Angel Olsen’s Fresh Start
After a breakup, she stripped back her sound to the starkest essentials.
In the fall of 2018, Angel Olsen left behind her life in Asheville, North Carolina, and traveled across the country to the remotest place she could find. To hear her tell it, there wasn’t much to leave: She’d just gotten out of a five-year relationship, which also spelled the end of several friendships. “That’s the hardest part of a relationship in a small town,” says Olsen, 33. “You realize who your friends are, who can deal with conflict between two people and not be shitty. . . . It was time for me to be alone for a while.”
As painful as the experience was, it left Olsen with a batch of incisive songs about loss, solitude, and emotional crossroads. She took them to Anacortes, Washington, an even smaller town, near Puget Sound, where she met up with engineer Michael Harris, who’d become a close friend after they worked together on her album My Woman in 2016. “I thought, if any engineer can handle me being kind of depressed, it’s Michael,” she says.
Working long but leisurely hours in a tumbledown church-turned-studio called the Unknown, Olsen and Harris got down to the bones of ballads like “Lark Song” and “(Summer Song).” Later on, in Los Angeles, Olsen would rerecord most of the songs with lush string arrangements for her 2019 LP, All Mirrors. That album’s rave reviews celebrated her as one of indie rock’s richest chroniclers of heartbreak, with a vision far grander than that of most of her contemporaries.
First, though, she wanted to capture the songs with as little adornment as possible — just her guitar and voice and an occasional keyboard, straight to two-inch tape. She says she was looking for “the most ghostly version of these songs.” “I felt so damn lucky to be there,” Harris says. “I’d be sitting in the control room weeping inside when she’d get a good take.”
“I needed to make sure I could make something that was mine again,” Olsen says. “There’s something to be said for my own intuition.”
Those Anacortes recordings, so stark they seem like X-rays of her soul, are out now as Whole New Mess, marking a return to the sound of her earliest work. A decade ago, when she made her first EP, Strange Cacti, she was working at a coffee shop in Chicago. The customers were cranky, and her paychecks often bounced, but she loved the freedom the job gave her; she remembers writing songs on the backs of receipts during the day and performing them at tiny clubs by night.
Olsen moved to Asheville after making 2014’s breakthrough, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, some of its songs being fueled by the incandescent anger she felt at exes who hadn’t supported her aspirations. “It’s a weird experience when you love someone who is a man who is jealous of your career,” she says. Putting together a backing band for a rougheredged sound seemed like a natural step. “I just wanted to play music with the big boys,” she says. “I got overzealous about the idea of playing in a rock & roll band because of the aggression I was feeling.”
She expanded her sound even further for My Woman, dipping into film-noir atmosphere and hints of R&B. The album led to her best reviews and biggest stages yet, but Olsen began to have doubts about how far she’d moved away from her solo acoustic origins. By the time she got to Anacortes, she was ready for a reset. “I needed to make sure I could make something that was mine again,” she says. “There’s something to be said for going with my own intuition.”
Olsen had hoped to support Whole New Mess with a solo tour this year. Instead, she’s returned to living quietly in Asheville, thinking about how strangely well the album echoes the isolated year of reckonings we’re all living through. “It’s a sad and lonely time, but in some ways it’s been a blessing to have to face a lot of stuff,” she says. “I’ve been writing again. Who knows, maybe I’ll have another record by 2022.”
SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON