If you listen to music, and if you’ve been on the internet recently, chances are you’ve heard of Olivia Rodrigo’s driver’s license. I originally wasn’t planning to speak about the song for my blog, but its extremely rapid rise to becoming the number one single was something I found absolutely fascinating, bringing me to write about it. Who is Olivia, and why did the song do so well?

I had never heard of Olivia Rodrigo before, but she has actually been rising in the industry for a while now. She has been acting and performing since a young age, starring in shows like Bizaardvark as well as High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, where she plays a starring role (a show she also wrote music for).

Drivers license is Olivia’s first official solo project that she has released alongside producer Dan Nigro, on Jan 8 this year. It broke multiple records within the first few days of release and as of today has surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify. That’s…not a small feat.

Sonically the song is beautiful. The beginning incorporates the sounds of a car, allowing it flow into the one-tone piano that leads us into the song. Olivia delivers a stunning vocal performance throughout, managing to belt in the fifth octave without sounding strained. She has a youthful tone that creates a great synergy with the words that she writes about young love and her experiences with it. The production is clean and allows her voice to pierce through like a a glass shard. The structure also surprisingly deviates from typical pop song structure, and does not have a chorus, instead bringing a bridge/secondary chorus towards the end of the song. I appreciate that they didn’t try to take a ‘nostalgic’ route that I have seen from many popular artists recently, where they bring back 80’s synths and 90’s beats to appeal to their audience. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn’t feel as innovative as trying to develop a new and personal sound that makes use of the more advanced music software we have now.

The song is well-written, conveying an honest message. It has strong and powerful lines like “She’s everything I’m insecure about” and the main motif of the song “You said forever, now I drive alone past your street“. I do think however, that the song has some syllable placement that makes it hard to register from the first listen.

It’s definitely written and delivered in a much more advanced manner than a lot of popular songs right now, which makes it even cooler that it is doing so well. The words are really where the song shines; with its vulnerability.

Being open and wholly honest in music is actually quite rare among a lot of artists right now. And if you look at the artists that are doing the best, it is because they are some of the only people really being as genuine as possible in the words they write. Being the same age as her, I find it astonishing how she was able to achieve such a high level of vulnerability in her words for her debut single. I personally think it’s extremely difficult to put yourself out there like that at such a young age. It displays a level of maturity and self-awareness that is refreshing to see.

Of course, it is difficult to speak about the success of the song without mentioning the drama surrounding it with the love-triangle narrative that is being perpetuated all across social media. It definitely boosted the popularity of the single, but I still believe that its initial success was purely because of the quality of the song combined with the fact that she was moderately well-known in the US. It was the first time I had seen such widespread recognition and praise for a song like this, in such a short amount of time. It really felt like an overnight catapult to stardom.

It is a great feeling to see young people like Olivia being appreciated for authentically great music, and considering this is only her first single, it excites me to see where she goes next.