Olivia Rodrigo released her first single of 2021 last week, which seems all but set to top the charts here, in the UK, and around the world! Shooting straight to #1 in the Irish charts, Olivia has already made history. With 2 Million streams, Rodrigo has shattered records and has had the biggest ever amount of week 1 streams for an artist.
Penned by Rodrigo, she first shared a clip of the piano-driven, alt-pop song on Instagram in the summer of 2020 to incredible fan reaction, which inspired her to go into the studio with producer and co-writer Dan Nigro (Conan Gray, Lewis Capaldi, Carly Rae Jepsen) to finish the track. With its radiant harmonies and kinetic percussion, “drivers license” is a brilliant balance of unfiltered outpouring and graceful specificity.
The companion music video to “drivers license” is also available to view HERE. Directed by Matthew Dillon Cohen (Ashe, Hinds, Gus Dapperton), the video spins a vivid portrait of Rodrigo as she drives aimlessly, longing for an ex-love, a sentiment Rodrigo precisely conveys in her pensive lyrics (“You said forever, now I drive alone past your street”).
For Rodrigo, one of the greatest joys in life comes from deliberately tapping into her deepest heartache.
“When I came up with ‘drivers license,’ I was going through a heartbreak that was so confusing to me, so multifaceted,” Rodrigo recalls. “Putting all those feelings into a song made everything seem so much simpler and clearer—and at the end of the day, I think that’s really the whole purpose of songwriting. There’s nothing like sitting at the piano in my bedroom and writing a really sad song. It’s truly my favorite thing in the world.”
Olivia is set to release her debut EP later this year, which she wrote during quarantine.
Watch the video;