Olivia Dean – So Easy (to Fall in Love)

How do we feel about our newly anointed Best New Artist?

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[5.86]Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: When she talked about “Bossa Nova all night” on her last hit it was less a promise, more a threat. I can’t knock results, but this does, in fact, sound like someone wrote a campaign song for their Best New Artist Grammy campaign.
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Claire Davidson: Olivia Dean’s music is a tough sell for me: she’s a classic soul revivalist in the vein of Amy Winehouse or Adele, but she lacks — or, perhaps more accurately, chooses not to display — either artist’s firepower, so committed is she to spinning vintage yarns. “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” is even more vexing, because it has to walk a very delicate balance: the song is gently flirtatious, but it’s grounded in a winking coyness that relies less on Dean’s interest in a prospective partner than her own certainty in her steadfast romantic charms. (It’s so obvious that she’d make a great partner, in her opinion, that “anyone with a heart would agree.”) I don’t dislike this approach, but it reads as self-aggrandizing when Dean’s accompanying instrumentation is this relaxed, opening with little more than acoustic guitar strums and faint spurts of trumpets on the first verse. Olivia Dean’s potent charm does blossom on the second verse, when a more plush palette of guitars and swooning guitars rises to the fore, but these more serene moments are cut short by the song’s abbreviated runtime. There isn’t even much in the way of a bridge, just an extended fragment of sonic restraint that takes the listener from the second chorus to the third. When your instrumentation is this low-key, it only amplifies the finer details, a substantial amount of which “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” bungles.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Olivia Dean is so effortlessly charming and inviting, but I can’t help this creeping feeling that “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” is further away from RAYE, Laufey, or Ravyn Lanae bliss, and tonally closer to Lewis Capaldi overwrought balladry and that Alex Warren “Ordinary” nonsense.
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Alfred Soto: Most R&B artists try one of these retro-soul pastiches. Olivia Dean’s makes use of instrumental subtleties like the bossa nova lilt of the trumpet line and the acoustic strumming.  Dean herself doesn’t oversell the song. That’s the trouble — “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” is a bit of all right.
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Leah Isobel: I like those ascending “me, me, me” harmonies on the bridge — it hits somewhere in between Solange and Machinedrum, a really nice textural counterpoint to the rest of the song. But I find it hard to get behind the low-stakes breeziness here. I get its placid appeal, but there’s something so… marketing-speak about it, so self-commodifying beneath a façade of confidence, that just rubs me the wrong way.
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Nortey Dowuona: I’m a little surprised by Julian Bunetta‘s drumwork here. It takes up such a big space in the mix and sounds rubbery — as compression makes anything sound — but also full and thick, splashing all over the frame. They don’t even appear until the end of the first refrain, with hints of bossa nova drum patter from Zach Nahome on each refrain instead of throughout, but the switches are smooth, don’t awkwardly collide, and smooth over each chord change from verse to refrain to verse. A tinkling piano solo slips in, and in this mix with these drums it sounds so luxurious that it saddens you when it immediately leaves. Same could be said for this song, but Julian, alongside John and Zach, know when to bring down the curtain on Olivia, allowing her the chance to blow kisses to her adoring (yet not vicious) public and depart to cheers. Julian Bunetta, you know.
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Al Varela: Earlier today (as of writing this blurb) I was at the grocery store when this song came on in my playlist. I was so immediately enraptured in Olivia Dean’s charming voice and the gorgeous instrumentation full of muted horns and fluttery guitars that I started dancing in place a little and putting a little more pep in my step. I stopped myself when I remembered that other people just trying to get their groceries were standing around me, but for a moment, I imagined a time where I could let myself freely frolic to this song through the entire market. And I’d be the happiest person in the world in that moment.
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Edward Okulicz: I feel absolutely nothing about this song. I feel absolutely nothing about Olivia Dean. That this is the follow-up to the globe-conquering “Man I Need” makes me feel nothing, not about that song, not about this song. It is a perfect piece of craft, engineered as if its only reason for being is to be pleasant. Does elevator music exist? Is muzak still a thing? If they were to make a muzak version of “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” they might actually have to make it sharper, brighter, more substantial.
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Andrew Karpan: A love song that is really a song about the joys of convenience, a celebration of getting little things forever. Olivia Dean’s ability to desperately search and then find the groove inside waiting room muzak is almost just as commendable.
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Ian Mathers: Hearing this in relatively close proximity to the new Bruno Mars makes me realize he’s who Dean reminds me of; pleasantly competent, vaguely retro, always feels kinda like (s)he’s pastiching someone even when (s)he’s not. Well, “always” is twice, so far, but neither song has been interesting enough to make me investigate further.
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Iain Mew: The easiness is a natural follow-on from songs about being nice to each other and just talking to her, but I like it a lot more for two reasons. One is just how full-on that ease is, a commitment to pillowy lushness in all aspects that matches up to Olivia Dean’s gorgeous vocal and the words of dreams and cake and heaven. The other is how that’s set off by the hint of something else that’s in there, at least by implication. You don’t sing about how easy you are to fall in love with and how “anyone with a heart would agree” without the possibility that the recipient might yet turn out not to have that heart.
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Katherine St. Asaph: So wholesome that it makes Burt Bacharach sound like 100 gecs; so retro that in the video, Olivia Dean has the “Memphis” beta version of Windows 98; so easy, pejorative and otherwise. The latest way for people to criticize pop music for being pop music is to call it AI, but “I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life” sounds more actually like a ChatGPT line than anything by whoever this year’s designated punchline ends up being.
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Scott Mildenhall: When Olivia Dean says she “could be fresh air,” it takes a second to twig that she means a breath of one. “So Easy” is so lightweight as to be vapour. Bar a few flutters of nimble rhyme, it’s studied competence all the way down. The deadly dull hair/laugh/walk triplet is deceptively absurd, but that doesn’t feel like the ambition — little of that is apparent.
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Jel Bugle: Easy listening, bit bland, hard to feel anything much about it.
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