What Happened With Olly at Sanremo 2023
Sanremo 2023 had a pretty busy lineup, and Olly's appearance wasn't the biggest talking point of the evening, but it still drew some attention. The artist performed his track and made it through the competition. I remember watching the broadcast and thinking the staging was straightforward, nothing overly ambitious. That's usually how these mid-card performances go. The song itself is a pop-rock number with fairly conventional structure. Verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, repeat. Nothing experimental about it, which is honestly kind of refreshing when you've been watching the same festival for years. The melody sticks in your head after a couple listens, though I wouldn't call it an earworm. It's the kind of track that works well live but might get lost on a streaming playlist. I actually tried to find a high-quality recording of the performance shortly after it aired. The official Rai broadcasts are available on their platform, but the audio quality varies depending on which camera angle feed they use. Some clips pull from the studio mixed version rather than the actual stage recording. If you're looking for the real live take, you want the main mix, not the promotional bumpers. I spent about twenty minutes comparing different uploads before settling on one that sounded right.
The song didn't advance to the final rounds, which surprised a few people in the chat rooms I was reading. The voting patterns that year were pretty split between the bigger name artists and a couple of surprise entries. Olly landed somewhere in the middle of the pack, which is honestly a realistic outcome for a newcomer at that festival. If you want to listen to the track, the studio version is available on the usual streaming platforms. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music all carry it. The live version from Sanremo is trickier to find in good quality. YouTube has several uploads but most of them are phone recordings from the audience or low-resolution captures from the broadcast. The official Rai channel sometimes takes down older festival content after a while, so don't assume it'll stay up indefinitely. One thing worth noting about the performance itself: the vocal delivery was solid but not technically impressive. Nothing wrong with that. Sanremo has enough singers who treat every song like they're auditioning for opera. Olly just sang it straight, which I respect. The arrangement had some live instruments mixed with the backing track, which is standard practice at that point in the competition.
The lyrics deal with personal reflection themes, pretty typical for the festival. Nothing particularly groundbreaking in the writing, but the delivery feels genuine rather than manufactured. That's about as much as you can say about most entries in the new artists section. I'd expect to see Olly release more material in the next year or two. The Sanremo exposure gives you a window, but what you do after matters more. A few artists use it as a launchpad, most don't. The ones who follow up with consistent releases are the ones who actually stick around.
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