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 cancelled 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.”