On June 4 Olivia Rodrigo told a UK radio audience she is “actually like, 60% deaf in my left ear,” and that if someone tried to whisper a secret on her left side “I couldn't make out what you were saying.”
Rodrigo delivered the line on KISS FM UK's show and followed with a joke: “So, if you tell me a secret, go right ear.” The number — 60% — is the clearest detail she offered, the kind of precise figure that changes a private condition into public fact and forces listeners to reconsider casual moments: leaning in, touching an elbow, muttering into a shoulder.
That revelation landed beside a quieter timeline she has sketched before. In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter Rodrigo said she “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,'” and she has been “navigating” the issue since childhood. The June 4 remark tightened that history into a present condition: not just a childhood quirk but a roughly quantified hearing deficit centered in her left ear.
She tied the disclosure to her music without turning it clinical. Rodrigo referenced her song “what’s wrong with me” from her third album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, and quipped — with the kind of self-deprecating laugh that has threaded her interviews — “There's quite a lot that's wrong with me.” She also compared notes with a friend, saying, “One of my friends is this great photographer, Petra Collins, and she has really bad vision,” and that they joke about art as compensation: “so we always joke that I make music because I have bad hearing, and she takes photos because she has bad vision.”
The context matters: Rodrigo is not describing a recent injury or a new diagnosis. Her radio comments confirm what she has indicated before — the hearing difficulty surfaced in early school tests and has been part of her life while she built a public career. Yet the disclosure still changes how casual encounters with her might be read and how lines from her songs land for listeners who now know the physical detail behind them.
There is tension between the light tone she used and the reality she named. She laughed her way through the anecdote, but the condition itself is persistent and specific. Saying “I'm actually like, 60% deaf in my left ear” is not the same as the playful shorthand of a throwaway line; it invites a follow-up about cause and care she did not provide. The one-off figure sharpens curiosity: why 60 percent, what tests produced that number, and whether it has changed over time — questions Rodrigo did not answer on air.
For now, there is no new medical update or plan announced. Rodrigo framed the detail as a lifelong fact and a conversational aside; she has not said she will seek further comment, nor did she explain a cause. The clearest answer to the question posed by the song title and the online query whats wrong with me olivia rodrigo is this: she reports a long-standing, measurable hearing loss in her left ear discovered around kindergarten and described most recently on June 4 as being about 60 percent deaf, and she has chosen to speak about it with a mix of candor and humor rather than technical detail.
That choice closes the moment for now. Rodrigo turned a private limitation into a piece of her public persona and left the medical gaps open — a fact that means any further reporting will depend on whether she or her representatives decide to add detail about cause, treatment or change. Until then, listeners who want to share a secret will know which side to sit on.
