The biggest of her several UK top 10 hits…
[Video]
[5.71]
Julian Axelrod: Wedding music for couples who think “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” is a little too spicy.
[5]
Nortey Dowuona: The songwriting is sweet, and Charlie Holmes gets some real mileage out of Olivia’s wan voice (which I like). Yet… presented without comment.
[5]
Iain Mew: It’s interesting listening to this next to the new Sabrina Carpenter single, two songs asking for a type of masculinity (responsible guy/man I need) where the specific request mostly comes down to wanting to be talked to respectfully. Olivia Dean approaches it with softness and sincerity, and the slightest of hitches in her voice works to get across the vulnerable uncertainty whether this is going to work. It’s just much harder to pull this off as the vague romance the music implies than as sex comedy.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Whatever the particular variety of warm, electric piano-type sound they’ve got going here, it’s great and it’s also doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The lyrics certainly aren’t deathless and Dean’s performance is nice but just kinda… there. That sound though? I’d go back to it a couple of times.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The three-note keyboard hook end-stops the verses, emphasizing Olivia Dean’s quiet urgency. The closing credit “mmms” suggest she’s fooling herself into thinking that routine will help.
[7]
Claire Davidson: “Man I Need” has a pleasantness that’s easy to like but difficult to love. The song pairs Olivia Dean’s down-to-earth delivery with a low-key piano gallop whose scale doesn’t match its jauntiness, and the mismatch is worsened by the way the glossier keys in the verses muddy her melody. Dean is a charming vocalist, and while her conversational candor lends this song a believable frankness, it also tempers her sense of urgency; you get the sense that she could easily walk away from her partner at any time. That’s a shame, because, at the risk of sounding conservative, I like how she frames her request that a partner step up and be the man she needs, not one she can merely entertain. If only “Man I Need” felt more like a song and less like a directive.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Shares the expensive textures of the Dijon-Bieber pairing we covered earlier in the week (that’d be Tobias Jesso’s work, both as a referent for nostalgia for last decade’s 70s nostalgia and as an actual co-writer); does less with it than Dijon and more with it than Bieber. For a pristine, stylish pop product there’s something slightly amateurish here – the “Talk to me”s on the intro feel rushed, the chorus as whole drags without going much of anywhere. That aspect would normally charm me, but in a song otherwise so clearly designed for sophisticated pop consumers I can’t help but be slightly annoyed at this otherwise pleasant song.
[6]