You Said Forever

Or, 'drivers license' three years on

It’s very easy to lose sight of the monoculture as a musician. Granted, there’s not much monoculture to speak of these days, but ever since my first day of music school back in 2015 (no one talk to me about how it’s been almost ten years), I have been bathing in a soup of fringe auteurs and vintage resurgences. My freshman year, no one might have caused a bigger commotion in our corner of campus than Blake Mills or Hiatus Kaiyote. In 2021, two years after my graduation, I had a session with a pretty famous producer, and when said producer posted me on his Instagram story with our other co-writer, my inbox was flooded with excited messages, asking if the other guy in the video was “really Tobias Jesso Jr.”

(It was!)

After nearly a decade of warping my own radar for pop culture, I have come to view everything I like with a sort of commercial skepticism; essentially, I always assume that my favorite songs and bands won’t get as big as they deserve to be. And so, when a teenage girl I’d never heard of who was apparently big with kids because of her role on a Disney show released a song about getting her license, and I fell in love with the song, I assumed it would be the kind of inside baseball smash that only me and the other dorks could love. I listened to it, got the chills, and thought: this should be huge. But Carly Rae Jepsen should be bigger than she is. So should MUNA. This will do well, but not as well as it deserves.

And then it became the biggest [expletive] song of the year, one week into January. Counterculture no more.

It’s been three years since Olivia Rodrigo released her earth-shifting debut single, ‘drivers license.’ I want to revisit just how she shifted the earth so efficiently.

I would posit that ‘drivers license’ remains one of Rodrigo’s best songs. Whenever people ask me for songwriting advice, one of the first things I say is that lyrics need to sound “good”—cool, meaningful, conversational, whatever you’re going for—when you strip away the melody and the production.

(I recently heard the song “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love” by Usher for the first time in a while, and I was struck by how well it follows this rule, specifically the line leading into the chorus, “swear I’ve seen you before / I think I’d remember those eyes”—it’s wildly satisfying as a response to the rhyme scheme set up earlier in the verse. Pop music executed well is sheer genius).

‘drivers license’ reads like a conversation with your most sensitive friend, to the point that listening to it feels like eavesdropping. One of the biggest problems people have as writers, especially young writers, is this tendency to filter out one’s best impulses. “I got my drivers license last week / just like we always talked about / ‘cause you were so excited for me / to finally drive up to your house” might literally be a string of texts sent to an ex after months of no contact. It is a testament to Rodrigo’s instincts as a writer that none of this was punched up in an attempt to impress an imagined audience.

As the production opens up, Rodrigo lands what, for me, was the knockout punch: “and 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.” My first single, “White Boy” was a clear-but-teary-eyed reflection on a lifetime of living in the shadow of white women. Rodrigo does something more deft. She leaves the fact of her rival’s blondeness like a door left ajar, something for you to wander through at your leisure. ‘drivers license’ isn’t a song about being a woman of color who feels inferior to her white counterpart, but it isn’t not a song about that. Rodrigo’s biracial identity is a specter looming in the background of every line. It might have been anyway. But that early mention of blonde hair makes sure you don’t forget.

The bridge of this song is another stand-out component. Plaintive and incantatory as a wailing siren, we watch Rodrigo’s psyche fracture into its constituent parts, all leading up to the revelatory and deceptively magnetic closer, “I still fuckin’ love you, babe.” Rodrigo mentioned recently in an interview that she pared down the swearing on various lines on her sophomore outing, Guts, which I think is admirable, as it can be low-hanging fruit to land an expletive and gin up an emotional response. But sometimes the clean version is wrong. ‘drivers license’ sticks its emotional crescendo like a gold medal gymnast with that line of its perfect bridge.

Really, though, the mission statement of the song is the closing line of the first verse—“how could I ever love someone else?”—combined with the closing line of the chorus—“‘cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street.” Getting your heart broken for the first time—and I mean really, properly shattered—has inspired these kinds of dramatics for millennia. I’m not saying that Rodrigo reinvented the wheel here. But she tapped into it just perfectly. Honestly, my younger brother, Holden McRae, has a song that I feel is similarly poignant and effortless—the refrain is simply, over and over again, “tell me what’s supposed to happen now.” After the acute agony of loss has subsided, the next most distressing part of a breakup is the disorientation. Even if this person wasn’t your spouse—even if you shared no children nor property—there is this sense that their presence dictated and precipitated every single part of your life. Without them there, the script is gone. What’s supposed to happen now? How am I supposed to love someone else? Then there is the idea of forever, and the idea of the promise thereof. For the anxiously attached girlies in their teens and twenties, the notion that someone could change their mind about something as profound and life-altering as being in love with you is tantamount to lunacy. How could they have changed their mind? They said forever. And now I am alone in my Prius listening to “Waiting Room” over and over again. Obviously I am dead, or this is a hallucination, or they are Satan. The video for ‘drivers license’ expands on these circular thoughts, on repeating the same behaviors—like driving past their street, or scrolling through old photos, or playing old songs—in the hopes that it’s all been some massive misunderstanding.

It’s a rare and beautiful thing when a genuinely excellent song by a young female singer-songwriter (who isn’t already a global phenom) is also the biggest song in the world. In the three years since it’s come out, Olivia Rodrigo has released two very good albums, both of which I have enjoyed thoroughly. While I expect no new output from her for a while (I haven’t put out an album for nearly two years, and it’s going to be a minute, SORRY, so I wouldn’t dare throw stones), I do eagerly await the third installment in her chronicles. So much of her magic lies in her ambassadorship to teenage girlhood. What will Olivia in her mid-twenties create? I can’t wait for the ‘drivers license’ she writes about getting kicked off her parents’ health insurance, or dumping a guy for not having a bed frame, or trying to figure out what ‘escrow’ means.