The 2020s File Feature
Making The Bed
Making the Bed — Olivia Rodrigo Looks in the MirrorThe Second Album and Its Different ProblemThe problem facing Olivia Rodrigo after SOUR was one of the most…
01 The Story
Making the Bed — Olivia Rodrigo Looks in the Mirror
The Second Album and Its Different Problem
The problem facing Olivia Rodrigo after SOUR was one of the most familiar in pop: how do you follow a debut that arrives fully formed, receives universal praise, and establishes your reputation so completely that the sophomore effort must answer for it? GUTS, released in September 2023, was Rodrigo's answer, and it is a record preoccupied precisely with this kind of self-consciousness. Making the Bed, one of its most searching tracks, turns that awareness into the subject matter itself: a young artist examining her own role in the situations she finds herself complaining about.
The Sound of a More Complicated Perspective
Where SOUR operated largely on the clean energy of first heartbreak, GUTS complicates its emotional palette considerably. Making the Bed is a mid-tempo track that carries the slight discomfort of genuine self-examination; the production is warm but not particularly comforting, which suits lyrics that refuse to let the narrator off the hook. Rodrigo's vocal performance here is precise in a different way than on her most intense tracks: she sounds like someone thinking carefully rather than emoting freely, which gives the song an unusual quality of considered honesty.
Chart Performance
Making the Bed debuted at number 19 on September 23, 2023, entering the Hot 100 with the kind of momentum that a major album release generates when the fanbase is mobilized and streaming platforms are paying attention. The track spent three weeks on the chart, a run that reflected its status as a beloved album cut rather than a lead single. GUTS generated multiple simultaneous Hot 100 entries, and Making the Bed was among the stronger performers in that group. With over 11 million YouTube views, the song has found an ongoing audience beyond its chart period.
Olivia Rodrigo at Twenty
One of the more interesting things about Rodrigo's early catalog is how clearly it documents a specific phase of development: the transition from understanding yourself primarily through others' behavior toward something more uncomfortable, the recognition of your own agency in your own life. SOUR largely exempted the narrator from scrutiny; GUTS corrects this. Making the Bed is a key piece of that correction, a song where the narrator acknowledges that she has contributed to the conditions she's suffering under. That's a harder story to tell, and Rodrigo tells it without flinching.
The Songwriter's Craft
Rodrigo co-wrote Making the Bed, continuing the creative collaboration that produced SOUR. The songwriting on GUTS generally reflects a more expansive sense of what pop can contain: more ambivalence, more irony, less of the clean emotional clarity that made the debut so immediately accessible. Making the Bed is perhaps the clearest example of this shift, a song that earns its emotional impact precisely because it refuses the easy resolution of blaming someone else.
Play this track and notice the moment you realize the narrator is turning the judgment inward. That's where the song earns its keep.
“Making the Bed” — Olivia Rodrigo's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Self-Reckoning at the Heart of Making the Bed
Accountability as Pop Subject
Pop music has a long tradition of songs that locate suffering in external causes: the person who left, the lover who betrayed, the world that failed to understand. Making the Bed belongs to a smaller and more demanding tradition: songs that turn this gaze inward and ask the narrator what role they played in their own unhappiness. This is a harder song to write and a harder one to hear, which is part of why it resonates as strongly as it does.
The Idiom as Frame
The title draws on the familiar expression about lying in the bed you've made for yourself, a piece of inherited wisdom about personal responsibility that has the benefit of being true and the limitation of feeling slightly worn. Rodrigo's achievement in the song is to take this familiar frame and fill it with the specific emotional texture of what it actually feels like to recognize your own contribution to a bad situation. The idiom is the starting point, not the endpoint.
Fame, Youth, and the Pressure to Perform
One of the song's more complex concerns is the relationship between a public persona and a private self, particularly when the public persona was built during adolescence and then must be sustained into young adulthood. Rodrigo's lyrics describe the experience of living up to an image, of making choices that serve the performance of a self rather than the actual development of one. This is an experience specific to her circumstances, yet the underlying dynamic resonates with anyone who has felt the gap between who they present themselves as and who they actually are.
Agency and Its Discomforts
The emotional center of the song is the recognition that agency is simultaneously a gift and a burden. The narrator has choices; she makes them; some of them produce consequences she then has to manage. The song does not dramatize this as tragedy; it examines it with a dry clarity that is, finally, more unsettling than outright suffering. The tone is reckoning rather than lament, and that distinction is where the song's maturity lives.
Why It Connected With the GUTS Audience
Listeners who had grown up with SOUR were, by 2023, also a few years older and a few degrees more willing to examine their own behavior alongside their grievances. Making the Bed met them where they were. The song's three weeks on the Hot 100 and its sustained streaming numbers reflect a fan relationship that goes beyond casual playlist inclusion; this is music that people return to because it says something they recognize about themselves, which is exactly what Rodrigo was reaching for.
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