If the lyrics of Olivia Dean’s most recent singles have you all up in your feelings, that’s kind of how the singer hoped it would go.
“I saw someone the other day saying that ‘Olivia Dean was first saying “I don’t want a boyfriend,” and now she’s saying, “come be the man I need”,’” Dean says, referencing her hits “Nice to Each Other” and “Man I Need.” “And I’m like, ‘girl, do you not change your mind?’ Don’t we all flip-flop around on our emotions?’ Both things can still be — they’re not mutually exclusive. It’s all valid. And that’s what this album is. There’s many different stages of how you feel.”
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The 26-year-old Brit is eating a piece of salami backstage at her venue in Edinburgh, dressed down in a baseball hat from the International Spy Museum, a memento from a recent stop in Washington, D.C. She’s been on the road for much of the summer as she gears up to release her sophomore album, “The Art of Loving,” on Friday, the highly anticipated follow-up to her Mercury Prize-shortlisted debut album “Messy.” This fall she returns to the U.S. to open for Sabrina Carpenter, after which she’ll play her own arena tour in Europe next year.
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Dean’s most recent single, “Man I Need,” became a hit as soon as it was released in August, spawning countless TikToks and hitting top 10 in dozens of countries.
“It’s crazy. Because in my mind, we’ve been playing it in the live show for a couple months, and I’ve obviously known about the song for a long time, so I kind of forgot about it in that sense that you forget that other people haven’t heard it,” Dean says. “So it now sort of has this second life for me, which is just so beautiful. It was just really fun to write. I wanted to write something with that kind of shuffle that makes me think of Michael Jackson, something that you could just keep moving to.”
“The Art of Loving” comes over two years after her debut album, and with it the ever-looming pressure of a potential “sophomore slump,” which Dean admits to feeling initially.
“But then I thought about, ‘OK, how can I relieve some of that pressure from myself and make this ultimately what it should be, which is an enjoyable experience?’” Dean says of how she approached it. “You kind of have to go completely in the other direction and think, ‘OK, what is the album that I would love to make purely for myself? Where would I like to make it? Who would I like to make it with?’
“I think it would’ve been a mistake for me personally to now suddenly go into a really big, sexy, expensive studio and work with people I’d never worked with before, and just push myself too far out of my comfort zone. I don’t really like it when people say, ‘get out of your comfort zone.’ I like my comfort zone and I make really good things in my comfort zone because the kind of music I make is vulnerable, and so I need to be comfortable. So I did feel that pressure initially, but I really tried hard to look after myself and think about how I could make the best music and what I needed to do to do so, if that makes sense. I felt it, but then I just ran away from it.”
For her, that meant writing the album in her hometown of London, with people she’s worked with before, in a studio decorated with pictures from her house.
“I brought my own piano into the studio from my house, so all the piano on the album is mine,” she says. “I think that just seeps a warmth into it that you don’t know what it is, but there is a warmth that I think we really tried to create and I think we achieved.”
Dean started writing new songs as soon as “Messy” was released in June 2023, but didn’t really recognize that she was properly making a new record until late this winter.
“It all happened quite quickly. You could say two years, but you could also say eight weeks,” she says.
“I think these songs are more intentional. I think they’re more confident in some ways, more vulnerable also, and I just think that they’re better,” she adds. “I don’t think my old songs are bad, but I think as in anything in life, any passion or hobby or skill you’re trying to learn, you want to get better, so hopefully this is better.”
“The Art of Loving” was inspired by an exhibition by the artist Mickalene Thomas that Dean saw in Los Angeles called “All About Love,” in which Thomas responds to the classic bell hooks book.
“I’ve been reading a lot of [hooks’] books and watching a lot of interviews of her at the time, and really looking at love as a practice. Similarly to a musical instrument, you practice and you get better,” Dean says. “Why don’t we look at love in that same way and treat it as a real skill that you have to hone not just for yourself, but for the benefit of others in your life? And I guess that was the world that the album was written in. Really thinking about, ‘OK, how do I love?’ And all the different facets of love.”
When on the road, she has started hosting after parties called “sweet things” where people are encouraged to dance and enjoy themselves, away from their phones.
“And sometimes we have a magician,” she says. “Bring back magicians.”
We’ll have to wait and see if a magician gets booked for her celebration after playing O2 in London next year.
“I’m playing arenas now. Can you believe it? Jesus Christ!” she says. “How did we get here everyone?”