It probably goes without saying, but 2020 has been a very different year for Ovie. Releasing his debut single ‘Dublin Girl’ to acclaim at the end of 2019, it’s taken twelve months for follow up ‘One More Time’ to make an appearance. For the young Irishman, however, it’s been a time to make new music but to reflect on the experience of putting out that first song. “It was really positive”, he enthuses. “Even now people are still messaging me about that song. I was very happy. If I can’t control the outcome I just focus on making the video as good as it can be, the track as good as it can be. You can do the best thing ever and people don’t respond or something that’s a joke and you blow up. I realise that there’s an element of hard work and an element of luck. You can’t control the luck, only the hard work so I just do that bit to the best of my ability and hope it pays off”. 

“Before ‘Dublin Girl’, I wasn’t clear about the direction I needed to go. We had a bunch of different sounds but we need to commit to one. In the six months before that single came out I was working on something completely different, I didn’t even consider ‘Dublin Girl’ would be an option. Then my A&R came back and said he couldn’t get it out of his head so I went back to revisit the possibilities and stopped being so critical, then it started to make sense. If I hadn’t changed my mind I’d be in a completely different musical place now, somewhere between Sam Smith and Chris Brown”.

Now with new track and video ‘One More Time’ ready to drop, he is sure of where he fits in (“if you like a Burna Boy song and you like a Chris Brown song, I’d feel comfortable playing you my music”) and of the path he wants to follow. He does, however, have a unique method of selecting which songs to release. “If I’m driving with someone I’ll play them ten songs and the seventh will be one of mine, just to see the reaction without them knowing who it is. That’s how I choose the singles, especially if they try to Shazam it. It’s the most honest reaction ever if someone has no idea that it’s your music. If they don’t like it they’re not worried about offending you, but the best complement for me is when they stop the conversation to try and find out who made the track”.

He also considers that he has a better sense of his own voice. “It became important to me not to mess with my image to fit with the songs, the music had to make sense. ‘Dublin Girl’ is similar to me as a person, maybe 60% me, but ‘One More Time’ is 90% me. It was important for me to be true to myself. I’m a big social introvert so because of that I’m not going to be writing from a lot of personal experiences, they’d be pretty boring songs. I’d either get ideas from watching movies or mostly listening to my friends complaining about their lives. Ever since I’ve switched to being me all I need to do is fix on a scenario and the rest of it plays out. ‘One More Time’ is about being in a good position in life, there are girls everywhere, but you’re missing that one person. All I had to do was come up with the concept and the rest wrote itself, it’s like a diary almost. I’ve found that I’m not as unrelatable as I thought I was. I have stories to tell that are genuinely honest”.

So if 2020 has been a different year for Ovie, it’s also been one that might well prove to be crucial in his development as an artist. “The goal with ‘Dublin Girl’ was not to blow up, it was to do this. To find out who I am before I went any further. The goal is to figure out who Ovie is as an artist and I know that we’ve done that because I’ve never had this feeling about my music before”. It’s a feeling he’s ready to share with the rest of the world.