On the Rise
Olive Jones

Much the same is true of her jewel-toned debut album For Mary, though it’s not immediately clear from the seemingly effortless clarity and grace it holds. It’s a baseline ask of any soul contender that they have warmth in abundance and an instinctive way with rhythm, but what makes Jones stand out from the pack is the undeniable craft behind the sheen – a process of stitching that spans years and years, where the work doesn’t necessarily feel of a piece until, at last, you can step back and consider the whole.

“I do think of a debut album as being like some kind of tapestry or quilt of all your working and musings over the years,” she tells Best Fit over video call from her manager’s office. “Each of these tracks is its own patch of the quilt, but they’re not all uniformly cotton. I feel like they all have their own texture. There’s some scratchy hessian, some felt, and some velvet too. Any quilter would be absolutely livid to have to work with that.”

Now based in London, Jones grew up 130-odd miles west, on the coast of Dorset, in a house of salted air and filled with sound. Much of her childhood was spent in the sea (“we’re a very water-based family”), but music was always her calling rather than, say, becoming a professional surfer. Digging into her parents’ record collection, drawn to many of the giants of soul and jazz, she remembers being fascinated by the depth of the emotional details, not just in the voices of technical athletes like Ella Fitzgerald but also in the instrumental work of players like Miles Davis and triple-threat artists like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, who bowled her over with the unfiltered grit and rawness of their music.

Though she came up in quite an academic setting when it comes to music – saxophone lessons from the age of seven that led to a university degree – Jones says she learned more from listening to and absorbing the works of those artists than she ever did from studying musical theory and mechanics. “I grew up mostly listening to Black voices that could really evoke a sense of the weight of what they’d been through,” she says. “With Nina and Billie, often their singing is a little out of tune or not technically on point, but I realised that it didn’t matter because suddenly I was crying. That’s the humanity of music, and those artists were my bridges. That’s how I learned that, yes, you need the technical vocabulary, but you also need to know how to create poetry.”

As a songwriter, Jones says that melody more or less always leads the way for her, inspired by the years she spent playing saxophone and, later, a guitar she was given by her father. She cautiously admits, too, that she was influenced in part by dabbling in musical theatre in her teens but, with a few exceptions like Chicago, Bugsy Malone, and a lot of Stephen Sondheim, the medium wasn’t for her. It was discovering Amy Winehouse’s debut album Frank back in the early 2000s that first sparked a sense of recognition in Jones of something she would like to be: “a jazz singer within the pop world,” as she puts it. “I felt so drawn to her,” she says. “Immediately I was like, okay, yeah, there’s room for this music too.”

After wrapping up her music degree, Jones’s first move was crossing the channel to France, armed with just a rudimentary grasp of the language. Challenging herself to overcome the self-consciousness she’d feel when performing at home, she took to the streets with her guitar and gradually learned how to pull in a crowd. “There’s nothing more exposing than busking, because nobody’s asked you to be there, plonked in the middle of the street,” she says. “But it was quite special, and a really lovely thing to experience, and I did that for about a year.” As for her biggest earning cover? Of course it had to be “a bit of a belter,” she says. “It was probably Adele’s version of Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’.” 

Once back in the UK, Jones moved to Leeds, where a chance encounter with the drummer of electro-soul instrumental trio Noya Rao led to her joining the band as their singer, recording one album (2017’s Icaros) and three EPs before things sort of fizzled out, partly stymied by the pandemic. Like many others, Jones experienced the enforced downtime as a time of really sitting with the question of what she really wanted. “Can I see the band’s future?” she remembers asking herself. “And if not, how much longer do I keep going?” Being in a band is pretty tough if attentions start to wander, she says. “You really need everyone to be on the same page, and if they’re not and you feel like you are dragging people along – even if it all comes from love – it can be quite exhausting.”

“I still love the music, and we haven’t necessarily ‘broken up’, but it just felt like time for me to invest my energy into my own project,” she adds, explaining how she left Leeds for London (via a brief stint back in Dorset) and focused on the songs that would eventually grow into For Mary. Teaming up with producer and songwriter James Wyatt – who has worked alongside people like Lianne La Havas, Ellie Goulding, and Toria Wooff – quickly proved fruitful. The first song they wrote together, “All in My Head”, became Jones’s first single, released late in the summer of 2023, followed a few months later by the Ann Peebles-referencing “Planes”, written in the early weeks of clear lockdown skies.

They may be over 2 years old but both songs find a home on For Mary, as does her third single “Summer Rain” and two reworked tracks (“A Woman’s Heart” and “Blossom Tides”) from her debut EP, Three More Nights, released in late 2024. In fact, alongside the four pre-album singles – “Talk About Love”, “End of Time”, “Colour on the Wall”, and “Kingdom”, For Mary includes just three completely new tracks, “Only You”, “Mary”, and the interlude “Mary Come Home”. In Jones’s eyes, “Mary” is the patch around which the bigger vision of the record quilt started to form. Describing the song as “a turning point” in terms of her songwriting, guiding her away from the airy, laidback soul-pop of songs like “Summer Rain” and into a folkier space, it gave her permission, she says, to lean into different influences and embrace not feeling like she needed to write to a particular style.

The character of Mary may be left deliberately undefined – more a composite, fictional figure than any one specific person – but that doesn’t make the song feel any less true. “I’ve stuck to the idea that Mary could be anyone, male, female, or non-binary, and that they are kind of faceless,” she says of the song, assembled as it was from the experiences of people close to her affected, in one way or another, by challenges related to poor mental health. “Let me in under the clouds that roam above you,” she pleads in the lyrics, reaching out with a sense of tentative devotion. In a culture that often frames care as goal-oriented action – fixing, solving, intervening – “Mary” feels refreshing in that it recontextualises care as something more tender and honest. When you care for someone who won’t be saved, the song suggests, perhaps the most robust form of love is to keep them close regardless.

“I don’t like really on-the-nose writing,” clarifies Jones, admitting she prefers to work from a place that’s almost subconscious rather than trying to squeeze out something self-importantly profound. If she ever gets stuck, she says, she’s learned to just stop trying and go listen to what other people are writing – “how they’ve conjured an image or worded an emotion” – and find the honesty in that. As a teacher at university once told her, when singing jazz you almost have to be an actor, “otherwise you’re just singing a song.” “For me, the idea that you have to find something within a song that connects you with the emotion, even if the words might not relate specifically to you, was a very poignant realisation,” she says. “But you’ve got to be honest,” she stresses. “Sometimes I’ve written songs where I can tell that I’m not being honest, and they’re always so much shitter.”

When Jones does allow herself some bluntness, it’s typically in service of a near-universal truth. On “A Woman’s Heart”, for example, tucked inside the song’s light-touch feminism is the weighted couplet “Yeah, you’re telling me that it’s alright / But I can’t even walk the streets at night,” which very clearly speaks for itself. Jones has a black belt in karate so she’s not to be messed with, but – as many conversations with other, cross-generational women have shown – to exist as a woman is to constantly have to negotiate with the worst proclivities of men. As we talk, she’s keen to stress that, while she herself doesn’t feel especially oppressed, of course she is aware of and sometimes feels the fear. Raised with two brothers in “a very equal way” and educated at an all-girl’s school, she found joining the real world quite jarring in terms of suddenly having to feel like her gender really mattered. “But this isn’t just a song for women to hear,” she says. “It’s for everyone to hear and reflect on, in a positive way.”

Lively album standout “Kingdom” is another moment where the personal gives way to the political, channelling Jones’s frustration with Brexit into something approaching theatricality. “The problem with this kingdom is the kingdom has died,” she sings, leaning into the drama, but anyone about to panic dial the ghouls at Reform should know that she’s aware that it’s somewhat hyperbolic. “I’m a proud Brit, and feel very lucky to be born British,” she clarifies. “There’s so much about this country that’s incredible, but there’s an arrogance among certain groups that I just find intolerable.”

As we’re often told by snappy social media memes, a society is defined by how it treats its most vulnerable members and by its cultural output, but with both under attack seemingly everywhere these days, it’s hard to see how we go forward from here. “I would love to reclaim Britishness as a positive thing,” says Jones, optimistically. “I just hope we don’t slip more and more into an American model of society, because who would actually want that? It’s a complete façade, and the more you dig beneath the gold-plated surface the more you want to scream, What the fuck is going on here? – it’s a terrible nightmare, so messed up in so many ways.”

Nostalgia has always been a hell of a drug but when the alternative is an abject reality of manosphere misogyny, emboldened xenophobes and racists, and endless wars in the name of planet-poisoning oil, it feels more and more like a sweet escape. For Jones, the line between inspiration and pastiche is terribly thin, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a sweet spot where artists can “create something that evokes a similar feeling as older music, while still acknowledging that we’re in a different era.”

“I’d hate to feel like I was copying something,” she concludes. “I’d rather be inspired by the process. Things like recording live, not relying too heavily on technology, embracing imperfections. That’s what defined a lot of older soul music. The rawness. The need to really perform. You couldn’t rely on endless takes or editing. That’s what keeps the music feeling real.”

It makes sense, then, that nothing about For Mary feels hurried. Taking the long way round, with its gradual recalibrations and occasional false starts, has left a perceptible mark on the music, in its steadiness and in Jones's understanding that her craft does not rely on laying it all out on the line, that songs don't have to necessarily resolve in order to resonate. Listening from top to tail, it sometimes feels like sitting with a story that's still taking shape, alive to its own making and trusting her intention will land where it's meant to.

"The album is a snapshot," she says. "But it's also something that I've already kind of moved beyond. It's actually been so lovely having this time between it being finished and it coming to light, because I've been able to see it with fresh eyes and appreciate it in a different way. I'm so excited that it's at last been born into the world."