FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Twenty-Four: Angel Olsen
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FOR this part of Modern Heroines…
I am shining the spotlight on one of my favourite artists, Angel Olsen. The thirty-three-year-old singer-songwriter from St. Louis, Missouri has released five studio albums: Half Way Home (2012), Burn Your Fire for No Witness (2014), My Woman (2016), All Mirrors (2019), and Whole New Mess (2020). I want to feature Olsen because I think her most-recent two albums are her best - which is high praise as all of her albums are staggering. In the case of Whole New Mess, I think it is very underrated and it should have featured in the top-ten albums of 2020 on many different sites. The fact that there has been so many great albums released this year means that something as stunning as Whole New Mess has missed out on the top slots! Because Olsen has released two phenomenal albums in as many years, to me, marks her out as one of the best songwriters in the world. I think she will be an icon of the future…and we are going to see many more terrific albums from someone who seems to get better and better as time progresses! I am going to bring in a few interviews Olsen has been involved with so we can learn more about her; I will end with a playlist collating her best songs to date. Before then, I will quote a couple of reviews that show there is a lot of love for Whole New Mess.
This is what AllMusic said about Olsen’s phenomenal fifth studio album:
“The original song "Whole New Mess" opens the album with a weary, howling rumination about efforts to get back on track, set to rhythmic strumming. The character of the recording is as if someone in the pews captured a miked singer and amp setup at the altar. The rest of the album continues in kind, with Olsen's dramatically nuanced vocal performances at least bordering on spellbinding throughout. Appearing midway through the track list, the other original song, "Waving, Smiling," is a minimalist guitar waltz that mourns a forever that didn't last. Arguably the most devastating entry here is her solo "Chance (Forever Love)," a song whose sibling closed All Mirrors but which serves as Whole New Mess' penultimate track. Its leaping melody and, this time, acoustic arpeggiated triplets become more and more haunted over the course of the song as the echo becomes more pronounced. Whole New Mess wraps with the comparatively jaunty "What It Is (What It Is)," an All Mirrors chamber rock song that reveals itself to be a classic folk-pop round at heart. It leaves listeners with an implied shrug and lingering stare. Managing to be uniquely stylized and engrossing while stripped bare, Whole New Mess not only works in isolation, it deserves equal footing in Olsen's discography”.
I am amazed how Olsen can write such personal albums that, like I say with many albums, can also be understood by anyone else. It is not like you need to know much about Olsen’s life – though I will draw in some interviews soon – to appreciate the songs and be touched by them. Released in August of this year, it must have been strange for Olsen (like all artists) to put out music when she couldn’t tour or promote in the normal manner. Even though her music is quite intimate, there is something incredibly powerful that translates brilliantly to the stage. It is almost ironic in a sense that Angel Olsen has released an album called Whole New Mess considering what this year has been like! When it came to assessing one of 2020’s very finest and memorable albums, Loud and Quiet remarked the following:
“Once again, Angel Olsen has managed to create an intensely personal album that will illuminate what you’re already feeling but didn’t know how to say. Olsen is known for making music that acts as an uncanny mirror, reflecting emotions with which fans can sympathise on raw, visceral levels, and this new record is no exception.
The songs on Whole New Mess are gritty but solid, showing how ambitious of a task Olsen set herself when she decided to head to a church-turned-studio in the Pacific Northwest for a personal reckoning. Listening is to be invited on an intensely private trip. Olsen’s vocals take precedent in every song, from her heartbroken crooning on ‘Chance (Forever Love)’ to the belts of ‘Lark Song’ and the echoes that reach us through the murky waters of ‘(New Love) Cassette’”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kylie Coutts
Few artists have had the same kind of momentum coming off an album as Angel Olsen did with All Mirrors. To prepare a new album and then realise that your plans are going to be rescheduled must have been devastating. I want to introduce an interview from The Guardian (that was conducted before the pandemic was known in the U.S.). The recent touring that Olsen undertook, evidently, was very important:
“Last October, Olsen released All Mirrors, her biggest, boldest album to date. A brooding, synth-laden opus that harnesses the full firepower of a 12-piece string section, it has been universally acclaimed – for Olsen’s risk-taking as much as the shimmering beauty of her arrangements. “It’s an album that keeps taking ostensibly recognisable musical forms and twisting them out of shape into something challenging and intriguing,” wrote the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis.
We meet in Lisbon, where Olsen has just kicked off a three-week European tour to promote the album, culminating with three English dates and a Valentine’s Day finale in Glasgow. Last night at Capitólio, a cuboid art deco building in the city’s theatre district, Olsen and her six-piece band made a heroic effort to reproduce the orchestral swoon of All Mirrors in a live setting. The thousand or so audience members may not have noticed a few rough edges in the performance, but Olsen felt the need to account for it. “I’m feeling a little loose tonight,” she confessed at one point in the set. “We haven’t played together for a month.”
It is useful to know a little about Olsen’s early life and the sort of music she was listening to growing up:
Olsen’s dream of making music, and the single-minded focus she applied to it, arrived early. Adopted aged three by a couple who had fostered her soon after her birth, she grew up in St Louis, a midwestern city she remembers as “kind of depressing”. Her family were poor, relying on her father’s income from the car manufacturer Chrysler, but she had access to guitar and piano lessons – “and I did end up going to rock shows at a really young age,” she says, “so that was fun”.
Her adoptive parents, who already had seven children, were much older – they are now in their 70s and 80s – and Olsen recalls searching for ways to bridge the generation gap. “I started listening to music from the time they grew up in,” she says (the influence of artists such as Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison is often discerned in her work). “I was trying to understand my parents a little bit and think about what they would have been like at my age.”
She also began making music of her own. “I had a little Panasonic handheld tape recorder that I would take everywhere,” she says. “And I was pretty private about it. My mom would say: ‘I heard you working on a song, that sounds nice.’ And I’d be like” – she adopts a stern expression – “‘Please don’t listen. I’m working on it. It’s not done yet.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Cameron McCool
There has been a lot of change in Olsen’s life over the past year or two. It seems, for now at least, she is enjoying being on her own and is not going to rush into any new romance:
A big moment on this path, for Olsen, was buying herself a house in Asheville, the easygoing North Carolina city she moved to in 2013. Having a place of her own to retreat to after weeks on the road underlined for Olsen the pleasures of solitude.
“I joke around about it, but I just don’t really want anyone in my house,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to wake up next to me. In my mind I’d be thinking: ‘I can’t wait till you leave so I can shower and play the music I want.’”
She’s in no rush to get into another romantic tangle – and anyway, she laughs: “The dating scene in Asheville is pretty bleak. It’s like: ‘Did we date already? Or was it my friend that dated you?’
“I don’t know,” she goes on, “maybe there will be some more drama in my life later. But I don’t really feel the need to get crazy drunk any more. I don’t want to go out all the time. I feel boring. My life is calm. And that’s good. But I almost miss the drama like a little bit. You know? Paul, who is playing guitar with me, was like: ‘Don’t worry, something dramatic will happen to you’.”
I probably should have clarified before when I said that Olsen has released two albums in two years. Whole New Mess was recorded by Olsen and engineer Michael Harris in a converted church. The album features tracks from All Mirrors, arranged in a more intimate style. There are some new songs sitting alongside the reworked previously-known tracks. In an interview during the pandemic with NME, we learn why All Mirrors, and Whole New Mess were released close together – and what the intention and vibe behind the new album is:
“The decision to let ‘All Mirrors’ and ‘Whole New Mess’ exist side by side “is sort of an experiment for myself,” she says. She thinks that placing both versions next to each other – one grandly ornate, one intimate and more vulnerable – will reveal something about how we interpret artists’ words. “I think the context of the lyrics changes because of what’s behind them,” she says.
With album five, Angel Olsen is peeling back the layers of her work to get back to the “stripped back versions of me”.
‘All Mirrors’, she explains today, is “about how you look in the mirror over time and see changes and differences: quickly your face, body and image can change. Deflection and deflecting from people, and how we mirror each other and find people who mirror us in some ways. That’s problematic sometimes.”
In other words: in connecting with people, we are also searching for something within ourselves. Many of the songs seem to question if it’s possible to love somebody in a way that doesn’t reflect back on yourself. Is Angel any closer to figuring it out?
Forgive cutting up interviews and missing out sections, but I want to quote parts that I feel are particularly interesting and illuminating. Not only has Angel Olsen been keeping busy during a very hard time; she also explains why many of her songs have quite a melancholy edge:
“Angel Olsen has been throwing herself into plenty of newness lately. Aside from this unconventional record release, she also recently branched out into more mainstream territory with ‘True Blue’, last year’s 80s-inspired noir-pop collaboration with Mark Ronson, which appeared on his acclaimed album ‘Late Night Feelings’.
And this is the thing about Angel Olsen: she’s an artist who writes with such lacerating precision and clarity about things which are so complicated to articulate, but remains distinctly private and, in some ways, unknowable. And perhaps she’s right to question that tension, and the idea that great art only comes from creators who are eternally open.
“I would rather be hurt and vulnerable than live a life of being completely walled up from people,” she concludes. “But unfortunately living a life that’s vulnerable means writing all of these fucking records that are sad. That’s what it’s meant for me. Maybe I’ll get tired of it someday”.
Despite the lockdown and things being very restricted, Olsen has been able to stream and produce these very good concerts/gigs. I think she is an amazing live artist, but this more private and less stressful form of performance seems to suit her – as we discover from an interview with Pitchfork:
“What inspired you to start doing these well-produced quarantine concerts?
I started making videos at home of covers I was learning and then I wasn’t sure how long the pandemic would last. So I did a stream that raised money for my band and crew because they were still waiting on unemployment. It began as a way to take care of the people in my business but it ended up becoming more community-oriented. I more so did it as an exercise to play old songs for fans while also giving back to the community in whatever way that I could. It was hard because I had to learn like 40 songs and I had to make a bunch of what they call “socials.” But I love working with Ashley Connor, who directed the live streams. It’s really powerful to have a group of people that I know I can call if I want to make something visual and that I trust with my art.
Does filming a live stream remove some of the pressure of performing live? It seems in some ways like a happy medium.
I hate to say it, but I’m an introvert, so whatever people see when they see me performing is a performance. Like, I’m performing for my band to be a leader among them, and to be in a good mood, to appear to be present and to be present. But for me, it’s very energy-sucking to be around people. If I had it my way, I would put out a record, do all of my photos myself, put out a manifesto so I don’t have to do any fucking interviews, and play a few shows here and there throughout the year. I don’t need fashion shoots anymore—they’re fun, but I don’t really want it. I know that I wouldn’t be in the position I am if I didn’t do that work. I know that those things are advertising my work, but if I could go without advertising my work constantly, and I didn’t have to look or sound like a fucking interesting person, then I wouldn’t do it at all. I would just put out the music and let people take it for what it is. As I get deeper and deeper into this shitstorm of whatever the music industry shall be, I feel less and less moved to want to keep advertising to people something that should be so apparently meaningful”.
I think that we will see more material from Angel Olsen very soon but, having released two albums so close to one another – the latter reworks songs from the former -, there is this growing fanbase and awareness of her music. I have not mentioned Olsen’s first three albums…but I am going to include songs from all of them at the end. I do think that All Mirrors marked a peak. She has followed that with the incredible Whole New Mess. Olsen is very introverted and private, so I can understand why her songs sound like they do. It must be hard having to do a lot of interviews and taking her music all around the world – and I can appreciate why she is not a huge fan of touring. Even though she would prefer less attention and glare, having put out so much brilliant music, she may have to get used to enormous popularity and love…
VERY soon indeed.