At TD Garden, Olivia Dean proves why her tour is one of this summer’s hottest tickets – The Boston Globe
The last time Olivia Dean headlined a show in Boston, she played the Theater District club Royale — a venue that “turned into a club,” as she recalled it during her return to the city on Monday night. That Tremont Street spot where she performed in 2025 has a capacity of just over 1,000; on Monday, the London-born soul singer was the main attraction at the much larger, sold-out TD Garden.
“Basically,” she said, “there’s a lot more people here now than there were then.”
Dean’s current tour has been one of this summer’s hottest tickets, capping off a breakout year that began when she released her second record, “The Art of Loving,” last September. Her appeal is obvious after one listen to that album; she has a lithe voice that can hover above a ballad or add a breeziness to her R&B-tinged pop, which incorporates gentle soft-rock moments and brass-assisted bossa nova into its mix of soul balladry and sun-dappled grooves.
But the way listeners have flocked to Dean’s music isn’t solely because of its sound. Her love songs remain clear-eyed while expressing obvious passion, an outlook that, on “The Art of Loving,” she said was inspired by the feminist philosopher bell hooks’s 1999 treatise “All About Love: New Visions,” and the way that hooks believes, as she writes, “we would all love better if we used [the word ‘love’] as a verb.” That, Dean stressed during her between-song asides, meant engaging in generosity of spirit and steadfastness toward anyone a person might love, whether romantic partners, family members, or the self.
Dean’s interpretation of hooks’s work doesn’t bypass passion — after all, she called love an “art” in her album’s title. The sauntering “Dive,” for example, turned a lover’s understanding gaze into a reason for her to “See I’m capable and fine/ And feeling beautified tonight”; the simmering “Nice to Each Other” observed the value in a situationship’s slack ties even as it mused on jetting off to Italy, the land of amore; the wrenching “A Couple Minutes,” which supplied one of Monday’s more fervent singalong moments, is a snapshot of a few feeling-conjuring moments with an ex. Dean’s idea that love should be an equal exchange even with its more flight-of-fancy moments, however, is a compelling one that’s made even stronger by her own expressions of resolve.
Couching these messages in catchy songs with irresistible choruses, as Dean has done since her earliest releases, only makes them more appealing. The bossa-nova shimmy “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” flipped its titular conceit into a message of self-worth, Dean’s voice soaring on the chorus; “It Isn’t Perfect But It Might Be” reveled in its old-school sound while Dean navigated the idea of getting over heartbreak.
Dean closed Monday night’s show with “Man I Need,” a bubbly, brass-accented statement of self-worth that balances romance with self-assurance. It was Dean’s first top-five US hit and a fitting end to a night where the audience was encouraged to celebrate love not just by singing along but by thinking about how it, as a concept, could be a thrillingly transformative force.
OLIVIA DEAN
With Baby Rose. At TD Garden, Monday