor vision, that Rodrigo makes music because she has bad hearing and Collins takes photos because she has bad vision.
That light tone is part of what makes the disclosure stand out. Partial deafness is an unusual condition for a Grammy-winning singer, especially one whose work depends on hearing detail, pitch and timing. Rodrigo treated it as a punchline, but the detail also explains something more practical: she may miss what is said on her left side, even when the exchange is as ordinary as a whispered secret.
What remains unanswered is the cause. Rodrigo said she has been living with the condition since childhood, but she did not say why it happened or whether anything has changed medically. For now, the news is not that she has a new diagnosis. It is that she has put a name and a number on something she has carried for years, and the number is one that people are likely to remember: 60% deaf in one ear.
