Olive Jones

Singer-songwriter Olive Jones has a unique way of making us feel heard through her music. With her gorgeous soul and blues-influenced sound, not to mention her stunning voice, this future star draws you into her world, as though she’s singing for you and you alone. Her debut album, “For Mary”, encapsulates these talents into one cohesive work, placing her at the forefront of a British soul renaissance. “Your first album is like a tapestry of yourself,” Jones suggests. “I’ve been writing songs for so long, and each of these tracks has its own story and a moment in my life – so the record is a quilt made from all those patches.” We open with “Mary”, inspired by her longing to protect a loved one from their struggles with poor mental health. The title character is fictional, inspired by a number of people in Jones’s life who have been impacted, in myriad ways, by mental health issues. “A lot of people close to me were affected, and I also grew up in an era where it wasn’t really spoken about,” she says. “Ithink it’s changed a lot since, but the song felt to me like an opportunity to explore that feeling of wanting to be there for someone, and the helplessness of perhaps realising that you can’t.” Jones skilfully turns her pen to such complex subjects with poetic flair, weaving in wonderful turns of phrase that she sings in a sweet, honeyed lilt: “Let me in under the clouds that roam above you/ Maybe I could blow them away.” The instrumentation blows through like an autumn wind; strings sigh gracefully; percussion shivers like rain bouncing off the pavement. This remarkable musicality harks back to Jones’s childhood by the coast in Dorset. “It was idyllic but there was no music scene,” she recalls with a laugh. Fortunately, her parents had “really good taste” in music, and she was fed a steady diet of jazz and soul from a young age. “There was a lot of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Miles Davis…” she says. “I remember being really moved by Davies’s…