If it’s not already cold enough for you out there, Olivia Rodrigo served up some serious pop chills on Monday night (Dec. 11) during a performance of her soundtrack song for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, “Can’t Catch Me Now.”
Fresh off a cake-smashing Saturday Night Live performance and a trip to NPR for a Tiny Desk show, Rodrigo filled the already notoriously frigid Ed Sullivan Theater with goosebump-inducing pop vibes as she sat on a stool in a white slip dress on a fog-enshrouded set to begin the performance. “But I’m in the trees, I’m in the breeze/ My footsteps on the ground/ You’ll see my face in every place/ But you can’t catch me now,” Rodrigo sang in an airy voice on the song’s chorus as the camera panned back to reveal white lights cutting through smoke and a backing band playing the song’s haunting track.
By the end, Rodrigo was up on her feet, howling, “you can’t catch me now” as the song raged to a crescendo before fading to an ominous denoument as she whispered, “you thought that this was the end.” The night was notable for other reasons as well, as it marked host Stephen Colbert’s return to the desk two weeks after he suffered a ruptured appendix that sent him to the hospital for emergency surgery.
The typically unflappable host described the “abdominal agony” he suffered on Nov. 21, the morning after his chat with former fellow late nighter David Letterman. “I figured the pain would go away so I decided to do the show that night,” he said of the chat with the talk show legend. “How bad could it be? Turns out extremely bad.”
Though he insisted on finishing that show, Colbert said his wife Evie convinced him to go to the hospital.
Watch Rodrigo perform “Can’t Catch Me Now” on The Late Show below.
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