Moments into Olivia Rodrigo’s documentary Driving Home 2 U, we see her turn on a camera in the shoebox-sized home studio of her producer, Daniel Nigro, state the date – March 2021 – and squirm as he plays the first song they wrote together, a year earlier. “And I’m still not over it!” she says of the relationship documented in the song. She seems less embarrassed by the enduring heartache than with confronting a less refined version of her songwriting – a craft she would hone into 2021’s biggest hit.
Drivers License, Rodrigo’s lovelorn debut single, came out on 8 January 2021 and broke the Spotify record for the most one-day streams of any non-Christmas song within four days. “My entire life just shifted in an instant,” Rodrigo says in the film, which seems to exist as much to help the then 18-year-old comprehend that rapid change as to entertain her fans. As well as the studio footage, it shows her road-tripping from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, the places where she wrote her subsequent debut album, Sour, giving atmospheric performances in diners and deserts along the way. Curiously, it never acknowledges why she was in Utah: Rodrigo is a lead character in Disney’s High School Musical TV series, which shoots there. Although the documentary is produced by the Walt Disney Company, it entirely omits the early part of Rodrigo’s career on two of its shows to frame her narrative purely in terms of her growth as a songwriter.
