Then 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo released her song “Driver’s License” on Jan. 8, and it became a worldwide number-one hit song within the week. How did this song keep enticing listeners? How come we kept playing it on repeat for the entire month of January? Why does it make you want to drive past your ex’s house sobbing as you scream the lyrics? As an English major, I have some ideas as to how Rodrigo’s use of different literary devices in her lyrics made her song one we couldn’t help but relate to.
There’s nothing like the use of literary devices — tools writers use to add depth and meaning to their writing — to sweep us up in a narrative. Almost every song, book, poem, movie or show writer uses them as a way to enhance their story.
In this case, Rodrigo’s use of literary devices in her lyrics is what makes her story universal and what makes us think of our heartbreak and relationships while we blast her song. We can’t help but feel nostalgic while listening, so we press play again and again. From my perspective, Rodrigo’s three most prominent literary devices in her lyrics responsible for us playing her song non-stop are imagery, antithesis and repetition.
- Imagery
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When scrolling through TikTok, asking my friends for their opinions or watching the Saturday Night Live skit from Feb. 20, there’s no secret as to the consensus: The bridge is our favorite part of the song. Why is Rodrigo’s bridge one we can’t stop walking across? The answer is imagery. Imagery is a type of figurative language that songwriters use to describe smell, sight, taste, touch, or sound.
In the bridge, Rodrigo paints the painful image of remembering someone we used to be with who we still love with her imagery. She sings in a dreamy falsetto, “I still see your face in the white cars,” and “I still hear your voice in the traffic.” Her specific images allow us to picture the face and hear the voice of our exes as we listen to her sing about hers.
She closes out the bridge using a metaphor to describe her emotions. The lyric “I’m so blue” creates a whirlpool image of sadness and love that encapsulates our hearts, making us vulnerable for the final lyric in the bridge where she admits she still loves her ex. For this moment, we believe we still love our exes too—whether or not we actually do.
- Antithesis
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Throughout her song, Rodrigo shows that she really understands the concept of a breakup between two people through the antithesis of “you” and “I” in her song. Antithesis is a literary device that expresses opposite or contrasting ideas through a parallel structure.
In the lyric “’Cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street,” the “you” that represents the person who hurt us is contrasted in parallel structure with the “I” that represents us, the listeners. The “you” is associated with the hope of being together forever in the past, which contrasts to the idea of being alone that the “I” entity in the song and we listeners now feel.
Pitting “you” and “I” against each other later in the refrain emphasizes the disintegration of the “we” in her line at the beginning of the refrain, “And I know we weren’t perfect.” What is beautiful about her lyrics is that she uses them to show that in a breakup, what once was whole becomes two separate entities.
The juxtaposition of the heartbreaker and heartbroken allows us as Rodrigo’s listeners to relate to her song while our mind fantasizes that we are speaking directly to the person who broke our heart. We are able to feel the pain of the breakup all over again because we easily recognize through parallel structure the separation of the two people that are broken down to “you” and “I” from a “we.”
- Repetition
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There’s nothing more painful in a breakup than repeatedly going through the motions of your life day in and day out wondering if you will ever feel whole again. In each verse, Rodrigo repeats the lyric, “today I drove through the suburbs.” In doing so, she connects the image of the everyday routine action of driving to the emotional breakup in the song, much like how when we go through a breakup, the loneliness? constantly creeps into our minds as we continue with our lives.
Now, every time we drive in our cars, we think of “Driver’s License” and decide to play it on the drive. As we listen to the last two lines of the song, the repetition of, “you said forever, now I drive alone past your street,” leaves us feeling alone and empty twice over, so we decide to listen to the song again because riding an emotional rollercoaster is better than feeling nothing at all.
As I repeat the song like Rodrigo repeats lyrics to invoke emotions, I can’t help but want to drive by my ex’s house. I can’t help but repeatedly press play and put myself through the pain of my past all over again. I can’t help but connect to the story that is “Driver’s License.” We can’t stop listening to her literary masterpiece.