A Beautifully Honest Single from Olivia Dolphin
A gorgeous new single release from Olivia Dolphin delivers quite an intense performance and a bit of cinematic backbone due to the level of emotion that's portrayed throughout this piece of work. This is a song that showcases a bit of vulnerability and tells her story very well. So well, in fact, that you can almost paint a picture as the song unfolds.
"Lost" feels like a song that's about losing someone. Not necessarily in terms of losing them forever, but more losing their love. The lyrics are very descriptive at times and again, help you really grasp the story, but it's the vocal delivery that really pushes the emotional boundaries further.
She has this beautiful vibrato and a lot of soul in her voice, so when she sings, it comes through with a great level of intensity, and you can sort of feel this bit of sullenness or sadness, which goes right along with the music of the song, which works amazingly for setting the mood for those lyrics.
Now, this is just how I interpreted the song. It can actually be taken in different ways. However, that emotion is always there. The sadness and the understanding of something slipping away that you don't want to lose. It's all right there in your grasp, and at a certain point, you realize you might have lost it all.
Again, others may interpret this a bit differently, but for me, the sentiment was pretty loud and clear.
The music is beautifully done and incredibly well woven, giving this lush contemporary pop overtone, driven by piano and live percussion, which really helps push this almost cinematic underbelly.
What she does with her voice aside from just delivering this robust and sort of boisterous tone is she gives you a soul to hang on to. The song has a lot of heart, and you can definitely sense that it came from some real place and that Olivia is someone who most certainly gives pieces of herself in her music.
This is a song that sticks with you because it can be very relatable and super easy to connect with because of what it's about.
She also feels like a complete natural when it comes to vocal harmonies. There are so many layers of harmonies on this track at certain points that it feels almost like a gospel singing at you.
It's so flavorful and packed with this thriving feel and set of tones that it has a way of just wrapping itself around you.
This is absolutely a song you can get lost in or swallowed up by. I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean in a good way. Songs like these are meant for you to feel something, and at times, it can even trigger memories to pop up in your head.
This is exactly what I mean by being able to connect with a song.
She gives such a big performance that you get pulled right into it. Again, that emotional envelope is pushed, and the honesty comes out, which is something that gives her the song and everything else a lot of character.
There's one section in the song that hit me the hardest, and it's because of two things. This is kind of like a bridge section towards the end of the song, and she layers her vocals and sings two different things, almost like callback vocals.
There are two different sets of vocals that are singing different melodies and layered on top of each other, but performed in a timing that lets you hear everything that's going on lyrically.
It's all very beautifully constructed, and you can tell there was a lot of attention to detail and sections like this, especially.
There's also this amazing harmonica solo part of the song that works wonders because they didn't just let it come through dry. The harmonica is drenched in this reverb effect, which distances it and gives the track more depth tonally.
Again, all of this was very well thought out, and even though you can tell there was a lot of detail in how the song was mixed and recorded, the sentiment comes apart, and the soul of this is always right there in your face.
As far as we can tell, this single is part of an upcoming EP, of which there was already another single released called "I...I...". A song that also sheds a lot of personality and light into who she is as a person and some of the things that she's been through.
This is a very unafraid song as well, and if the full EP gives me more of this, I can't wait.
We all need more songs that let you think and feel, and Olivia is the perfect person to give this to us.
So, definitely check out both of these new singles and look out for the upcoming EP.
