Singer of hit song Driver’s License is Pinoy na Pinoy

The first big song of the new year is something that music lovers have eagerly looked forward to ever since record companies became big business and started making sales public. That was how the hit chart was born. It has since then shaped music tastes, provided entertainment and created stars. Every January, the list becomes the harbinger of what sounds will we hear lots of these coming months.

We just got the song for 2021 and it is a very special one by a very special girl.  The No. 1 selling tune in the Billboard Hot 100 this month is Driver’s License by Olivia Rodrigo. As many of you surely know by now, the lovely Olivia is part-Filipino. Her mother is of German and Irish descent while her father surnamed Rodrigo is Pinoy na Pinoy.

That is right. Okey, Olivia was born American and her training and all the breaks she got came from the U.S. of A.  Just like Bruno Mars. But that is no reason why we should be any less proud. She has the blood and from the way she sings, also the fabled music sensibility inherent in all Pinoys. That fact entitles us to claim her as also our own.

Now I have looked and looked everywhere in places like IMDB and Wikipedia and others in search of the names of Olivia’s parents and for hints about where her immigrant great grandparents came from. Like were they from Luzon or the Visayas but I found nothing. There are pics of her Mom and Dad but they are never identified by name. They have probably decided to stay private and we will let them have that.

And so what we have is Olivia who is on the threshold of great things to come. She was born in Temecula, California on Feb. 20, 2003. That means she is turning 18 soon. She started singing when she was three years old and went into the usual singing, piano, guitar and dancing lessons as she was growing up. She also went into modeling and later acting.

Olivia’s first big break as an actress was in An American Girl: Grace Stirs Up Success, which went straight to video.  Her next was in the Disney series Bizaardvark. By the time she was cast in High School Musical: The Series, there was no more denying the signs that the girl was made for stardom. Not just as an actress but also as a singer and songwriter.

Olivia was also into songwriting and as she grew up and found inspiration in female composers like Taylor Swift, she also went into writing songs seriously.  Her All I Want and Just for a Moment, co-written with leading man Joshua Bassett, made the High School Musical soundtrack and then came Driver’s License.

Rumor has it that the song was inspired by Olivia’s break-up with Joshua. It is about a girl looking forward to getting her driver’s license and then driving around with her boyfriend beside her. But the relationship ended.

“I just can’t imagine how you could be so okay now that I’m gone/ guess you didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me/ ‘cause you said forever now I drive alone past your street/ yeah, you said forever now I drive alone past your street.”

That may read like sentiments any teen-aged girl can relate to, but not when you hear Olivia singing. Now with her being in High School Musical and being part-Filipino, she has already ably followed in the footsteps of Vanessa Anne Hudgens. But she is more than that as a singer. She echoes the bravura sophistication of Lorde, the downbeat charm of Billie Eilish and the songwriting chops of Taylor Swift.

Swifty is today’s undisputed master of the break-up song. Remember Blank Space? But she did not think of the driver’s license situation that Olivia did.  As a result, everybody in this world who remembers a break-up around the first time when they got their driver’s license instantly related to the song and streamed and downloaded it and watched the video again and again and again.

Think 100 million streams in 10 days, nearly 40 million downloads and more.  Pinoys are feeling proud of Olivia Rodrigo.