Olivia Rodrigo Is in the Driver's Seat
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At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like everyone in America—especially the teenagers—was singing the same sad song. “Drivers License” by Olivia Rodrigo begins with a young woman’s voice singing over a spare piano note. She tells a straightforward story: Teen obtains driver’s license; teen drives through suburbs, reflecting on her recent breakup; teen arrives at a bitter conclusion: “I still fuckin’ love you, babe.” It’s a simple song, but Rodrigo’s delivery is dramatic. By the time she builds to its throbbing bridge—“Red lights! Stop signs!”—it’s hard to resist joining the gospel-like chorus of voices belting the words along with her. “Drivers License” practically erupted into the world. It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and broke a Spotify streaming record. TikTok users created so many lip-syncing and cover videos that the social media company created an ad featuring them.
If you’re of a certain age—say, old enough that you can’t remember the last time a bartender asked to see your driver’s license—you may be wondering, Who is Olivia Rodrigo? If not, then you are aware that Rodrigo is an 18-year-old Disney star. She plays Nini, a musical theater buff, in High School Musical: The Musical—The Series. When “Drivers License” came out, fans of the show pegged the ex-boyfriend in question as Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s costar, whom she is rumored to have dated in real life. The song also mentions a romantic rival, a “blonde girl” who’s “so much older than me.” This was thought to be another Disney star, Sabrina Carpenter. Soon, both Bassett and Carpenter released singles of their own—creating a triple-size version of the frenzy that used to accompany a new Taylor Swift album. Saturday Night Live made that point in a hilarious sketch, which featured a group of grizzled men analyzing (and crying over) the song in a pool hall:
“I don’t wanna say nothing too controversial, ya know, but this is giving me Billie Eilish vibes.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the verses, sorry to say: Taylor?”
“I mean, obviously it’s Taylor Swift. Taylor is the root. But it’s also pure Olivia, man.”
The dudes had a point. The similarities were obvious—here was a teenage girl, writing a song about her love life, using a traditional instrument, the piano. But “Drivers License” vibrates with a note of raw anguish that feels very un–Taylor Swift. I had a chance to speak to Rodrigo on Zoom about a month after the song’s release. I knew she didn't want to talk about the gossip that had been swirling around the song. But I figured it was okay to ask about the gossip itself: What’s it like to have millions of people dissecting your love life in social media comment threads? Rodrigo responds with an earnest swoon of gratitude. “It’s truly any songwriter’s dream,” she says. She talks about the thrill of watching everyone from TikTok tweens to middle-aged ladies connect with the song. They’re responding to the fact that she’d bared her heart. “There’s something so powerful in being vulnerable and open, like, ‘This is my life, and I’m fucking sad.’ Or, ‘I’m insecure,’ ” she says. “That’s what makes songwriting so special.”
Rodrigo is sitting in the living room of a rental duplex in Salt Lake City, where she’s been living with her mom since October, filming the second season of the Disney+ series. Because of the pandemic, she doesn’t get to do much IRL socializing. She FaceTimes with friends constantly (“I’ll call them at the weirdest times—their 3 a.m.—and they’ll always pick up”) and visits “soda bars” with her mom (it’s Utah). “She’s my BFF,” she says of her mother. “So it’s all good.” Rodrigo is dressed for a Zoom press junket: silky dark hair falling halfway down her torso, and a white minidress from Reformation. It’s one of the only brands that she buys new clothing from, because of its eco-conscious practices. Otherwise, like many members of Gen Z, she tries to buy used or vintage clothes, for environmental reasons. “Depop is my go-to,” she says, referring to the clothing resale app.
In a way, Rodrigo’s normality and her uniqueness come from the same source: She’s very, very in touch with her feelings. She grew up in Temecula, California, the daughter of a teacher and a marriage and family therapist. Rodrigo says of her parents’ jobs, “I feel like they’re a pretty accurate representation of who I am for some reason.” Her father, the therapist, was born and raised in Southern California, and her mother is a midwesterner (she’s from Wisconsin), with a passion for rock music. Rodrigo’s childhood unfolded against a backdrop of punk and alternative rock, from the Clash to the Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, and the White Stripes. She recalls, “My mom would be like, ‘Screaming and yelling and all that grotesque stuff, it’s emotion. It moves me. That’s the point of music.’ I’ve always had that in my head: The point of music is to move you.”
There were no musicians in the family, but Olivia was a born performer. Once, when she was around four years old, her parents left her alone for a few minutes with a Tinkertoy set, and she built herself a microphone stand. (“I guess that was a sign!” her mom says.) When she was five, her parents signed her up for voice lessons with a local instructor named Jennifer Dustman. Dustman recalls listening to the pint-size Olivia sing for the first time. “I wanted to laugh, it was so amazing,” she says. “Her mom goes, ‘What do you think? Is she good?’ I was like, ‘Um, yeah.’ ” Dustman enrolled the child in local singing competitions, because “she needed to get onstage,” she says. Soon Olivia was singing every weekend—talent shows, a grocery store opening. Her parents weren’t showbiz people, and they didn’t have career aspirations for Olivia, Dustman emphasizes: “She was a thoroughbred when she was little. She needed a lot of stimulation, musical and otherwise. So they just took the steps to get her what she needed.” Dustman worked with child actors in L.A., and she encouraged Olivia’s parents to have their daughter try acting classes. Soon the family was making 90-mile pilgrimages to L.A. for auditions. Rejections followed. Rodrigo recalls her parents’ response. “They were like, ‘We don’t like driving to L.A. If you want to stop auditioning, you can quit.’ ” But a certain tenacity kicked in. “I just remember thinking, ‘No. I have to do this.’ ” She kept auditioning, and, at the age of 10, got her first big break: starring in the American Girl movie Grace Stirs Up Success (2015).
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There was one area in which her parents intervened. When Olivia was nine, her father forced her to take piano lessons. “Oh my God, I hated it,” Rodrigo says. “I’d literally cry before every lesson.” But around the same time, something transformational happened: She started writing songs of her own, using the piano first, and then the guitar. Olivia had long made up what Dustman called “baby songs.” But after taking piano lessons, she says, “I realized that songwriting was something that people do, and it’s a craft.” The first song Rodrigo wrote on the piano was called “Superman,” a tween feminist anthem about a girl who doesn’t need a superhero to save her. Dustman recalls listening to her perform it at the piano. “I had chills from head to toe,” she says. “I thought, Okay, she’s a songwriter. That’s it.”
Until that point, Rodrigo had been living a double life: She was a normal kid who skipped town for auditions. But everything changed when, at the age of 12, she was cast in a Disney Channel show called Bizaardvark. She left public school, and the family moved into an apartment in downtown L.A. She became a showbiz kid, her world populated by adults—agents, managers, wardrobe people. Rodrigo bonded with her costar Madison Hu, who is still her best friend. (“She’s literally my soul mate,” she says.) But it was lonely being a Disney star. “It’s a multicamera sitcom, so literally every set is within a yard of each other,” she recalls. “You just walk to the different sets.” As she turned 14—the middle school years—she experienced what she called “an identity crisis on steroids.” She was struggling with questions that every early adolescent confronts: “Who the fuck am I? Who cares about me? How do I treat people?” But there were some unique pressures: “Most 14-year-olds
aren’t in a room with adults being like, ‘So, what’s your brand?’ ”
Rodrigo wasn’t sure what her brand was. She liked singing. But there was an established trajectory for Disney stars who became singers: Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez. And she wasn’t sure she fit that mold. Then, at 15, she was cast in another Disney production: High School Musical: The Musical—The Series. Socially, the show seems to have been a revelation. Rodrigo became part of a large, tight-knit cast, whom she describes on Instagram as “FAMILY!” It also created her first songwriting break. In episode four, the script called for Nini to perform a song that she’s written. Meanwhile, the real Rodrigo had mustered the courage to post one of her own original songs to Instagram, a melancholy piece called “I Am More.” She describes it as “this very raw take” on a frustration she was feeling with the way people perceived her. On Instagram, she looked pretty and carefree, but that wasn’t the way she felt all the time. That’s the problem with social media: “It’s hard to be something that is not one-dimensional on a medium that is inherently one-dimensional, you know?” The song’s hook is “I am more than I could ever show / I am more than the girl you think you know.”
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High School Musical: The Musical—The Series producers sent “I Am More” to Disney’s music team. Rodrigo says, “They were like, ‘We want Olivia’s character’s song to sound like the song that Olivia wrote.’ ” Eventually, someone asked, “Why don’t we just have Olivia write the song herself?” Which is how she ended up writing and performing “All I Want” for Disney at the age of 16. The song became a hit with fans, and also caught the attention of Sam Riback, the head of A&R at Interscope—part of the same company that includes Geffen Records, now her record label. He was impressed with Rodrigo’s performance, he recalls: “It seemed like second nature to her. She knew how to accentuate some of the lines and little moments to turn it into as powerful a song as it could be.” He became even more intrigued when Rodrigo told him about her musical influences. “She said one of her favorite artists was Gracie Abrams”—the 21-year-old daughter of the director J. J. Abrams, who shares her music online. “Gracie’s in her infancy!” Then came her mother’s ’90s rock. “She started referencing Fiona Apple, the Smashing Pumpkins. She liked the Taylor Swifts and all that, but you could tell there was a left-of-center view to the way she was approaching pop music.”
After we’ve been talking for a while, I ask Rodrigo if I can see her Salt Lake City duplex. “Hell, yeah,” she says. Picking up her laptop, she gives me a tour of the furnishings she and her mother bought for the apartment, including an IKEA couch and a framed Frida Kahlo portrait (“I’m obsessed with Frida Kahlo,” Rodrigo says). The kitchen is littered with balloons and flowers—gifts celebrating the success of “Drivers License.” She opens the door to what looks like a college dorm room: unmade bed, clothes strewn on the floor. “This is my bedroom songwriting oasis,” Rodrigo says. On one wall, she’s created a little shrine, taping up pictures of singer-songwriters she admires: Taylor Swift, Gwen Stefani, Alanis Morissette, and, of course, Gracie Abrams. There’s a guitar, an electric keyboard, and a whiteboard covered with lists related to an upcoming album. “It’s songs that I love and want to reference, and songs that I’ve written that I want to clean up,” Rodrigo says. I catch a glimpse of the word SOUR in bubble letters.
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Rodrigo initially worried that the success of “Drivers License” would become a problem. “I thought I was going to be really in my head, like, ‘I’m never going to write a song as good as that again,’ ” she says. But instead, the opposite has happened: “This song has given me a lot of confidence in my voice.” At the risk of triggering stressful memories, I bring up the brand question. Has she gotten any closer to figuring hers out? The answer is yes—sort of. “I think songwriting has really helped me home in on what I like about myself and my art,” she says. It has something to do with being honest and vulnerable and not contrived. “I just want to be effortless, I guess,” she goes on. “Whether it’s in my fashion or my songs or my social media, I want to just be like, ‘Yo, this is me. And I’m sometimes weird as fuck, and I’m sometimes polished and put together.’ ” She adds, “I think that’s the antithesis of a brand.” But if history is any indication, a lot of people can relate. ▪
HAIR BY IGGY ROSALES FOR HIDDEN CROWN; MAKEUP BY KALI KENNEDY AT FORWARD ARTISTS; SET DESIGN BY KATE STEIN; PRODUCED BY SERIE YOON AT NIGHT WATER CREATIVE.
This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue.
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