FEATURE: Spotlight: Olivia Dean — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Olivia Dean

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ONE of the best E.P.s of this year…

came from Olivia Dean. Growth is one that I have been listening to since it came out. I will come to a couple of interviews around Growth soon. The East London artist is one of the best in the country. After a tough lockdown, she has been able to perform a few gigs this year. I think that 2022 will be a very prosperous and busy one for Dean. The first interview I want to come to is from NME. She spoke with them back in March ahead of performing at their Girls to the Front International Women’s Day:

“Everybody knows that the music industry is a boys club”, says fast-rising singer-songwriter Olivia Dean. “I’ve come across a lot of different, weird situations. And it’s interesting; I think at the time, you have to get through it, and then process it afterwards. You often think to yourself, ‘Oh, was that weird? What happened? Was that OK?’”.

The London-born vocalist, who is set to release her anthemic new single ‘Be My Own Boyfriend’ soon, has spent the formative years of her career breaking down barriers for female and non-binary artists through her music. Inspired heavily by her mother – who is part of the Women’s Equality Party – Dean’s commitment to change is threaded through her soulful pop songs, which explore independence, self-empowerment, and tackling misogyny in the music industry.

For Dean, championing female and non-binary talent has long been an integral part of her creative process, having worked exclusively with female music video directors since she made her debut in 2018 with ‘Reason To Say’, a soft, slinky neo-soul number. “I feel like my music is for everyone to enjoy and I want everyone to feel they can relate to it,” the 21-year-old says. “But I’m a woman, so it definitely all comes from a female perspective”.

There is so much passion, beauty and incredible sounds that we hear on Growth. An E.P. I hope will lead to an album, go and listen to it if you have not done so already. Pop Sugar spoke with her in May about her romantic side, in addition to how Soul is a big drive and inspiration for her:

“Olivia Dean is a hopeless romantic. She's deeply inspired by honesty and vulnerability, and strongly believes that you have to be happy in your own company before you're able to let someone else in. This self-awareness is evident in her music too: a soulful selection of tracks that centre around self-love, vulnerability, and personal growth. In fact, her latest single, "Be My Own Boyfriend", is an ode to loving yourself, and it's a result of the lessons Dean learnt during lockdown. We caught up with the artist to talk the BRIT School, music inspiration, and learning how to be alone.

Dean's musical journey began at the BRIT School, but there's an element of performance that's always been in her blood. "I was really shy as a child and my mum was like, 'You need to go and talk to all the children and become more confident,'" the singer told POPSUGAR. "I went to Saturday school and I started singing and I loved it and I did musical theatre first. I think I really enjoyed hearing other people's stories and seeing the drama of it all. Then I went to BRIT School for four years after that and I started songwriting there. I met some people that are in my band now, and I just fell in love with singing my own stories. Writing became very therapeutic to me, and very necessary." When it comes to a school that prestigious, there's an allure of mystery about how it all works, but according to Dean, "It's just a normal school. I did my GCSE there, but then you're able to do your one specific creative strand that you do. And then in sixth form, you do only music, or things like dance."

"I'm really inspired by honesty and genuine human connection, people being vulnerable and just actually saying [what they mean] and not sort of dancing around it."

In terms of her inspiration, Dean told us: "I think musically what really inspires me is soul singers. I love voices and I love lyrics. I've always loved the Motown era, and Carole King, and Aretha Franklin. Amy Winehouse was a really big person for me growing up too, she was very iconic." In terms of her personal inspiration, though, Dean noted: "I'm really inspired by honesty and genuine human connection, people being vulnerable and just actually saying [what they mean] and not sort of dancing around it. I think that's really cool. I guess that's what inspires me."

Dean spent a lot of time on her own during lockdown, and it's that alone time that led to her writing her latest single, "Be My Own Boyfriend". Prior to lockdown, Dean was pretty good at spending time with herself, and she strongly believes, "If you're already happy with your own company, then anyone else who walks into your life is just an addition." In terms of the track itself, the singer explained: "I spent a lot of time with myself and I'd recently come out of a breakup and I was just like, 'Hang on a minute, I think I'm my own boyfriend.' I learned to love my own company so much that I just really wanted to write a song about it. We wrote it in one day and I'm so proud of it."

She added: "I think I'm quite a hopeless romantic. I've always been kind of obsessed with love and a lot of my music is about love, and I think I've been in love a lot since I was 16. I love being in love with people and I think that after I came out of my last relationship, I was like, 'Where do I give all my love? Who do I send it to?”.

Her upcoming EP is aptly named Growth and sees Dean exploring more of the same themes of self-love, honesty, and personal development. "More so than in my previous music, I've been writing more about me and less about how another person's made me feel," she said. "It's about everything I've learned in the last year. It's quite a downtempo project, which wasn't my intention to really make, because I had just released quite a sad breakup EP, but I think this year has been quite downtempo, so I'm not going to come out with all this mad party music even though I do really want to party. The project is about growth in many senses, about my hair growing, and my ideas about myself and how I look at love. I really hope people like it. I'm excited for people to hear it, it feels like quite a vulnerable project." As for the release date, Dean admitted that there isn't one yet, purely down to the fact that she's a self-proclaimed perfectionist who simply hasn't committed to one”.

Olivia Dean is an artist who makes music that needs to be heard on the stage. Whereas I think future music will be more alluring and uplifting, Growth is an E.P. that seems to reflect a more difficult time. We learn more about this in an August interview from DORK:

“It’s been the most interesting year of my life,” she explains. “Considering everything, I’m pretty proud of myself. The first half of the last 18 months had been pretty hard. I spent a lot of time by myself in my flat.” The requirement to lock yourself away and lock yourself down was challenging for an artist who thrives on the visceral power and thrill of live performance. “I see myself as a live artist,” she affirms. “That’s what makes things feel full circle for me. Getting out of the studio and playing the songs live. I definitely feel like I write songs to play them. I was left feeling quite confused about what I was doing and what was my purpose.”

The new music she has been working on provides something of a considered soundtrack to this most unusual year. “I’m really proud of this project I’ve made,” she begins. “I see it as a time capsule of the last year. It’s quite downtempo, but I think this last year has been like that. It feels like the natural way for it to sound.”

The EP is called ‘Growth’, and it radiates with all the soulful warmth and tender emotional resonance that pierces through all Olivia’s music. “I’ve been singing since I was 8 years old,” she says of her formative musical years. “I always remember it being something that I wanted to do, but I didn’t start writing songs until I was 15 or 16.” When she did start writing, the songs she was creating became an outlet for feelings that she struggled to otherwise express. The power of music became Olivia’s language. “I was thinking about why I started songwriting, and surprisingly, as a person, I’m not really good at talking about how I’m feeling,” she says. “Especially with the people closest to me in my life. It was an avenue for me to express myself and figure out what was going on in my brain in a roundabout way rather than addressing it with the person.”

Perhaps the most frightening thing about wondering how the stark emotional songs will be received is the absence of playing them live and feel the connection between audience and performer. “I haven’t had the chance to try them out as I had with my song ‘Echo’ from my last EP,” says Olivia. “I was playing that for a year before it even came out. I was confident it was good because I had the validation from people going to gigs and telling me I love that one. With this music, no one has heard it.”

That sort of validation is important to Olivia, and it has left a void in her musical life. She tells a story of how she was organising a club night last year right before lockdown. “I was putting on a gig, and I started this night called Out Out, and I wanted to make it a monthly night and get my mates to play, and I was headlining the first night. I had just put out ‘Crosswords’, and everybody came down. Some people didn’t come because they were worried about this thing called Coronavirus, and I was like, ‘naaah, come down, it’s fine, don’t worry about it’. I played the song that had only come out a week before, and it got to the chorus, and everybody started singing it. That was something that you see on live performances at Glastonbury, and just the people singing it back hit me. I was like, ‘oh my god, people are connecting to this music’. I’m holding on to that moment, hoping that something else like that will happen again.”

The EP finds Olivia working with different people for the first time, but the mood is more brevity and emphasising what isn’t there rather than throwing the kitchen sink for a big sound. The more considered and soft approach felt right. “When I first started writing, it was just me on my piano,” she says. “That’s how this year has felt. It’s just been me and my piano. I didn’t really want to do too much to them. I just wanted to keep them as is and just let the songs speak. It’s less produced and a really good stepping stone to my album that will come in the near future.”

The power of the songs very much comes from the emotion and the delivery. “They’re all super dramatic and kind of sad,” laughs Olivia. “I said to myself I wasn’t going to write sad music, but I think that’s what I’m good at”.

One of our most talented and inspiring young artists, 2022 will be a year where Olivia Dean breaks out and ranks alongside the most talked-about stars. With a sound that is so fantastic and memorable, she is going to be around for many years to come. Take some time and follow her on social media. If you do not know about her now, then you surely will…