Rein Me In (with Olivia Dean) by Sam Fender
Liv Jarrell of postscriptbyliv joins A Song For You to explore the song that’s taken over the UK
Welcome back to A Song For You — a weekly series of conversations with artists, writers, and music lovers about one song that holds a special meaning to them.
Each post dives into one song chosen by our guest that left an indelible mark on their life through three parts:
The Journey Behind the Music: I set the scene to explore the song’s history, cultural impact, and the story of how it came to be.
In Their Own Words: Our guest reflects on their chosen song, sharing the personal story behind why it matters to them.
A Song For You: A carefully chosen recording or performance of the song, selected by the guest.
Our guest this week is Liv Jarrell, author of the popular Substack postscriptbyliv. If you don’t already follow Liv’s Substack, I can’t recommend it enough. She has an uncanny ability to pull back the curtain on whatever she’s writing about and find the deeper truth underneath the surface.
Her song for you is “Rein Me In”, a collaboration between Sam Fender and Olivia Dean — two of the great British artists of this time. Let’s dive in.
The Journey Behind the Music: Sammy’s Thought Bubble
One of the things A Song For You set out to do from the beginning was to create a space for discovery — for you, and honestly, for me too. Every edition is an invitation to follow a thread neither of us has pulled before. And no matter how different the songs selected sound from one week to the next, they all share the same quiet power. They tell stories that make us take inventory of our own lived experiences and shift how we approach our tomorrows.
I’ll be honest: the music I listen to on a daily basis sounds like the playlist for a Fourth of July cookout hosted by someone’s cool dad: Americana, jambands, indie rock, and classic rock. So attending CorePower classes is essentially my cultural lifeline to hearing today’s pop hits. For the better part of the past year, it’s been nearly impossible to get through a class without hearing an Olivia Dean song. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend an embarrassing amount of time standing in the lobby afterward, jotting down the song I’d just heard in my notes app. Where has this sound been my whole life?
Dean does something that sounds simple but is incredibly difficult to pull off: honor the influence of the music that came before her and quietly step past it.
Born and raised in London, she grew up absorbing Carole King and Al Green from her father’s record collection and Jill Scott and Angie Stone from her mother’s — with Lauryn Hill, Amy Winehouse, and Joni Mitchell woven through all of it. We all want to sound like the artists who shaped us. The influences are easy to trace. But the challenge is taking all of that and making something that feels genuinely new. Something that honors the lineage without being trapped by it.
The Art of Loving — her second album, out last fall — does exactly that.
She became the first female solo artist to simultaneously place four singles in the UK top ten. She swept the 2026 BRIT Awards just two weeks ago, taking home four trophies including British Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, and — with the song we’re talking about today — Song of the Year. Staying Stateside, she won the Grammy award for Best New Artist.
On “Rein Me In”, Dean joins Sam Fender — a songwriter from North Shields in the northeast of England: Springsteen country if Springsteen grew up near Newcastle.
Fender writes the way the best American folk heroes do: rooted in place, honest about class and community, and unafraid of big emotions. Rolling Stone called him a “master storyteller,” and I wholeheartedly agree. His music has made him one of the UK’s most celebrated voices for years, with three consecutive number one albums and the 2025 Mercury Prize — the most prestigious award in British music, handed annually to the best album of the year regardless of genre. But the accolades feel beside the point once you actually sit with his catalog. I’ve long been a casual listener, and finally took the plunge this week. He’s the kind of artist you hear once and immediately need to go back to the beginning with.
When Liv brought “Rein Me In” to this week’s A Song For You, I jumped at the chance to spend some time with a song I’d only heard in passing. I admittedly have struggled to listen to any other artists this week.
Take it away, Liv.
In Their Own Words: Liv Jarrell on Rein Me In (with Olivia Dean) by Sam Fender
Everyone has an artist they feel a little irrational about. The one they recommend with heightened enthusiasm, whose songs they evangelize to friends and whose albums they sit with properly — headphones on, distractions off.
For me, that’s Olivia Dean.
What strikes me about her music isn’t just the warmth of her voice — it’s how she writes about love. Not glossy or cinematic, but honest: patient, vulnerable, and deliberate.
That perspective makes her the perfect counterpart to Sam Fender, whose music has a rough-edged urgency to it like someone narrating the chaos of their own emotions in real time. His songs live inside the messier parts of feeling: hesitation, regret, the things we realize just a little too late.
“Rein Me In” lives squarely in that space.
Originally released on Fender’s third album People Watching in February 2025, the song took on new life that June when Dean joined him for a rereleased single before releasing her own album, The Art of Loving, last fall.
The pairing makes sense once you sit with this song. Fender’s lyrics paint the picture of someone who’s let something meaningful slip through his fingers and knows it. He wanders through familiar streets and old haunts, each one carrying a memory that won’t stay buried, masking the ache with alcohol while the regret rings like tinnitus. And at the center of it all is that repeated plea: please, don’t rein me in.
On the surface it sounds like a request for freedom. But the more you sit with it, the more it feels like avoidance — someone trying to outrun their own feelings by staying in motion.
Which is exactly where Dean’s verse becomes so powerful. She steps into the middle of that emotional storm and calmly names what’s happening.
When she sings “you’re so afraid of that heart inside your chest,” it feels like someone turning on the lights.
We tell ourselves we’re protecting ourselves from other people — from rejection, disappointment, heartbreak. But most of the time, we’re protecting ourselves from the depth of our own feelings.
Dean doesn’t sound angry. She sounds patient. Like she recognizes the instinct to run but knows that running doesn’t actually solve anything.
That contrast is what makes the song linger. Fender thinks out loud as he spirals. Dean pulls up a chair beside him and says, gently: let’s be honest about what’s going on here.
And yet — for all that emotional excavation — the song is also simply a bop. Guitars that swell, drums pushing the whole thing forward, a chorus that begs to be shouted a little too loudly in the car. It lets you feel profound and slightly dramatic while tapping your steering wheel like you’re in the band.
This song isn’t really a duet. It’s a conversation between two emotional instincts: the urge to escape and the courage required to stay.
Most of us have been there. Standing in the wreckage of something good, realizing too late that the hardest thing wasn’t loving someone — it was letting ourselves be loved in return.
A Song For You: Rein Me In (with Olivia Dean) by Sam Fender
“I'm working myself up to a nice warm bliss
All my memories of you ring like tinnitus
If I stop, it's just pain
Please, don't rein me in”
Go deeper: Check out Liv’s thoughts on The Art of Loving on postscriptbyliv!
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