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Olivia Rodrigo on writing "driver's license"
Brut America
Follow
3/25/2025
With her debut single, "driver's license", she's made history as the youngest artist to top U.S. charts.
Olivia Rodrigo talks to Brut about the story behind the breakout hit that she wrote in quarantine.
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Music
Transcript
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00:00
Two days after the song came out, we were like, oh, whoa, this doesn't usually happen.
00:04
This is really crazy.
00:05
Is the computer glitching?
00:06
Why are so many people streaming it?
00:07
It's crazy.
00:08
I was over quarantine and had actually just gotten my driver's license.
00:22
I was driving around my neighborhood for the first time by myself, which was this big excursion.
00:27
It was super exciting.
00:28
I was listening to a bunch of sad music, and I felt really moved by the music I was
00:33
listening to.
00:34
It was really inspiring.
00:35
I drove right home, and I sat at my piano, and I wrote the first verse and chorus of
00:41
Driver's License.
00:42
Then the next day, I was like, oh, wow, that was actually pretty good, what I wrote yesterday.
00:46
I wrote the second verse, and then I brought it to my producer and collaborator, Dan Nigro,
00:51
who helped me finish it up, and we produced it together.
00:55
Yeah, that's sort of Driver's License that we have today.
01:20
I was absolutely not prepared for that at all.
01:23
I had no expectations of getting a driver's license, but even if I did have expectations,
01:28
in no way could they have ever prepared me for what actually happened.
01:31
The success was pretty instantaneous, which was crazy.
01:45
It was pretty quick, and it was just mind-blowing, but also sort of weird because it was in quarantine,
01:51
too.
01:53
I had this big hit song that people were really liking, but I had no context of that in the
01:58
real world.
01:59
I was just looking at my phone, you know what I mean?
02:01
It was sort of a weird, isolated experience at the same time.
02:05
I actually had never performed one of my own songs before in my life, on a large scale,
02:12
more than just my mom and my dad.
02:23
My debut album is sort of a slice of my 17-year-old heart, and I think a first heartbreak is something
02:34
that teenagers feel very acutely, among other growing pains.
02:39
So, yeah, I just sort of wanted to capture that teenage experience as best I could.
02:45
Obviously, Driver's License was this huge success, and there's obviously a little bit
02:51
of pressure that goes along with following that up, but at the end of the day, I really
02:55
just love songwriting.
02:57
It's my favorite thing in the world to do, and I would do it regardless of whether or
03:02
not people were listening.
03:03
So, the fact that people are going to listen is just sort of icing on the cake for me.
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