What Am I Gonna Do On Sundays?: A Lyric Review – Olivia Dean Sheds the Spectre of A Past Love to Find Self Love

By Corey Anthony Tucker

To lose a love isn’t to part with it completely. Not always. Remnants of a past romance have a habit of locking themselves into our cellular structure. Just when we think the damage of a break up is done and dealt with, the damage resurfaces, shifts from dormancy into activity. The damage beats in our bloodstream. Lingers in and worsens our interactions with the past version of ourselves. The one our ex seemed to own.

If your ex owns your past self, your past self will own you. To disengage and distance oneself from the hurt induced by a break-up, the kind that unearths a pain that echoes in your bones, is to admit yourself into a purgatory of sorts. A place where your past self devolves into a phantom self. A spectre that is looming and languorous and fuels feelings of disconnectedness and dissonance; disrupting your present self with preoccupations of past pain.

‘So even if I could, wouldn’t go back where we started’ – Olivia Dean, The Hardest Part (2020). Olivia Dean understands that to engage is to extricate. That is to say, addressing the deep pang of her break-up allowed her to process, purify, and part ways with the pain with her phantom self. In doing so, dissonance bleeds into harmony as her connection to her present journey and sense of self strengthens. On her break-up EP What Am I Gonna Do On Sundays? Dean discovers that outgrowing a relationship can mean that you are growing into yourself.

On the stuttering electro-creep of EP opener What Am I Gonna Do On Sundays? Dean trudges through the bittersweet memories of the eroded rituals she and her ex used to share. There are tinges of a sickly sweet naïveté, most notably in Dean’s passive acceptance of her ex’s emotional obscurity, ‘you’d throw the curtain wide/ And I wouldn’t mind the sky of only clouds’. His faults are flagrant, and he knowingly flaunts them because he knows her infatuation with him renders his red flags invisible, ‘I’m gonna miss you […] Ruining my joke coming up with a better one.

In the aching laughter they shared, Dean felt safe. The locale in which the laughter occurred however, symbolises the reality that Dean and her ex only worked when tucked away from the world, ‘sheltering in that subway/ We proper painful laugh’. Their dynamic is undone as Dean wisens up to the toxicity of her ex’s active putting down of others and his instinct to override her agency rather than encourage it, ‘[you] having something to say about everyone/ Ruining my joke coming up with a better one’.

Dean mourns the melancholic reality that her ex was only an active agent when it suited him, and as such, his passivity only wills out when she leaves him, ‘I thought you’d fight a little harder for me/ Mmm, fight a little harder for me’. But a silver lining is bound in the symphonic swell of the chorus, mirroring the renewal of Dean’s agency. She demands her ex own his sadness, as her priority is to ease into, understand and own her emergent self, ‘you can keep the rain/ But let me have the Sundays/ That’s something I can’t bear to lose’.

On the undulating punchiness of The Hardest Part Dean eases into assuming her better self as her ex struggles to deal with how her growth has displaced him. Back in contact with each other, her ex is unchanged, signified by the static on their phone call, ‘call me up to meet you, static on the phone’. Her ex tries to resume their dynamic by dictating her movements, but Dean no longer welcomes or allows his assertion of his agency over her own, ‘normally I need you, this time, I don’t wanna go’.

Dean’s ex declines the chance to love her because the woman she is now doesn’t posit him on a pedestal, ‘held you up so highly, deep under your spell’. By pulling her ex down from the pedestal, she de-iconises him, immunising herself against the malady of his manipulations, ‘your opinions would define me’. By excavating and embracing her intuition, Dean identifies that the only direction she and her ex could ever move in is backwards, and that to do so would be to backpedal on her growth, ‘cause lately, I been certain there’s no further to go’.

In the ongoing exploration of her emergent self, Dean recognises that the only way her ex could partake on that journey with her, is if they can bolster and complement each other’s sense of self on the sensuous, sax-laden groove of Echo. Here, Dean acknowledges that, given her elation with her newfound independence, for her to even entertain being a support system for her ex, she’d want his support in return, and more than that, she’d need him to demonstrate that he wants to support her, ‘no man’s an island, do you not see/ That I need you?/ As you need me’.

Dean’s ex can’t be buried under her expectations of wanting to feel supported because she doesn’t expect him to bring her total peace. All she’d want from him is to bring her a little bit of ease, ‘you don’t have to move a mountain/ Just take a little weight off me’. With a firm grasp on her self worth, Dean is unwilling to invest her love in any boy incapable of respecting the basic tenets of reciprocity, ‘man up and be about it/ ‘Cause my love is not a one way street’. Knowing that her self worth will sometimes wane, ‘I was on the way down,’ Dean wonders if her ex would ever be ready and willing to amplify her authentic self, ‘so when I need you most/ Will you be my echo?’.

What Am I Gonna Do On Sundays? closes out with the beaming boundaries Dean sets between herself and her ex on penetrating piano-ballad Out. Out feels like a reframing of the opening track. Through growing into herself, Dean’s outlook on her past relationship has refined, and so, all the signs of her ex pulling away from her are perceptible now, ‘please, don’t roll your eyes at me […] You look straight through me’. Her ex’s inconsistent desire for her strikes as one of the more significant tells of their relationships impending end, ‘sometimes you want me, sometimes you don’t’.

Dean recognises that she doesn’t require her ex to verify her feelings in order for them to be valid, ‘save your breath, save your apology’. She also shows that, in her case, closure comes from ensuring that she honours the truth of how she is feeling, and that she adheres to the boundaries she establishes for herself, because in doing so, she can ensure that her ex will, ‘and I won’t pretend that we can be just friends/ I can’t be your friend […] And don’t ask again if we can be just friends/ I won’t be your friend’. In choosing her boundaries, Dean chooses to love and protect herself over loving her ex, ‘I adore you but can’t afford to’.

Dean’s emergent self is better off, not just for owning her boundaries, but for refusing to settle for less than what she deserves. For less than what she wants. Dean wants real love, and with the star of self worth to guide her, she knows that her ex was never that, ‘I crave real love and my God this ain’t it’. She needn’t be pitied by her ex or anyone else, because in growing into herself she has grown into a love that is real, ‘I need love and not just sympathy’. I am certain that any listener following the star of Olivia Dean will learn how to love, choose and protect themselves along the way.