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尽管声称自己是“极端完美主义者”，但在制作首张专辑的最后一首歌《Messy》时，伦敦唱作歌手 Olivia Dean 发现，自己在一边弹吉他一边反复嘟囔着“乱糟糟”（messy）这个词——这让她发现了自己更放松的一面。“保留下我的笑声吧”“那段钢琴不一定要严格合拍”——专辑就在这样松弛的想法下完成了，开场曲《UFO》亦是在一句玩笑话带来的灵感下轻松敲定的，《Getting There (Interlude)》则保留了现场乐队第一次录制的效果。“我很喜欢颠覆‘乱糟糟’这个词的概念，将其负面意义幻化成某种美好的东西。”她告诉 Apple Music，“在这个人人都假装自己生活美妙无比的时代，大胆说出’我的生活一团糟，而你的生活大概也是’会让人耳目一新。这其实没关系，这样的人生才有味道。”

“乱糟糟”的理念为这张专辑带来了温暖亲切的感觉，让人仿佛置身录音室现场。专辑兼具爵士与老派灵魂乐风格，Dean 充满夏日气息的招牌流行曲风也洋溢其中。弦乐抒情曲《No Man》融合了丰富的器乐，与歌词的伤感脆弱形成微妙的张力。但 Dean 的创作尝试显然不会停留在悲伤的音乐上，在介绍融合 Lovers’ Rock（一种浪漫的雷鬼曲风）和 Bossa Nova 风格的《Danger》时，虽然她自称“是典型的 Olivia Dean 歌曲”，给人一种“我会爱上你，但不会很爱你”的感觉，但她在创作这首歌时，处于“有意想写一点有趣的歌”的状态。她解释道：“以前我总觉得‘如果有什么东西很快乐、很简单，那它就不会好’，实际上这是不对的。”

在专辑张弛有度的氛围下，Dean 游刃有余的歌声贯穿始终，她在其中呈现了一连串妙不可言的生活片段，比如酒吧女洗手间的偶遇带来了《Ladies Room》的创作灵感，Dean 回想了起年轻时的不那么独立的自己，让她觉得“我需要写一首歌，对那时的自己说出‘你想做什么就去做什么吧’”。《I Could Be a Florist》是 Dean 对另一种生活所展开的想象，“我走进录音室，本来应该完成《Dive》，但我当时突然陷入了某种存在主义危机，觉得自己好像没办法关掉开关，和音乐保持一定距离了。我幻想着自己如果开个花店该多好，我可以为大家做漂亮的捧花，为大家带来欢乐，每天看看花，然后关门下班。”

用 Dean 自己的话来说，专辑也弥漫着一种“刚刚度过了人生中最美妙的一天，但突然发现太阳就要落山了”的微妙氛围。《The Hardest Part》并非新歌，却是很能代表 Dean 的歌曲。写这首歌时，她正处于尝试放下一段感情的心碎阶段，但写下歌词“我只有 18 岁/你早该知道我一定会改变的”（I was only 18/You should’ve known that I was always gonna change）时，她依旧感到骄傲，因为她觉得，“总有人会告诉你‘你变了’，仿佛那是坏事。但我会说‘没错，我是变了，这太好了’。”《Dangerously Easy》这首歌讲的是看到离开的爱人过得比自己幸福时，会产生“怎么能看起来如此容易？为什么没有我你会这么幸福？”这样的疑惑，但 Dean 认为“这不是一首愤怒的歌，是心平气和的”。她还指出：“这首歌里有我在专辑里最喜欢的一些歌词。它在 bridge 段的 bassline 有点（Childish Gambino）《Redbone》味道，我很喜欢。我觉得这首歌风格挺老派的。”

此外，在这张专辑里，Dean 还坦然面对自己，以及那些珍贵的、真实存在过的生命时刻。《Everybody’s Crazy》讲述了一些“回到家用枕头捂着脸哭泣”的时刻，Dean 提到自己“在歌里太诚实了，简直是把心敞开给人看”，并称“这首歌像是温暖的拥抱，像一碗番茄汤，但到最后，你会吃到蘑菇，然后突然整个世界豁然开朗”。《Carman》则是对于 Dean 的人生而言非常特别的歌，她想用这首歌纪念自己属于疾风一代（Windrush）的奶奶。疾风一代是最早移民英国的有色人种，但当时却并不被社会和大众欢迎。Dean 认为“无论当时还是现在，人们对疾风一代都有很多负面印象”，所以“他们需要一次庆典”。因此，她在歌中写下“从未有过周年庆典”（Never got a jubilee）这一句歌词送给奶奶。她告诉 Apple Music：“我写这首歌时，想象着奶奶坐在王位上，乐队在打着钢鼓，大家在欢笑庆祝，吃着芝士意面，庆祝她的钻石庆典。钢鼓在录音室响起的时候我哭了，因为我觉得那是全世界最美妙的声音——对我而言，那让我想起一个自己从未去过的场合，有种怀旧感。把它录进专辑太重要了，我为这首歌感到非常骄傲。”

Olivia Dean’s follow-up to 2023’s Messy suggests she’s anything but. From the radio-friendly uplifter “Nice to Each Other” to the sweeping, late ’60s Dionne Warwick-esque soul of “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” The Art of Loving finds Dean self-assured as she slinks freely through R&B and pop. “You can make whatever you want, there’s no rules and that’s such a freeing feeling,” she tells Apple Music’s Rebecca Judd.

Dean describes her songwriting on The Art of Loving as “real, fresh, and honest” and she makes it sound so easy. It’s no surprise that the overarching theme—love in its different forms—came naturally. “I had the title quite quickly,” she says. “I’ve also been fascinated by love. It’s the one thing that everybody is looking for in their life in some capacity, whether it be friendship, family, romantic, but it’s something that we’re not taught. There’s not a love module in school. It’s this magic thing we’re supposed to know how to do. So I wanted to take a closer look at it and what it means to me and the art of it, the craft of loving someone properly.”

The album opens with the instant hit “Nice to Each Other,” the obvious choice for Dean. “As soon as I wrote it, I knew it was going to be the first song. It’s got a Fleetwood Mac guitary feel and it’s cheeky, it’s flirty,” she says. There might be heartbreaks and wistful moments along the way, but Dean leaves listeners in no doubt she’s in a happy place. “How could I not be?” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about touring and what I want to sing live and I want it to be joyful. So I’ve been moving towards joy.”

Olivia Dean 于 2025 年推出的专辑《The Art of Loving》一反她 2023 年专辑《Messy》的风格：从适合电台播放、轻快振奋的《Nice to Each Other》，到充满 60 年代末 Dionne Warwick 式灵魂乐风格的《So Easy (To Fall In Love)》，Dean 在《The Art of Loving》中自如地游走于 R&B 和流行乐之间，散发出笃定与从容。“你可以随心所欲地创作，没有任何规则，这是感觉非常自由。”她告诉 Apple Music。

正如 Dean 所形容的那样，《The Art of Loving》中的创作“真实、新鲜又坦诚”，听起来简单纯粹。专辑的核心主题“多重形态的爱”也顺其自然地浮现：“我很快就定下了专辑标题。我一直对爱很着迷。每个人在生活中都会追寻爱，无论是友情、亲情还是爱情。但其实我们从未被教导如何去爱，学校里没有关于爱的课程，这很神奇，似乎我们天生就应该知道如何去爱。所以我想更仔细地审视它，思考它对我的意义以及爱的艺术，也就是如何真正地去爱一个人。”

专辑以热门单曲《Nice to Each Other》开场，这首歌是 Dean 的不二之选：“完成它的那一刻，我就知道它会是开场曲。它带有 Fleetwood Mac 式的吉他氛围，俏皮又暧昧。”专辑中或许也有心碎和伤感的瞬间，但 Dean 留给听众的始终是她快乐的心境。“我怎么可能不快乐呢？”她说。“我最近在思考巡演的事，包括我要在现场唱什么，我希望它是轻松愉快的。所以我一直在朝着快乐的方向前进。”

By her own admission, Olivia Dean is an “extreme perfectionist.” But, one day while making her debut album, the London singer-songwriter found herself mumbling the word “messy” over and over again while playing her guitar—and unlocked something lighter within herself. “I just loved the idea of flipping ‘messy’ from being a negative word into this beautiful thing,” she tells Apple Music. “I applied that to finishing the album and it was like, ‘We’re going to keep me laughing in there’ or, ‘The piano doesn’t have to exactly be in time on that part.’ I think in an age where everybody is pretending that their life is amazing, it’s really refreshing to be like, ‘My life’s a mess. And your life’s probably a mess too.’ But that’s fine: That’s the spice of life.”

The aptly titled Messy is a sublime debut—that “messy approach” lending it a warm, immediate feeling that often makes listening feel like you’re right inside it. The album houses the soulful, jazz-inflected, old-soul songwriting and made-for-summer-days pop that Dean has built her name on: “In the studio I’d say, ‘Can you do this one a bit more like you just had the best day of your life, but suddenly the sun is setting?’” she says. There are sculptural, string-laden ballads (“No Man”), loose instrumental moments (such as on “Ladies Room” and “Getting There”), and intimate confessionals on her mental health (“Everybody’s Crazy”) or watching an ex thrive without her (“Dangerously Easy”). It’s all anchored by Dean’s effortless vocals, and the album presents as an irresistible series of vignettes set everywhere from the girls’ bathroom at a pub to her imaginary flower shop in South London (“I Could Be a Florist”) and home, on the exquisite “Carmen”—a jubilant tribute to her grandmother who came to the UK as part of the Windrush generation. Here, Dean takes us inside Messy, one track at a time.

“UFO” “I thought it was the perfect opener because it’s like, ‘Hello, everyone. You’re about to go on a journey with this shy alien who is trying to find a place to land herself. Come along.’ This was one of the earliest songs we wrote for the record—it started out as a joke, as a lot of our songs tend to. [Producer] Matt [Hales] and I were having a cup of tea, and I said, ‘It’s a bit of a sexy problem.’ He thought it was hilarious. We went back to the studio, and I was talking about Nick Drake and how I liked the guitar style of his songs. The song was written really quickly and I listened to it 20 times that evening, like, ‘This is it.’”

“Dive” “I love the drama, and my karaoke song is ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor so I knew I wanted to have [an intro like that] on my record. I wrote this on a really sunny day in London and was talking about how I was ready to fall in love again and feeling open to it. We were thinking about Aretha Franklin and Carole King and all the chords that they use to make your heart feel like you’re flying on a cloud. This one took the longest to finish—because I knew it was good, that it could be an important song, that it was special. It might sound carefree but a lot of work went into it. I was working on it for a year.”

“Ladies Room” “I was in my local pub in the girls’ bathroom and this lady said something like, ‘Girls, never go out with a man 20 years your senior.’ Then he called her and she was like, ‘I don’t want to go home but I’ve got to leave.’ I thought that was a brilliant start to a song because I’ve had that before. When I was a little younger and not as independent as I am now, [I] was in, to put it frankly, more toxic relationships. I would have gone home if my boyfriend was like, ‘Stay in with me,’ so I needed to write a song that was like, ‘Do whatever you want to do.’ The rest of it was inspired by Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ and how that party sound goes throughout it.”

“No Man” “Originally this had loads of instrumentation. It was dense, with crazy drums, and I realized I wasn’t doing justice to what I was singing about, which was quite sad and vulnerable. I wanted it to feel quite [James] Bond-y, but I was also listening to a lot of Mac Miller’s Circles. I don’t want to talk about the subject matter too intensely—I feel people can get the vibe of what it’s about.”

“Dangerously Easy” “This one is about seeing somebody you loved doing really well without you and feeling like, ‘How are they making it look so easy? Why are you so fine without me?’ But it’s not an angry song—it’s very amicable. Some of my favorite lyrics on this record are in this song. It’s got this kind of ‘Redbone’-y bassline in the bridge and I love it. The one feels quite old school to me.”

“Getting There (Interlude)” “This was always just on the end of ‘Dangerously Easy,’ but I thought, ‘She’s got legs. She can be her own song.’ When we were recording the last bits to the album, I said to the band [Dean made the record with her live band], ‘When we get to the end, just go for it.’ It was the first take of what we did.” “Danger” “At first I thought, ‘I can’t have two songs on the same album with “danger” in. That’s not allowed.’ And then I was like, ‘Anything’s allowed.’ I had been wanting to write something fun because I’d been writing a lot of sad music. I had this complex of, ‘If something’s fun and simple then it can’t be good.’ Actually, yes, it can. I think of some songs as Tangfastics—they’re just fun sweeties that you love. And other songs are like sad muesli. You’ve got to have it, it’s good for you, but it’s not the most exciting. I definitely wanted to play with lovers rock and bossa nova, because I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff. It’s also just a classic Olivia Dean song: I will fall in love with you, but not quite.”

“The Hardest Part” “She’s an oldie but she had to be on the album because I think this song has been very defining for me. It was written at a time when I was very sad and was trying to process letting go of a relationship that I thought was it for me—as you do when you’re young and in love. I was so invested, but had this epiphany: ‘You are not a good person for me, and I’ve changed so much, and you are not able to love the person that I’ve changed into.’ Accepting that, that’s the hardest part. I’m so proud of the lyric: ‘I was only 18/You should’ve known that I was always gonna change.’ That concept of people telling you that you’ve changed like it’s a bad thing. It’s like, ‘Yes, I have and that’s fantastic.’”

“I Could Be a Florist” “I went to the studio and was supposed to be finishing ‘Dive,’ but I was having a little bit of an existential moment—I felt I couldn’t turn off from music. I was fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to be a florist. You could make lovely bouquets for people and bring people joy and look at flowers all day and then put the closed sign on the shop door. It came super quickly—I left the demo how it was. Now, obviously when I listen to it, [I realize] it’s a love song and it’s about wanting to bring flowers to people as a metaphor for love.”

“Messy” “The last track I wrote for the album. I had this guitar part that I kept playing over and I just kept saying the word ‘messy.’ I thought, ‘What is this song about? What am I trying to say?’ Maybe it was about a relationship being messy, but I had one of those epiphany moments, like, ‘No. It’s a song to myself. I’m writing a song to tell myself I’m allowed to be messy. Your album doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be you.’”

“Everybody’s Crazy” “I love this song, but it does also terrify me. It really puts me out there. As in, my heart on the line. But you have got to be brave. It’s all well and good for me to have songs like ‘Ladies Room’ where I’m like, ‘I’m an independent lady, you can’t tell me what to do,’ but obviously I go home and cry into my pillow sometimes. Let’s be real. For me, this song is a warm hug, a bowl of tomato soup, but then at the end it’s like you’re on mushrooms and suddenly the world’s opening up.”

“Carmen” “Out of everything I’ve made, this felt like the thing I made most for me. It feels so specific to my life. I knew that I wanted to immortalize my grandmother forever, even when I’m gone and my great-grandkids are gone. That’s what music can do for someone. It was something that was very private at the beginning. It’s a song about her coming to the UK from Guyana as part of the Windrush generation. She got on a plane in 1963 and came over with her baby sister and completely changed her life. Then she had four kids, and they had kids and one of them is me.

“I wanted this to feel like a celebration because, at the time and now, there is a lot of negativity around Windrush. I thought, ‘They need a celebration.’ The way that people from that generation loved the Queen—they needed the love back and the lyric ‘Never got a jubilee’ was me giving her that. When I was writing this song, I pictured my granny sitting on a throne, steel pans are playing and everybody’s just having a great time and eating mac and cheese at her diamond jubilee. I cried when we had the steel pan player come in and record because I just think it’s the most beautiful sound in the world—for me, it’s nostalgic for a place I’ve actually never even been to, but to have that on the record was so important. I’m so proud of this song. My granny knows it exists, but she hasn’t heard it yet. I guess I’m just nervous.”

When the UK went into lockdown in early 2020, Olivia Dean pushed pause. “Everyone was like, ‘This is the time you need to be as productive as you’ve ever been,’ but I went the opposite way,” the London-based singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ I just wanted to be scared like everyone else.” Still, that time proved transformative, as Dean stayed at home, started therapy, and—inevitably—began writing. Growth is, as she puts it, “a capsule of that time, and [about] a lot of personal growth I went through,” from accepting her hair (see this EP’s Solange-referencing cover, on which Dean also nods to nature, which kept her, like so many of us, going during lockdown) to getting truly comfortable in her own company (“Be My Own Boyfriend”). Written and recorded as the UK emerged from—and then went back into—lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, and featuring Dean’s jazz-inflected pop, Growth is also about learning to trust and love again following the heartbreak of her 2020 EP, What Am I Gonna Do on Sundays?. You’ll hear it on the devastatingly beautiful, piano-led “Slowly” (surely 2021’s answer to Celeste’s heart-stopping “Strange”), and “Float,” a gorgeously organic acoustic-guitar moment on which Dean embraces just seeing how things go. “For a while I thought, ‘That’s so boring. There’s no sex or cheating or drama,’” she says. “But the thing is, I don’t want that for my life. I want to be happy and in a healthy relationship. This EP is about how being boring is actually OK.” Read on as Dean walks us through her utterly un-boring EP, one track at a time.

“Be My Own Boyfriend” “This was the first I wrote of all these tunes. I’d been in my flat for three months and then I had the chance to go to the studio. I got there and [producer] Barney Lister played this beat, and I was like, ‘Damn, that sounds like Prince or something.’ We really had fun with it. It’s quite tongue in cheek and coming up with the key change was so ridiculous and brilliant. I’m so glad that I have this song in my life, and I get to sing it all the time, because it honestly makes me feel so good. I hope it does that for other people.”

“Slowly” “This is maybe the saddest song I’ve ever written, but it’s super honest. When I was writing it, I was wondering if I’d even put it out. Maybe it was just a song I needed to write but I didn’t need to share. This song is like, ‘Am I really going to allow myself to be vulnerable with someone?’ I sent it to my manager, and she replied with a picture of her just crying with tears streaming down her face. Then, I played it to my housemate, and she burst into tears. And they were just like, ‘If you touch that, it might lose whatever it is that’s in it that makes us so emotional. So, just leave it.’”

“Cross My Mind” “This was written out of a really sad day. It was at that point in lockdown where you could go out, but things still just felt really bleak. I went to The Dairy Studios in Brixton, where I wrote the first two tracks of this EP, and broke down in tears. I almost canceled the session, but then Barney started playing a beat and I just started singing. We wrote the track in one day. I was feeling isolated, and I’m not someone who’s good at texting people or telling people that I love them. So, this song was just for the people that I love—a reminder that I do love you, even when I don’t reply to texts.”

“Fall Again” “This one was written before ‘Slowly,’ which is funny, because it kind of feels like the other way around, in my head. But I think I wasn’t ready to write ‘Slowly’ yet. I kind of needed to write ‘Fall Again’ first. I already had some of the lyrical ideas but didn’t have the melody, then worked on it in the studio with [Norwegian-English] producer Fred Ball and [London-based producer] Ari PenSmith, who helped me flesh it out. I wanted to add strings and a choir to it, but everyone, again, just said leave it alone. And I think it’s good, it’s simple.”

“Float” “I wanted to leave the listener, and myself, with a reminder that, regardless of what you’ve just heard, it’s important to just be present. You can worry so much: ‘How am I going to fall in love? What if this doesn’t work and we break up in three months and you break my heart?’ But all of that stuff is kind of irrelevant, because all you can do is just be in the moment that you’re in.”