Angel Olsen Leaves Epiphanies Behind For The Realm Of Moving On

By Emma Madden


This is Angel Olsen's least preference piece of the job. Soon after failing to pick up our call at the scheduled time, she apologizes. She ran into a friend at the bookstore and didn't remember about our conversation. Forced to leave the shop where she was, presumably, not having to again discuss her latest album All Mirrors, she's not keen on small talk. My "how are you?" Is met with an imperative: "Let's get into it."


An element of confrontation runs while in Olsen's music, as it does in her conversations with journalists and fans. Any time whenever she performs live, she tends to act as a funhouse resemble to her audience — refracting their own expectations of her, some days mockingly, so that they're confronted with the absurdity of their own preconceptions. "I'm about to play some dark shit," she mentioned before premiering "White Fire," her most goth song, to a London crowd in 2013. "Everything is tragic, it all just falls apart," she began, before keening over with laughter. "I can't believe I actually wrote that."


Her five albums, especially her latest, function like a reflect contained up to herself and the people she's loved. It's been a concept in her music from the very beginning: "I'll hold your reflect / All you must do is turn around / and also you could visualize the face make while you are giving out your soul," she sang on her first EP, 2011's Strange Cacti. The same concerns show up time and again during her discography. The will to like oneself and live self-reliantly — to burn your fire for no witness. The need (and impossibility) to be seen wholly and truthfully. The sheer hope to be loved and touched (shut up, kiss her).


In her earlier recordings, these themes took the form of epiphanies. Olsen seemed to be willing herself to learn her own lessons: "Know your own heart well / It's the one that's worth most of your time," she sang on that first EP, with a voice like a muffled chainsaw. Right now eight years into her recording career, Olsen has relaxed and matured into her own worldview and guide for being alive. "I've had several epiphanies that I later realized were not totally actualized," she says. Right after two band-centric albums — 2014's Burn Your Fire For No Witness and 2016's My Woman — she toured and released Phases, a compilation of covers, demos, and B-sides in 2017. It was the opening time lose toured solo in several years. While it gave her the possibility to revisit old songs, to "think back at how stupid I was, and why pure it was for me to not really know anything, right now that I know so much," it also gave her the chance to actualize those epiphanies. "A lot of realization from previous records came to me As soon as I was performing them on my own."


Her latest album feels like a full self-actualization. However at its core, All Resembles is about moving forward. Any time you think something's a certain way and then convince yourself of and picture it, it might be a really good tool for writing," she says. Yet in a way, doing that can be very dangerous." Right now while she performs her older songs, she almost feels as though she's covering someone else — the shadow of her younger self revealed to her like a reverse scry.


As a result, All Resembles is far less devoted to epiphanies than it is to charting the method of moving on. Also it does so with excruciating aesthetics. "I like the air that I breathe, I like the thoughts that I think, I like the life that I lead... Without you," she sings like a question on "Tonight," quite possibly the most pretty and painful song she's ever recorded. It's Olsen revealing the most heartbreaking segment of heartbreak — the moment realize you could exist without the person you never thought you can live without. Any time as soon as you wonder whether the person you gave your heart to really knew you at all.


"It's easy to imagine love from a new person and imagine all these things and give them your heart. However it's hard to find somebody who will really hope to know you and share their life with you," she says. “I think it's just so much more special to never mention, 'I love you,' and to just show that you love someone."


Does that make All Reflects a breakup album? No, that could be also simplistic. "While that's certainly a piece of it — the experiences and the feelings that I have are quite literal — it's never about a specific person or one specific event, yet alternatively about numerous events that have been similar in a lot of ways," she explains. Olsen pulls from a full depth of experience, nesting the full flute of existence and emotion indoors a solitary song. It's what makes her one of today's greatest songwriters. Listen to album opener "Lark" and count the moods. Within six minutes, she conveys grief, greed, elation, rage, remorse, and peace.


Olsen is much more singular in conversation. Depending on the day and the mood, her interactions with journalists and fans can vary quite drastically. Today, she sounds dampened. She's in the midst of a "heavy week," she says. Her days have been filled with interviews, which have dragged her away from spending time at the bookstore and with companions. "I've told myself I don't hope to do it anymore and I just be doing it anyway," she says. Music is the one thing Olsen's known that she's routinely wanted to do. It's the thing she understands most about herself and of life. "Not very several people have been blessed to know that that's what they wish to do from their childhood. And yes it stuck with me whether or not I've enjoyed every aspect of it."


Those characteristic include "having to perform all of the time and never getting to spend time with those I love, and having to dissect it all of the time." A little like what she's having to do now? "Yeah, group of."


More than ever, Olsen wants to live rather than explain. "And it's not because I don't love," she sings somewhere between relief and fear on "Tonight," "just don't have time to explain all of the things you think you've come to understand about me." It's not an epiphany, although rather a hard-fought resignation.