Olivia Rodrigo’s global hit Drivers License is the epitome of new-school pop songwriting, where sexuality is complex, emotions are specific and bombast is traded for intimacy
The biggest song in the world right now considers two teenage rites of passage: learning to drive and losing your innocence. In Drivers License, the expansive yet intimate debut single by Olivia Rodrigo, she takes her maiden voyage as driver with an empty passenger seat, circling her ex-boyfriend’s neighbourhood and ruminating on their abandoned plans to celebrate this milestone. Had it come out a few years ago, when empowerment fuelled pop’s engine, it would have ended with Rodrigo driving off into the sunset, two fingers silhouetted against the sky. Instead, she’s stuck in purgatory: “Yeah, you said forever, now I drive alone past your street,” sings Rodrigo, who turns 18 on Saturday.
Released on 8 January, Drivers License broke Spotify records for one-day sales streams (for non-Christmas songs), and then broke that record the next day. It has been No 1 in the
UK for five weeks (and may make it six today); in the US, it is the 10th single in history to spend its first five weeks at No 1. It would be easy to ally the success of a song about being stuck in the suburbs solely with lockdown’s Groundhog Day malaise, but the phenomenon has deeper roots.