Olivia Rodrigo Spills Her 'GUTS' at Ace Hotel Concert: 8 of the Album's Best-Kept Secrets

Olivia Rodrigo (front) joined by producer Daniel Nigro (back) to share stories behind the making of Rodrigo’s album, ‘GUTS,’ as part of Amex Member Week at The Theatre at the Ace Hotel, Los Angeles on Monday, October 9, 2023. (Photos by Dan Steinberg & Mark Von Holden for American Express/AP Images)

MTV’s Unplugged series may have dissolved in 2009—with a one-off revival from Shawn Mendes in 2017—but Olivia Rodrigo brought out strings and barstools to emulate a similar environment Monday at Ace Hotel Theatre for Amex Member Week.

Of course, the show was packed to the rafters: hundreds of buzzing fans lined the sidewalk outside, filling the stretch of Olympic Blvd. to 9th St. with moms, daughters, and everyone in between. Inside was no different, with attendees cramping the otherwise-spacious art deco icon. 

Fans in a cramped Theatre at the Ace Hotel lobby for Olivia Rodrigo's Amex Member Week performance in Los Angeles on Monday, October 9th, 2023. (Photos by Dan Steinberg & Mark Von Holden for American Express/AP Images)

A highlight was the merch line, which ran through the venue’s main lobby for the extent of the show and even lingered for some hours after.

The 1600-seat auditorium quickly filled up, and Rodrigo took the stage around 8 p.m. to deafening, echoing, screams. Throughout the show, she sat alongside GUTS songwriter and producer Daniel Nigro for a track-by-track breakdown.

Here are all the best-kept secrets behind the 20-year-old’s sophomore and second number-one album.

vampire

“I would get home and talk to my wife [about work] and say ‘Well, we had a philosophical conversation about tempos and speeds of songs for 12 hours,’” Nigro said.

“And then we both went home crying; that was the day,” he joked.

lacy

“We picked up a book by Fleet Foxes singer Robin Pecknold, who had put out a book about his songwriting process… they started as poems,” Nigro reminisced.

“I got poems, and we need poems,” Rodrigo joked. “I did poetry class and one of the poems I wrote for the assignment… that I loved a lot was called Lacy.”

ballad of a homeschooled girl

“My wife woke up in the morning with COVID and our nanny didn’t want to come into work… so I had to call [Rodrigo] and be like ‘I can’t work because I have no one to watch Saoirse [his daughter],” Nigro said.

“I was like ‘babysit? Sign me up,’” Rodrigo said. “So I babysat, and all day in the studio… she would bounce to the beat of the song; she inspired the song to be finished.”

the grudge

“I was driving to the studio and… I was listening to The Smiths,” Rodrigo said. “And he [Morrissey] says ‘it takes courage to be kind’… I was really upset at the time and was like ‘What if I don’t want to be kind?’”

“When I got to a stoplight, I wrote in the notes on my phone ‘it takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel very strong’” she added.

“We literally spent hours trying to write that melody and chord expression,” Nigro added.

teenage dream

“I really love this song,” Rodrigo said. “I wrote it when I was 18 and thought it was weird and no one would relate to it… it’s become one of my favorite songs on the record and it perfectly encapsulates how I felt growing up at the time.”

get him back

“When we were in the studio and we were feeling really bad, we called it ‘the dread,’ like we caught a case of the dread,” Rodrigo recalled. “On this particular day in the studio, it was definitely full of the dread.”

“Olivia was talking to my dad about this process and writing songs is hard… and my dad, he knows everything so he said ‘you know, a lot of the best songs are written with two chords only,’” Nigro said.

“We were like ‘we’re going to go back to the studio and write a song with two chords,’ and we failed because we use three chords… but we ended up writing something that we really liked,” he added.

love is embarrassing

“We wrote a really bad song and Dave came back the next day so depressed and was like ‘Well, I guess the albums done,’ but I wrote this song called 'love is embarrassing' and said ‘Please listen to it,’” Rodrigo said.

“And he says ‘Yeah, this is good but Olivia we have to turn the album in in five days, I can’t produce, mix, and master a song in five days, it’s impossible,” she added. “I was like ‘I believe in you, I believe in you!”

all-american bitch

“This next song was another last-minute addition,” Rodrigo said. “I was always obsessed with the words ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board’ so I really liked that the song started out that way.”

“It’s the perfect way to encapsulate all the possible standards that we were supposed to fulfill as a girl and as a woman… I also lost my voice screaming from this song,” she added.