Olivia Dean explores the ‘Art of Loving’ at fun and flirty Atlanta concert
Around this time last year, Olivia Dean — before the Grammy, Billboard hits and gargantuan fame — kicked off a tour to promote her 2023 debut album “Messy” at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse. The Little Five Points venue seats roughly 1,000 people.
Today, the U.K. soul singer’s appeal is colossal, so much so that she recently performed four shows at Madison Square Garden along the “Art of Loving Tour,” named after her 2025 sophomore album. At the Atlanta stop Saturday night, loads of fans were in line hoping to get tickets. The successful ones screamed in excitement upon retrieval.
Dean’s whirlwind journey to superstardom may be perplexing to some, including the 27-year-old songstress herself.
“It’s difficult to even understand how we’re even playing this arena,” she told the State Farm Arena crowd.
But her Atlanta show was sufficient proof that her relatable musings on love and desire are fit for the grandest of stages.
Before Dean stepped on stage, fellow soul singer Baby Rose opened the show at 8 p.m. The Atlanta artist dropped her third album, “Yearnalism,” last month, offering another poignant reminder of her time-stopping voice that’s reminiscent of the blues Billie Holiday and Nina Simone built.
Her deeply emotive, anachronistic sound is now reaching arenas for the first time, thanks to Dean. Baby Rose performed a 30-minute set that kept the crowd both entertained and intrigued by the depths of her tone. She ended her performance with “One Last Dance” and “All My Love.” When performed live, the latter track swells to a 1980s funk groove crescendo that you never want to end.
Before the show, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rose said Dean chose her to be the tour’s opening act last year, after being a longtime fan.
“It’s just overall very comforting, Rose said about the tour so far. “When I think about tour, it’s like you wait for the show because everything outside of it can be a little bit uncomfortable. But this hasn’t been like this. This is really good. You just feel cared for. I feel cared for in a way that’s very vacationlike.”
Indeed, Baby Rose looked and felt at ease during the hometown stop.
At 9 p.m., the arena lights went down, signaling Dean’s arrival. The singer, dressed in a lavish black ball gown and donning her signature black curls, looked every bit of elegant. This was especially true when seeing her backed by a nine-piece band in a simple setup that subtly hinted at a 1960s jazz club, the stage encircled by a white curtain that also functioned as a projection screen.
It didn’t seem out of place at State Farm Arena, which can seat over 16,000 people. Dean deftly balanced the intimacy of her set and the arena-sized fanfare with a fun and flirty charm that didn’t disappoint.
For the first 20 minutes of the show, Dean performed songs from “The Art of Loving” in order, starting with crowd-pleasers “Lady Lady” (“Do I have any sexy ladies in the house tonight?” she asked the crowd) and “So Easy (to Fall in Love).” The latter, her second Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, was met with the audience singing along to every word of the catchy chorus.
“You’ve got nothing to lose this evening. … I wanna be here with you, and I hope you feel present this evening,” she assured the room, filled with fans dressed in gowns galore.
Throughout the nearly 1½-hour show, Dean shared a variety of lessons learned from falling in love, most of which she says she discovered after reading bell hooks’ seminal text “All About Love”: Love is a skill. Love is a craft. Love is forgiving. Love is patient.
“To love someone else is to want them to be the best version of themselves, and everybody in here deserves that kind of love, and I know now that I deserve that, too,” Dean said. “Don’t ever let anyone hold you back.”
It was a riveting reminder that preceded an even more riveting performance of “Let Alone the One You Love,” a soul-stirring ballad on the disappointment of ending a relationship with someone who’s no longer worthy of one (“Who would do that to a friend/Let alone the one you love?”). For the song’s outro, Dean and her background singers harmonized bluesy “hmmm” sounds that vividly captured the song’s angst.
Later in show, she flaunted her tambourine playing with “Messy” and her guitar skills for the acoustic “UFO,” to which fans waved their phone flashlights across the venue. For “Carmen,” a song dedicated to her grandma, who immigrated from Guyana to the U.K. as a teen, delivered a touching ode to all immigrants.
“I don’t understand why people have become so scared of each other,” Dean noted. “We’re all just people.”
With her performance of “Loud,” a standout moment, Dean stood atop a petal-shaped stage in the center of the arena. Wearing a white top and skirt, Dean’s commanding vocals reigned supreme over aching lyrics about a relationship in a crisescrisis so major that all communication is lost. In turn, her pristine alto becomes as loud as the silence she described on the track.
For a show with minimal dancing, Dean certainly made the best of her stage. With “The Hardest Part,” she walked through the crowd, even walking up the stairs to briefly greet and sing with fans. With “Baby Steps,” she two-stepped while dropping low the ground, exerting the mighty power of her knees, becoming the literal embodiment of how falling in love again can be a slow yet fun process.
Dean’s impressive stamina became a highlight again for her cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up,” running across the stage in heels as if she were on a track.
She ended her show with “Man I Need,” her other Top 10 hit, and performed the chorus too many times to count, with the audience screaming each lyric. By the final verse, confetti erected from the stage. With 24 songs, Olivia Dean’s Atlanta show reiterated that her meteoric rise isn’t at all disconnected from the confidence and honesty she exudes in her hit songs.
“You all didn’t disappoint,” she told the crowd.