On June 4, Olivia Rodrigo used a radio appearance to land a line that doubled as a reveal: while talking about her new song "what’s wrong with me," she told KISS FM UK, "I'm actually like, 60% deaf in my left ear."
The 23-year-old framed the admission lightly, then supplied the practical detail: "So, if you were to sit on this side of me and try to tell me a secret, I couldn't make out what you were saying," she said, before adding with a laugh, "So, if you tell me a secret, go right ear."
The number Rodrigo offered — 60% — is the clearest public statement yet about the scale of a hearing issue she has said has been with her since childhood. Her offhand joke carried weight because it attached a fixed figure to a condition she has previously described only in passing.
Rodrigo has said she first learned she was hard of hearing during the standard tests in kindergarten. "I never knew until kindergarten or so when they're doing the tests on all the kids, and they were like, 'Oh, you're a little hard of hearing,'" she told an outlet in 2023. That earlier remark and the June 4 disclosure together sketch a long-running, personal detail that she has quietly managed while building a public career.
She treated the subject with humor on air — a familiar posture. Rodrigo referenced a private joke with photographer Petra Collins: "One of my friends is this great photographer, Petra Collins, and she has really bad vision," Rodrigo said in 2023, "so we always joke that I make music because I have bad hearing, and she takes photos because she has bad vision." The joke returned on KISS FM UK as she folded her hearing into a lyric and a punchline about secrets.
That lightness is the story's friction point. A comedian's shrug across a table does not change the clinical meaning of "60% deaf" in one ear, and the contrast — a smiling pop star joking about partial deafness while giving a precise percentage — is what makes the moment notable beyond celebrity color.
Rodrigo tied the confession to the domestic scale of daily life: it affects the direction people should sit when they whisper and the small accommodations she has absorbed since childhood. She attached the line to promotion of "what's wrong with me," a track from her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, turning a personal trait into lyrical material rather than a medical narrative.
The disclosure answers a basic question the headline invites: "What's wrong with me?" In Rodrigo's phrasing, the answer is straightforward — she has navigated partial hearing loss in her left ear since early childhood and on June 4 quantified it as a 60 percent deficit — and she has chosen to fold that reality into her public persona rather than make it a separate, private crisis.
There is no medical update attached to the radio appearance. Rodrigo did not explain a cause for the hearing loss, nor did she announce treatment or plans to seek further testing. For now the revelation stands as context for how she lives and works: an artist who writes about small, personal failures and has turned a longtime hearing asymmetry into a lyric and an on-air joke while continuing to promote new music.
