Songfacts®:

• "Dive" is a love song about that exciting but shaky thrill of letting someone into your heart after it's been stomped on a few times. Olivia Dean recorded it for her 2023 debut album, Messy.
• Dean wrote the song after starting a new relationship. "I was in love!" she exclaimed to the BBC. "I was happy, I'd had an Aretha resurgence, and I just wanted to write something joyful and fluffy. It's a very happy song for me to sing. I have a lot of sad songs, so it's nice to end shows on a high."
• Dean has kept the identity of the love interest who inspired the song private. While she intentionally writes from a personal place so listeners can project their own experiences onto the music, she focuses on the feelings and emotions rather than on the identity of the individual.
• Olivia Dean wrote "Dive" with Bastian Langebæk and Max Wolfgang on a scorching hot day in East London. They also collaborated on two other Messy tracks, "The Hardest Part" and "I Could Be a Florist."
  
  "We were like, let's get back in the studio, let's write another one, and that was the first thing we wrote," Dean told Dork. "The door was open, the sun was coming in and it just came so naturally. That's how the best ones come. It's just a love song."
• Fans often mishear a line in the chorus.
  
  "It's 'Maybe it's the loving in your eyes,' not longing or looking," Dean clarified to Genius.
  
  She said the line was inspired by one of those oddly cinematic moments when someone looks at you with so much affection that you do a double take: "Wait… you love me?" She responds to that gaze in the next line:
  
  I'm here, see through
  
  Transparent. Unhidden. Completely in.
• While "Dive" sounds like a floating-on-air kind of track, its emotional anchor is heavier. The line "I'm ready to dive" is, according to Dean, the saddest part. Why? Because diving in means risking it all - again. "If I give everything I gave to the last person, and it doesn't work again... I don't think I can survive," she admitted.
• Dean built "Dive" around a classic structure: verse, pre-chorus, chorus, repeat, then a bridge, which she considers a sacred thing. For her, the bridge should say something you haven't already said, while also serving as a kind of emotional exhale. In "Dive," it's that moment when two people start to become one - "diving into each other," as she puts it.
• Dean's musical DNA is proudly Motown-infused - she grew up idolizing Diana Ross and The Supremes and even slips a winking nod into this track with the line "I'm coming out and diving in tonight" - a clear reference to Ross's iconic 1980 anthem "I'm Coming Out."