"Baby Steps" is Olivia Dean understanding that not all movement toward something has to be dramatic. The song is built on the recognition that incremental progress is still progress, which is a gentler and more human-scale idea than most love songs allow themselves. Her second album The Art of Loving is full of this kind of grounded observation: love as it actually operates rather than love as mythology. She is from Hackney, studied at the Brit School, and carries that training in the precision of what she does. The Brit School has produced a lot of artists who overperform their emotional material. Dean has always been the opposite: she underplays, she trusts the writing, she lets the arrangement breathe. "Baby Steps" is that approach at its most deliberate. The record went to number one in the UK and made her a Grammy winner. "Baby Steps" is part of why: it is a deceptively small song that does its work completely.
Olivia Dean