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Olivia Rodrigo will embark on her highly-anticipated GUTS World Tour in only a couple of months, and the popstar has been busy promoting the tour with tons of performances. Within the last two weeks, not only has she performed on Saturday Night Live, but she's also taken the stage at iHeartMedia's Jingle Ball Tour and rocked a new Tiny Desk concert with NPR.
Rodrigo's latest Tiny Desk performance, released on Monday, December 11, featured the acoustic performances of the GUTS tracks “Love Is Embarrassing,” “Vampire,” “Making the Bed,” and “Lacy.” Rodrigo shared behind-the-scenes stories about her writing process for each song, and revisited a small “Lacy” anecdote that other students could relate to.
“I took a poetry class last year at USC, and I wrote this poem as one of my homework assignments that I really loved,” Rodrigo shared. “It was the first time I'd ever written a song by taking a full sheet of lyrics and putting a melody to it, and it turned out to be one of my favorite songs on the record.”
Back in October, Rodrigo and creative partner-in-crime Dan Nigro gave us a taste of how the star’s sophomore album sounds live with their one night only engagement An Evening With Olivia Rodrigo in partnership with American Express.
During the intimate evening held at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in L.A., Rodrigo and Dan Nigro serenaded fans with a selection of GUTS songs, including fan-favorite “All-American B*tch,” while spilling some pretty major creative nuggets that we can’t help but describe as gems. One of said gems? The revelation that “Lacy” was, in a way, repurposed college homework.
Speaking to the audience and as noted by The Hollywood Reporter, the creative duo admitted to encountering some roadblocks while writing some of the songs, so, of course, they got savvy. While walking around Greenwich Village, Nigro entered a bookstore and found a book centered on American singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold’s songwriting process, where the Fleet Foxes frontman shared that “some of his songs started as poems.”
The revelation struck a chord with Rodrigo, who had just started uni at USC and had been tasked with flexing her poetry muscles. “One of the poems I wrote was called ‘Lacy,'” Rodrigo recalled during the event, and, poof, just like magic, the roadblock was gone.
Rodrigo and Nigro also shared other album making tidbits during the event — like the fact that they recorded “Vampire” over 20 times with different BPMs (beats per minute) to get the cadence right, and that the album closer, “Teenage Dream,” was actually the first song they completed.
American Express’s An Evening With Olivia Rodrigo is still available to stream right on Rodrigo’s YouTube channel. You can watch the entire performance and conversation below and get in on the album-writing goss.
This story has been updated.
