Olivia Rodrigo and Dan Nigro Use Intimate Storytelling Show in L.A. to Recall the ‘Toil and Jubilation’ of Making ‘Guts’: ‘I Was Really Scared’
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In an intimate performance and conversation in Los Angeles Monday night, Olivia Rodrigo admitted that there were tears shed during the making of her new album, “Guts.” But she and producer/co-writer Dan Nigro clarified that it wasn’t just about the emotion in the lyrics. Some of those were tears of frustration as they obsessed over songs and struggled to get her all-important sophomore release just right over its 10-month creation.
“We cried just because we were frustrated. We were really toiling,” Rodrigo said.
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Not that the songs themselves don’t bring up strong emotions. In response to a submitted audience question about which compositions took her to that level, the singer said, “I remember bawling when I wrote ‘Drivers License'” from the first album, and, from the follow-up, “I feel like I cried writing ‘The Grudge.'”
“Most of the recording is you crying,” kidded Nigro.
“That’s album three, just me crying,” she retorted. They then bantered over how they would keep their “Sour”/”Guts” tradition of four-letter album titles going for the next one when “Cries” has five letters in it. “‘CRYZ’ with a Z at the end,” Rodrigo finally proposed, proving that now, as with the loggerheads they sometimes found themselves at making the new record, there’s always a solution.
Rodrigo and Nigro joined up for this rare, lengthy, outside-the-studio collaboration for what was billed as “An Evening With Olivia Rodrigo,” an American Express-sponsored event at the Theatre at Ace Hotel that had been announced to fans just the day before. The roughly 1,600 cardholders who snapped up the $25 tickets with just an hour’s notice of the on-sale knew they’d more or less won the Olivia Rodrigo lottery, given that all the tour dates Rodrigo will be doing next year in arenas 10 times that size sold out just as immediately as tickets for this acoustic performance did.
Attendees at the AmEx event won’t get to hoard their impressions of the show to themselves for long, though. The hour-long performance and conversation was filmed by a five-camera crew, and the recording will go up on Rodrigo’s YouTube page tonight at at 8 p.m. ET/5 PT, remaining on her page through Thursday. (What fans watching at home won’t get to share that those in attendance at the downtown L.A. movie palace did: photo booths, unlimited servings of Midori Matcha — said to be Rodrigo’s favorite beverage — and a taco after-party out on the street.)
The exact nature of the show wasn’t revealed beforehand, with some (including us) assuming that it would be a solo concert and chat, given that Rodrigo had performed three songs the previous week at the Grammy Museum, expertly and rivetingly, without any accompaniment besides her own guitar and piano. In playing along with her for the full hour at the Theatre at Ace Hotel, Nigro proved to be not just an obviously able accompanist but engaging conversational foil — further publicly establishing the chemistry of a collaboration that’s proven so fruitful, it ought to be insured by Lloyd’s of London.
The pair were joined by three backup singers and an additional acoustic guitarist/keyboardist for a set that encompassed the “Guts” songs “Vampire,” “Lacy,” “Ballad of a Home Schooled Girl,” “The Grudge,” “Teenage Dream,” “Get Him Back” and “All American Bitch,” with the first album’s “Traitor” as a show-ending bonus. In all instances, the performances were framed with information about the writing or recording of the songs, with the emphasis almost wholly on the creative and collaborative process. Although Nigro promised at the start that “we get to tell you stories that will make Olivia very, very uncomfortable,” those were all about process, as Rodrigo was not about to hint at people or circumstances that might’ve prompted the most speculated-about material.
Answering a submitted audience question about nerves, they said, “20 minutes ago, we were really nervous. We were shaking.” They’d gotten over it, but that was emblematic, perhaps, of an album creation process that the singer admitted involved a certain level of fear.
“When Olivia and I first met, she couldn’t stop sending me ideas and was excited with any songs she wrote,” Nigro noted. “Whether it was good or bad, she was like, ‘I wrote a song! I wrote a song!’ But when we made ‘Guts,’ I think obviously given all the pressure and the buildup of the success of ‘Sour,’ things kind of changed and Olivia became a little bit more precious, so…” Rodrigo finished his thought: “I was scared, really scared.”
At one point describing a “year” making the album, Nigro later clarified that it was about 10 months from start to finish, with writing and recording taking place over the first eight months and mixing and fine-tuning consuming the last two — although she brought in “Love Is Embarrassing” just five days before the album is due and, against his better judgment, they squeezed it in under the wire.
“Vampire” was one of the first songs written for “Guts” and went so well that it spoiled them for follow-up compositions for a while. As for it being the first single, “I would say it was definitely one of the hardest decisions we had to make together. I definitely lost a lot of hair because of that,” Nigro said. “My favorite song, I was outvoted deeply on. I was literally like standing on an island by myself being like, “bad idea, right, bad idea, right”… everyone’s like, ‘Vampire’! I mean, I get it, actually, why ‘Vampire’ would work better, but I still, was just really excited about ‘Bad Idea, RIght?” and everybody seeing the more sarcastic side of Olivia that I don’t think was really apparent” on “Sour.”
Even after “Vampire” was selected as her return, “I tortured Dan for so long, for months” about the arrangement, Rodrigo said. “Like, ‘No, it’s too fast, it’s too slow, we need to change it by one BPM.’ … We probably have 20 versions of different BPM. And nobody even notices.” Added Nigro, “I would get home and talk to my wife and she’d say, ‘How was the studio today?’ Like, ‘Well, we had a philosophical conversation about tempos and speeds of songs for 12 hours, and then we both went home crying. That was the day.'”
Nigro said that the opening song, “All American Bitch,” provided the sort of overture the album needed to bridge what he feared might be an overly bifurcated album, stylistically.
“Making ‘Guts,’ we had this super start with ‘Get Him Back’ and ‘Bad Idea, Right?’ and ‘Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,’ super fun, up empo songs that showed a different side of Olivia, and then we went on to super-serious with ‘The Grudge’ and ‘Teenage Dream.’ And I was confused as a producer, like, how do I bridge this together?… And then when she sent me that idea (for ‘All American Bitch’), I remember like, holy shit, this is it: You just wrote the opening song of this record, and I was so frickin’ pumped about it. But I was also scared because the song was so good to me, that I didn’t want to screw it up…. The first record I kind of played most of the instrumentation — I’d say 85, 90 percent of it I just kind of played in the garage. And I was like, shit, like, we need to go into a studio with a band and record this as like a live band. So that was kind of an awesome experience that we got to do for this record, was record a couple of songs live.”
“I lost my voice screaming from this song in his garage,” she said. “I’m sure all of your neighbors thought that I was getting murdered.” He added, “I had her for 15 minutes screaming. No, harder! … layering screams on screams on screams” till they had “the choir of screams that we need for this song.” In performance at the Ace, the audience naturally obliged in joining the choir.
While some of the songs were performed on stools, Rodrigo was up and animated for the chant-along favorite “Get Him Back,” among others. Nigro said that there was a goal for that one, inspired by his father saying some of the best songs only have three chords: “I thought, okay, we’re gonna go back to the studio and we’re gonna write a song with two chords. And we failed, because we used three chords. We couldn’t use two, we needed three. But we ended up writing something that we really liked with three chords.”
For the dramatic “The Grudge,” Rodrigo said she got a lyrical prompt from Morrissey. “I was just driving to the studio, and I was trying to find an idea, and I was listening to the Smiths. And there’s this lyric where he says, ‘It takes courage to be kind.’ And I was like … what if I don’t want to be courageous and what if I don’t want to be kind? So when I got to the stoplight, I wrote in the Notes app off of my phone, ‘It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel very strong.'”
But then, one in the studio, “We had an argument about this for truly, like, what, an hour and a half — something excessive” — about the melody that would go with that particular line. Said Nigro, “Basically what I would do is that every few weeks, because we wrote the song way earlier in the process, if we went to go work on the song, I would just change it to the version that I like, hoping that she wouldn’t notice at all.” He then did an imitation of a puzzled and slightly unhappy look crossing her face as she listened to his latest handiwork.
In the end, on “The Grudge,” there was an unusual compromise. “Unlike most songs in which the chorus is the same, we couldn’t agree, so we literally just made them both different, just to satisfy the two of us.” Rodrigo invited the audience to listen for the way the melody varies on that line as the song plays out. “You guys can be the judge. Let us know!”
Not everything in the conversation involved heavy musical decisions. Some of it involved heavy fast-food choices. In response to an audience question about “Chicken nuggets or chicken strips,” Rodrigo said that she prefers strips because “I feel like tenders are just, like, healthier in some ways” … and then admitted she bases that on the idea that strips look closer to something that could occur in nature than nuggets.
Back on the creative process, Nigro read aloud a question about using one word to describe the album-making process. “One adjective: joyful,” he said. She responded with a touch of sarcasm: “Oh yeah, always!”
She continued, “I feel like we definitely had some tricky moments where we were like, how are we gonna do this? Are we good at this? We actually coined a term for it when we were in the studio and we were doing really bad, we called it the dread… a case of the dread. And sometimes Dan would catch it, sometimes I would catch it.”
Said Nigro, after their 10 months were up, “Two weeks later she came in to do something else at the studio, and she was like, ‘It’s so crazy, I love this record so much, and I forgot how much trouble we had making it — it feels like it was so easy.'” The post-childbirth effect, in other words. “I know,” she responded. “Even today, just talking about it, I’m like, ‘We had so much fun! We had Taco Bell every day, hanging out!’ We were toiling, though, in the real world.”
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