The Number Ones: Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Your first real breakup is not the end of the world. It just feels that way. Within a few years, you'll marvel at all the dumb and awkward things that you said and did when you first attempted to intertwine your soul with someone else's. You'll go through more breakups, and most of them will probably be a whole lot more devastating than that one. But in the actual moment, your first real breakup feels like the universe crumbling in on you. You know, on a rational level, that it's not that serious, that you're being sentimental and ridiculous, but that doesn't make it any easier. You might even feel so theatrically bummed out that you come to enjoy the purity of your own pain, to romanticize the end of romance.

The magic of "Drivers License," Olivia Rodrigo's first real single, is that it lives in that moment, that it might even take you right back to that moment whether or not that moment is deep in your distant past. When you hear "Drivers License," you hear someone going through it. You hear the kind of sentimentality and nostalgia that could only ever come from the very, very young. You hear this person attempting to keep things in perspective. You hear anger and betrayal and overwhelming self-pity. You hear someone mourning a part of her life that's gone forever, and that moment means something, even if the relationship maybe never did.

"Drivers License" is pop music. The person singing "Drivers License" is a teenager, a child, but she's already been performing for her entire life. She's part of the Disney machine, and she's got the slightly uncanny media-trained sheen that this particular machine imparts on every kid who comes through it. She's working with a seasoned pop professional and finding ways to turn insular bedroom-pop sentiments into grand, theatrical arena singalongs. But she's still a 17-year-old kid singing a song that she wrote about feelings that she really felt. There's a tension there, between precise craft and raw, vulnerable ache, and there's magic in that tension. "Drivers License" works so well as pop music mostly because it communicates that first-breakup feeling in ways that don't feel machine-mediated.

The first sound that we hear on "Drivers License" is the ding of a car's door-ajar alert, which fades right into a single-note piano pulse. Olivia Rodrigo got her mom to start her car up and record that sound on her phone, and her mom's recording is what we hear on the song. The first line on "Drivers License" — "I got my driver's license last week" — literally comes from Rodrigo's diary. When "Drivers License" crashed headlong into the Hot 100, debuting at #1 and then staying there for months, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Adults like me had never heard of Olivia Rodrigo, and we needed to read online explainers about all the Disney-star gossip that helped fuel the song's backstory. But the backstory was ultimately irrelevant because its sentiment was too universal to be contained. It came through in the smallness of those gestures — the sound of the car, the line from the diary.

Every first breakup is different, but every first breakup is the same. "Drivers License" evokes that exquisite melancholy in ways that most pop songs, and especially most recent pop songs, never even bother to attempt. With "Drivers License," Olivia Rodrigo emerged as a fully formed pop auteur, a worthy heir and competitor to her idols. Since its release, she has made good on that song's promise, even if she hasn't yet made another song with its level of impact. There are lots of reasons why "Drivers License" struck a chord at the moment that it did, but the most important of those reasons is that it makes you feel like you're going through your first real breakup, like it's the end of the world.

So: The backstory. Olivia Isabel Rodrigo is from the Southern California suburb of Murrieta, and she is still, as I write this, too young to rent a car. (Jennifer Lopez and LL Cool J's "All I Have" was the #1 song in America when Rodrigo was born.) Rodrigo's father, who is Filipino American, was a therapist, and her mother, who is white, is a teacher. Her parents love '90s alt-rock, so she grew up immersed in that stuff. As an artist, Rodrigo has taken a lot of sonic cues from the music that her parents love, but her whole vibe contrasts sharply with what childhood favorites like the Breeders and Babes In Toyland brought to the table. Rodrigo has never come across as a snarly, defiant, self-destructive figure. She's a showbiz kid through and through.

Olivia Rodrigo's parents don't work in entertainment, but she started taking singing, acting, and piano lessons when she was still a little kid. Her childhood is all over the internet. You can still find video of six-year-old Olivia Rodrigo belting out Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" at a talent show. ("Don't Stop Believin'" came out in 1981 and peaked at #9. It's a 10.) You can see seven-year-old Rodrigo in a 2010 Old Navy commercial. In 2015, a 12-year-old Rodrigo played the lead in something called Grace Stirs Up Success, a straight-to-DVD movie based on an American Girl doll. Virginia Madsen (a former child star herself, as well as an Oscar nominee) played Rodrigo's mom, and it looks like MasterChef Junior served an important plot function. I have not seen this motion picture, but I'm sure it's terribly moving. Rodrigo sings about being an awkward homeschooled girl, and she makes it sound like a universal condition, so it's a little funny to find out that she was (partly) homeschooled because she was doing stuff like that.

In 2016, the 13-year-old Olivia Rodrigo landed one of the lead roles in the Disney Channel sitcom Bizaardvark. Rodrigo learned guitar to play that role, and she moved to Los Angeles proper. I knew absolutely nothing about Bizaardvark before researching this column, but it seems like Rodrigo and her co-star Madison Hu play best friends who are trying to become YouTube stars, or stars on a fictional YouTube equivalent. That means the show exists in some strange liminal space between linear cable and social internet. Another star of Bizaardvark was Jake Paul, who was already building a YouTube empire and who now fights in terrible celebrity boxing matches for many millions of Netflix subscribers. Do you think Olivia Rodrigo and Jake Paul still text each other sometimes? I bet they don't. Jenna Ortega was on an episode of Bizaardvark, too. If you were on Bizaardvark as a kid, there's a good chance that you are now very famous.

Bizaardvark lasted for three seasons, and Olivia Rodrigo went straight from that into another Disney project. When the Disney+ streaming service launched in 2019, one of its original shows was called High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and that title is supposed to be convoluted. It's a slightly meta deal. A new drama teacher comes to a high school and learns that it's where the hit 2006 Disney Channel movie High School Musical was filmed. So she decides to mount a high school musical production of High School Musical, and the show itself is an Office-style mockumentary about that production. Rodrigo was the show's first-billed star, and she got to do a lot of singing. In a very slow holiday-break moment just recently, I watched the pilot episode. It's kind of cute.

The main romantic-tension situation in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series is a little more complicated than what Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens had going on in the OG High School Musical, but the first episode is based around Rodrigo's character dumping the character played by fellow Disney Channel veteran Joshua Bassett and then him auditioning for the musical to try to get her back. In real life, Rodrigo and Bassett were apparently also a couple for a little bit, though they've never confirmed that.

Rodrigo and Bassett sang a lot of songs together on the show. They also wrote at least one song, "Just For A Moment," together. Like a lot of young Disney stars, Rodrigo and Bassett both had pop-star aspirations. Rodrigo had been writing songs since she was an even smaller kid, and the show's producers had enough faith in her to let her write for herself sometimes. The biggest song from the show was a pure Olivia Rodrigo showcase. She wrote the big ballad "All I Want" by herself, and it reached #90 on the Hot 100 in January 2020, shortly after the show's first season came out. In the wake of that song, Rodrigo signed a deal with Geffen, somehow avoiding all the years in the kiddie-pop Hollywood Records mines that most Disney stars have to do.

While she was filming her part on the High School Musical show, Olivia Rodrigo kept writing songs and posting videos of herself singing them online. That's how she came to the attention of Dan Nigro, the producer who became her prime collaborator. In the great New York Times Diary Of A Song video on "Drivers License," Nigro says that he's never seen Bizaardvark or High School Musical: "Olivia told me I'm not allowed to watch any of it. It's like a separate world for her." Instead, a friend told Nigro to watch one of her Instagram videos, and he was impressed enough to DM her. They started working together, and they clicked right away.

Dan Nigro, who is 20 years older than Olivia Rodrigo, came into the game as the frontman for As Tall As Lions, a sort of quasi-sophisticated Long Island emo band who had a decent little mid-'00s run. Nigro has worked on some of my favorite pop records of this decade, but I simply cannot get into As Tall As Lions. It's kind of funny that the two biggest pop producers of the past few years, Nigro and Jack Antonoff, were both '00s MySpace emo guys.

As Tall As Lions broke up in 2010, and Dan Nigro went off to LA and started working with a friend, the pop-adjacent producer Justin Raisen. Along with Raisen, Nigro had credits on on a bunch of tracks from Sky Ferreira's absolute fucking classic 2013 album Night Time, My Time. From there, Nigro worked on tracks from people like Carly Rae Jepsen, Kylie Minogue, Caroline Polachek, and regular collaborator Conan Gray. But unless you were deep into '00s emo or cult-pop liner notes, there's a good chance that you didn't know who Nigro was before "Drivers License" came out.

Rodrigo wrote the original version of "Drivers License" shortly after getting her actual driver's license. The widespread fan assumption is that she wrote the song about Joshua Bassett after the two of them broke up and he started dating fellow Disney kid Sabrina Carpenter, a person who will eventually appear in this column. That's all conjecture, and nobody has ever confirmed anything. There's a line on "Drivers License" that seems to point straight to Carpenter: "You're probably with that blonde girl who always made me doubt/ She's so much older than me/ She's everything I'm insecure about." (Carpenter is four years older than Rodrigo.) But plenty of articles have pointed out that the original lyric, from a version of the song that Rodrigo posted online in 2020, is about a brunette girl.

We're getting into deep Taylor Swift territory here, with fans combing through lyrics for clues and with songs that seem to invite that sort of interpretation even if the artists never confirm or deny any of those reports. It was all a little bewildering to people who were not up on the real lives of Disney Channel stars — this whole universe of baby performers with their own interlocking histories. (At the time, Sabrina Carpenter was fresh off the Disney show Girl Meets World and the Netflix movie Tall Girl. She was not exactly a household name among adults.) But "Drivers License" is compelling enough to make people want to dive into the story behind the song, and I'm sure the Disney-celebrity cosmology helped build the track into a pop juggernaut even if it's pretty incidental to the song's appeal.

As a piece of writing, "Drivers License" walks a perfect line between the universal and the specific. It's literally diaristic in that it's about an actual moment in the life of this very young singer and songwriter. There are all kinds of concrete details in its lyrics. "You didn't mean what you wrote in that song about me" — we're dealing with a relationship between two people who both write songs. There's "that blonde girl" who's "so much older" and who may or may not be former Girl Meets World star and future pop overlord Sabrina Carpenter. Rodrigo really got her driver's license just before she wrote the song.

The recording style of "Drivers License," with its murmured vocals and its muted piano, draws on indie rock and bedroom-pop — music that's supposed to be small and specific and personal. Rodrigo has said that she wrote the song after driving around and listening to Minor, the 2020 debut EP from her generational peer and fellow LA showbiz kid Gracie Abrams. Later on, Abrams would open a bunch of shows on Rodrigo's first-ever tour and then become a big pop star in her own right. (Abrams' highest-charting single, 2024's "That's So True," peaked at #6. It's a 5.)

But "Drivers License" is not some small indie song. It's a whole lot bigger and more sweeping than that. Plenty of people have commented on how "Drivers License" carries the influence of Lorde and Billie Eilish, two artists who appeared in this column as out-of-nowhere teenage phenoms. The song owes even more to Taylor Swift, and it's telling that Rodrigo released "Drivers License" just after Swift came out with her twin indie-leaning 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore. Early on, Rodrigo spoke extensively about loving and learning from Swift's music, and the two artists said nice things about one another. They don't say nice things about each other anymore. More on that further down in the column.

"Drivers License" really established Olivia Rodrigo as the first post-Taylor Swift artist who could truly hang with Swift herself. Swift's music, including the constant game of dropping lyrical hints about entanglements with other public figures, certainly helped create a world where "Drivers License" could be an out-the-gates blockbuster, but I don't think the song really sounds like Swift. I don't think it really sounds all that much like anyone else, honestly. You can hear all kinds of influences at work on "Drivers License," but it still comes across as one young woman using every tool at her disposal to communicate a life-swallowing wave of emotion.

It's always fascinating to hear how a song like "Drivers License" came into being, and there's plenty of that talk on the Diary Of A Song video. The track started out as a voice memo, just Olivia Rodrigo alone at her piano. Even in that moment, though, she was thinking about how listeners could use the transition out of the song's intro in TikTok videos. She adds, "People did make TikToks like that, so I'm really happy about that." (Her favorite "Drivers License" TikToks were the ones with dogs.) Rodrigo originally intended to sing the whole song in a tremulous falsetto, but Dan Nigro convinced her that she had to "belt it" instead. He was right. Rodrigo's delivery of the first chorus — that bell-clear, Disney-trained voice coming so close to shattering with feeling — is one of the moments where "Drivers License" ascends.

The other ascension is the bridge. That bridge is an all-timer. It's where the song swells up to epic proportions, even as the lyrics just name the things that one might encounter while driving: "Red lights! Stop signs! I still see your face in the white cars, front yards!" Rodrigo wails that she still fuckin' loves you babe, and the conversational cussword works as a subliminal signal that sets her apart from past Disney-kid pop stars who didn't get to start cussing on record until they were out of their Hollywood Records contracts. Rodrigo knew that she was making a statement with the "fuckin'," too. I like that she did it, and I like that it only feels slightly forced.

Rodrigo and Nigro wrote the "Drivers License" bridge together in a rush, and it's fun to hear the two of them talk about how quickly it came together. They first recorded the song at a faster tempo, and Rodrigo was the one who said it had to be a whole lot slower, that they needed to redo the whole thing. Nigro says that he was bummed about throwing away a few days of work, "but she was right, I knew she was right."

She was right. Rodrigo teased "Drivers License" online for a long time before releasing it, building up anticipation within the segment of the population that pays attention to Disney stars' musical endeavors. But by the time it actually came out, with its moody Instagram-aesthetic music video, "Drivers License" was able to instantly transcend its origins and register with the wider population. The song arrived in early January 2021 and hit hard with so many young people who were still stuck at home with the COVID blues and who were evidently ready for something theatrically bummed-out. Pretty quickly, "Drivers License" also reached people my age who had to accept late passes in discovering that the kids were right, that this song is good.

"Drivers License" didn't benefit from any particular TikTok trend, but it still spread like crazy on the platform. Rodrigo also did all the conventional things to promote the release — everything other than playing regular live shows, which wouldn't really be possible until later that year. (Her first proper live show, at least according to her, was at the iHeartRadio Festival in September 2021.) The other presumed characters in the "Drivers License" love triangle also helped the song out by releasing songs that registered as rebuttals. Joshua Bassett released a piece of sub-Maroon 5 dogshit called "Lie Lie Lie" a week after "Drivers License." Supposedly, it was written and planned long before "Drivers License" came out, but he still made a perfect heel. "Lie Lie Lie" didn't trouble the Hot 100, and neither did any other Joshua Bassett song. Later, Bassett said that he was hospitalized for septic shock in the wake of the "Drivers License" phenomenon.

Two weeks after Rodrigo released "Drivers License," Sabrina Carpenter dropped "Skin," which certainly played as an explicit answer song. Like "Lie Lie Lie," it's nowhere near as good as "Drivers License." But "Skin" did become the first Hot 100 hit for Carpenter, who'd already been putting out music for nearly a decade. (It peaked at #48.) Just like Bassett, Carpenter came off as a bad guy in this whole situation. I thought she did a much better job singing about the fallout on her 2022 ballad "Because I Liked A Boy," but that one didn't make the Hot 100. Anyway, the bad-guy thing didn't stick to Carpenter. Today, she and Rodrigo are on about the same level. I really like them both.

"Drivers License" did crazy streaming numbers, owned the Hot 100 from January to March 2021, and topped charts all over the planet. Today, the single is sextuple platinum. On April Fools Day, Rodrigo followed "Drivers License" with "Deja Vu," her second proper single. "Deja Vu" is a breakup song just like "Drivers License," but it's a little more spirited and pissed-off. It peaked at #3, giving Rodrigo a second hit. (It's an 8.) Months after "Deja Vu" came out, some lawyers evidently agreed that the song's bridge owed a whole lot to the bridge on a Taylor Swift song that will appear in a future column. As a result, Swift, Jack Antonoff, and St. Vincent all got retroactive songwriting credits on "Deja Vu." That wasn't the only time that Swift got a retroactive writing credit on a Rodrigo song, either, and you have to wonder about the behind-the-scenes machinations at work there.

The principal figures have never publicly addressed those credit breakdowns, but for years there's been gossip about a cold-war beef between Swift and Rodrigo, which of course has led to more feverish speculation about songs where the two of them may or may not have written about one another. Those extra-musical considerations are simply part of the pop landscape of the 2020s. When you talk about the music, you have to talk about that other stuff, too. We'll have to keep talking about that stuff in future columns, since Olivia Rodrigo will be back in this space soon.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's the 2021 sketch where the men in the Saturday Night Live cast, along with Bridgerton guest-hunk Regé-Jean Page, break down "Drivers License" and basically write my column for me:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Today, I drove through the suburbs crying 'cause you didn't buy it yet.