Olivia Dean is the Samsung Rising Star honouree at the GLAMOUR's Women of the Year Awards 2023. After a year which has seen her soar to new levels of prominence, Olivia shares her journey so far, and how defining her own set of rules is taking her beyond the limits…
“When I met my manager when I was 17, she asked me: ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to write an album, do Jools Holland, and I want to play Glastonbury,’” lists Olivia Dean. “I did all these things this summer, so I'm feeling like manifestation is real, b*tch!”
The 24-year-old singer-songwriter laughs. She’s trusting her voice more after some undeniably huge career milestones. Aside from the aforementioned, Olivia was nominated for a Mercury Prize this year for her debut album Messy, that same album made it into the Top 10 on the UK charts, and she’s received Elton John’s seal of approval as he picked her as one of his one’s to watch from this year’s Glastonbury lineup. “My dream is to headline [the festival]. For me that is like I’ve completed music.”
For GLAMOUR's Women of the Year Awards 2023, in partnership with Samsung, we have chosen Dean to be our Samsung Rising Star. She arrives to meet me on a sunny summer’s morning with her curly hair slicked back into a super-neat ponytail. Her outfit is very on-brand for the singer, whose sound and style shows she’s nostalgic but not afraid to innovate. Today she mixes classic Levi's jeans with a contemporary statement piece: a white and black denim biker jacket by Feben. Olivia is always trying to find ways to empower other women, particularly women of colour. She excitedly tells me to follow the Black London designer on Instagram because she’s doing “really cool stuff”.
A self-described feminist, it appears that navigating the industry has emboldened her push for empowerment. Dean no longer feels guilty rejecting other people’s demands to blaze her own trail. “I know what I want. I’m not a doll to be told what to do and what to say,” she asserts. She tells me that she’s at a place in her life where she’s feeling in control after feeling pulled in different directions in a male-dominated and pressurised industry. “I don’t let that happen to me anymore,” she asserts.
“At the beginning of my career, I felt boxed in because of the way that I look, or the colour of my skin. It was like I was supposed to make a certain type of music and I really took that on like I could only make R&B,” she says. “I love R&B and soul, but also psychedelic and folk. I don’t believe in boxes”. During her career she’s taken control of her own image and artistry by “learning the art of saying no”. While she could follow a formula to create cookie-cutter pop and get herself noticed, she says she can’t release a track unless it really means something to her and is made “purely for [her] soul”. “I can tell when people have made something just because they want to get to number one and I can’t do that,” she says. “I have quite an acute ear for bullsh*t.” In fact, one of her biggest regrets in life was releasing a song she knew intuitively she didn’t connect with.
She explains: “I won't say what song it is, because I don't think it's productive. I think I felt a bit pressured to release something and a lot of people were telling me that they loved it. It didn't set my soul on fire though. I put it out and the next morning, I just cried, and I cried. I knew that I had crossed a line with myself because I had to promote something I didn’t really believe in. I’m glad it happened so I can recognise that visceral feeling.”
Olivia has hit her stride and has found a renewed sense of purpose. “I take my vulnerable moments – moments where I needed to empower myself – and then put that into my music,” she says. “I love seeing women message me saying that it helped get them through a break-up or embrace their own independence.”
Hers is the sort of emotive voice that takes you to various planes of feeling, whether it’s back to a love you lost while listening to ‘The Hardest Part’; or vibing out to ‘Messy’ despite the disarray in your life; or being sonically taken to that vulnerable, chaotic emotional minefield of falling in love on ‘Dive’. The latter track feels like the perfect place to start with this rising talent. It’s such a masterfully crafted pop song imbued with soul bearing lyricism that can sit in playlists alongside the classics, you can sing it in your room, you can play it to your parents, and to be honest you can imagine it soundtracking a Christmas ad too. Her silky sweet vocals glide over angelic harmonies and Motown adjacent instrumentation. Dean’s aim is to make pop music that is reminiscent of what’s come before and you can hear that her influences hark back to an era she was not even born for, rather than being tied to current fast-moving trends or TikTok-geared sounds.
Instead, Dean listened to Bill Withers, Mac Miller, indie artists like Alice Phoebe Lou, psychedelic folk and also Lauryn Hill, who is responsible for her middle name (“My mum wanted it to be my first”), while putting the album together. Dean’s family home was filled with the sounds of Angie Stone, Jill Scott and other neo-soul icons. “My mum and aunty are big R&B ladies,” she explains. Those inspirations from her environment and the fact that from a young age she watched the success of her cousin Ashley Walters (I float thex idea of a potential collaboration. “He’s busy with Top Boy,” laughs Dean) all pushed for her to create a body of work that stood out from other contemporary sounds in the Top 40 right now. She also had to detox from social media to ensure she wasn’t shaping her art based on what might perform well online before the project was actually complete.
Music allows her to process her own experiences and her last own experience permeates through her last album in particular. “When I was writing this, I was actually falling in love, but then the majority of music is about relationships and falling into them or out of them. Sometimes it can feel like ‘God, I’m just bringing more sand to the beach’.” But after starting with a melody on the piano, then finding some chords that feel inspirational, she then tries to bring a specificity to her lyrics that makes the listener feel nosy even if it isn’t something they’ve gone through.
The musician exhibits a natural songwriting ability that matures as she experiments. Dean doesn’t feel like she has to box herself into a certain genre this early on in her career. “I think that’s boring,” she explains. This summer she even toyed with soundtracking sports tournaments with the anthemic official Lioness track for the World Cup.
“Usually I write for myself, which is really small and personal and specific. But this needed to be for everybody. I want primary school girls to sing in the playground, and people to chant this in the park or the stadium,” she explains.
While that might have seemed like a random partnership, Dean is really into football herself. A key way of bonding with her Dad in childhood was going to West Ham games, and when England plays she loves hosting people at her house. The rise of the Lionesses was also something that inspired Dean. “When I was younger, there wasn’t such a public facing women’s football team. A young girl seeing that on the TV doesn’t need to think ‘oh I can do that’, she just needs to know that she can,” she says. Clearly despite not sharing the same craft the team’s determination to show that young women can achieve the same as their male counterparts is a story that resonates.
While she is a stellar recording artist, performing in front of a live audience is what really drives Dean’s passion for music. At school she felt “annoying”. “I was that kid that always wanted to sing in assembly,” she says. Then she was accepted by the Brit school, and found that being in a performing arts environment where everyone is the “same type of annoying” really transformed her into a less muted version of herself. “I realised I wasn’t lame, I just like entertaining people.” While its alumni include Adele, Tom Holland, and Amy Winehouse could be intimidating but she found it encouraging.
Being in a performance art environment means that in lockdown when gigs were impossible in enclosed spaces, Olivia drove round the country in an old milk truck to do a string of free shows for a nation deprived of live music. “I felt very lucky because live music makes people feel good,” she says. “Plus concerts are getting expensive, Jesus Christ.”
BRIT also gave her the confidence to go on a journey of re-evaluating her self image. It was around the time that she attended the school that she stopped straightening her hair everyday, which she had felt was the only way to feel beautiful. “I was so irritated by my hair and didn't know how to style it, how to look after it. I felt like the odd one out and just frustrated,” she says.
Now she enjoys wearing it naturally large and even experimenting with sculptural looks created by her hair stylist. “I suddenly just fell in love with how versatile my hair was,” she says. “I haven't straightened my hair for four or five years. I would never again, actually, as an act of rebellion.” Olivia caveats that women can experiment with their look as part of their own journey towards defining how they want to look but because her choice came from a place of not loving her truest form she’s ready to let the process of “sizzling” her tresses go.
Away from her hectic summer of rising to musical prominence, Olivia’s spare time is precious. To optimise her diary, Dean explains that she’s tried to curb the social media addiction that afflicts us all after reading a book on time management. “It said that your life is literally what you devote your attention to and I just thought why do I spend hours of my life on this nonsense that makes me feel stressed and insecure about myself,” she says. “I have so many other interests that fulfil me more.”
She’s fresh from celebrating her Guyanese-Jamaican heritage by attending Notting Hill carnival. “I took my baby brother and we waved our Guyanese flags.” You’re not going to find her in the thick of it following the crowds, however. “I find my spot and let the floats go by and when the last one goes by I get the tube. I don’t want to be cramped up.” The same goes for Glastonbury where she skips the mainstages in favour of smaller tents. True to form, even her partying habits stray a little bit outside the lines. “You know what I love doing at a festival? Losing people. I’m going over here see ya. I’m not going for a wee my bladder is strong. Sorry.” As a lot of her songs are about love I ask her to describe her experience of love at the moment in three words. “Healthy boundaries please,” she replies quickly. “I am a very independent person when it comes to love – I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve been hardened.” As such she’s quick to tell her partner when she wants to use her free time to sit and knit alone rather than invite him round. Most women go through life without working out how to live by their own rules and set their own limits to create the life that they want rather than what everyone else expects, and Dean has done so before even reaching her mid 20s.
Does she feel like an old soul? She nods. “I actually do. I get that all the time. I was in Tesco yesterday minding my business and the lady looked at me and said I seemed like I was 30. Do I look 30? I hope it's just a mature energy,” she says. “But I do crave to be 24 in the 70s.”
