Songfacts®:

• Self-driving cars were becoming a reality in 2025, and they got Steve Bardwil thinking. When we let cars to the driving for us, what else will we let machines do?
  
  "Right now, computers are making decisions that affect our lives that were otherwise made by humans," he said on the Songfacts Podcast. "Like whether or not somebody gets medical treatment. Humans have compassion and empathy, but now it's an algorithm that makes that decision without any emotion. More and more of that's going to happen, so 'I Just Wanna Drive' is a metaphor for how I want to keep our humanity. I don't want a self-drive car. I want the human experience of driving myself."
• The opening lines are:
  
  In the not-too-distant future, say 2035
  Things will be much different
  Folks won't feel so quite alive
  
  Bardwil wrote this before the explosion of AI, and has reconsidered his timeline. "I'm thinking I should change that 2035 to 2029 because it seems like it's already here," he said.
• The song is part of Nothing But Time, the debut album by the Steve Bardwil Band. Bardwil was immersed in the corporate world as legal council for Disney films (he nixed a scene in the movie Arachnophobia where a spider crawls out of a box of Cheerios) when he decided to pursue music full-time. His band landed opening gigs for Lyle Lovett and Eddie Money, and after he wrote enough original songs, he put the album together with producer Joe Chiccarelli, whose other clients include Morrissey, Vance Joy and The Strokes.