Olivia Rodrigo’s mom thought ‘Drivers License’ bridge was ‘weird’ when she first heard it

Sometimes mother doesn’t know best, and thankfully Olivia Rodrigo didn’t listen to her mom when it came to her debut hit single “Drivers License.”

During Apple Music’s First Listen on Thursday night, the High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star talked about debuting her first album Sour and revealed her mother wasn’t the biggest fan of the bridge in “Drivers License” when she first heard it.

“When I played ‘Drivers License’ for the first time for my mom, she goes, ‘The bridge is really weird. It’s too much. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the song,'” Rodrigo said with a laugh. “In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t take that to heart. She’s very honest. It might not be anyone else’s truth but she says what’s on her mind. But, I mean, obviously, she’s my mom and would support me in whatever I did.”

Grant Spanier

Rodrigo revealed her mom is the person she plays all her new music for first, and is partly to thank for Sour spanning so many different genres of music from swelling ballads to punk anthems. “Her favorite music is punk music and metal music and really hard gritty stuff,” Rodrigo said. “She’s always been the one that has instilled in me, ‘I don’t care about the technicalities. If it makes you feel something, then it’s good music.’ If my mom doesn’t like it, I know it’s not music that makes you feel.”

The singer also took fans behind the making of some of the new songs on Sour, like “Enough for You,” which she revealed she wrote “100 percent by myself.”

“I wrote the majority of it on my bedroom floor. It’s a very special song,” Rodrigo said. “It’s about feeling inadequate for someone. But it also has a lot of hope in it, which is really cool. It’s that perfect balance of, ‘Yo, I’m really sad right now, but life will go on.”

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The next track on the album, “Happier,” was the very first song Rodrigo wrote for Sour. “I didn’t write it with the intent of writing it for a record, I just wrote it just to write it,” she said. “‘Happier’ is a waltz. I wrote it actually on set… How I actually wrote it on the day is how it is in the record.”

And as for the internally angry and self-conscious opening track, “Brutal,” it’s one that the young singer can’t wait to perform live when she’s able to bring Sour to life in a concert setting. “I’ve never played a real show before,” she said. “I love that song. I think it’s so perfectly like, this is the period of my life I’m writing about.”

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