"An Olive Grove Facing the Sea" is a song by Northern Irish–Scottish alternative rock band Snow Patrol from their second album, When It's All Over We Still Have to Clear Up (2001).
[2] The song has been described as possibly being "a dream", "a hymn to an imagined presence" and also a "mermaid fantasy", because of its lyrics: "She was an angel / I saw her swimming there".
[3] The start of the song features acoustic guitar, whose strings are "brushed gently" and the cymbals played for "reverberation and resonance", instead of being "struck for impact", according to Stylus' writer Nick Southall.
mneTV's Cailean Collier wrote that since the song had been described as a dream, the video interprets this by "blurring the borders between fantasy and reality".
[17] UK magazine Drowned in Sound in 2009 named it the song to be played to anyone who didn't have enough respect for Snow Patrol as a band.
[17] Scott Juba, writing for website The Trades, praised it as "the real highlight of the two LPs" (Songs for Polarbears and When It's All Over We Still Have to Clear Up).
He went on to describe it as "one of the best songs" he'd ever heard, and that it "paints a beautiful picture of love's yearnings and contains enough quiet drama and soothing emotion to completely engross the listener in every word of the eloquently penned lyrics".