I also played saxophone in the regular school band. “I started playing guitar in grade school, which lead to me joining the middle school jazz band. “I’m originally from San Mateo, a suburb of San Francisco,” elaborates McCarthy on his background. McCarthy started working with SOTA DTLA in 2014, after cutting his teeth with songwriter and producer duo Mario Marchetti and Marc Himmel, and before that working in an Orange County studio called S1 Studios (now defunct). Three years ago McCarthy set up his mix room, where he mixed ‘Drivers License’, in the same building where the management company is based. The ‘we’ that McCarthy refers to means everyone who worked on the single, but in particular the song’s co‑writer and producer, Daniel Nigro, as well as Ian McEvily, who manages both Nigro and McCarthy for State of the Art Downtown LA, aka SOTA DTLA (formerly Rebel One). I’ve been reading SOS for 15 years and being in it has been one of my goals for a long time!” Salad Days In a good way! And then there’s doing this interview. We’re all really excited and stoked about it! It still hasn’t really hit me yet, because the last year has been so crazy for everyone, with Covid‑19. “I don’t think any of us expected it to do what it’s doing, just the magnitude of it.

“Yeah, the success of ‘Drivers License’ is crazy,” raved McCarthy, via Skype. This magazine’s Inside Track series tries to cover number one recordings whenever possible, and so when McCarthy received the inevitable email with an interview request, it added to him feeling pretty much on top of the world. In recent years, McCarthy has enjoyed a number of high‑profile credits, including Bebe Rexha, Melanie Martinez, Carly Rae Jepsen, Meghan Trainor and Giorgio Moroder, but the mega‑success of ‘Drivers License’ is in a different league altogether. The song went to number one in at least 25 countries, including the US and the UK, and was, at the time of writing, mid‑February, still dominating the charts everywhere. One of many songs he had mixed, ‘Drivers License’ by Olivia Rodrigo, became the biggest hit of 2021 so far, and broke many records in the process, including for biggest‑ever first‑week song on both Spotify and Amazon Music. In early February of this year, after nearly a decade of hard work, Mitch McCarthy hit the big time.

LA’s rising star Mitch McCarthy talks us through the mix. Olivia Rodrigo stormed the charts earlier this year with her breakthrough single ‘Drivers License’.

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