Olsen turns grief, longing into triumph
New album’s much-discussed excellence establishes breakthrough energy for artist
The most emotionally committed music of Angel Olsen’s career grew out of the possibility that she might quit making it at any minute. A singer and songwriter known for her impassioned melancholy, Olsen, 35, who lives in Asheville, North Carolina, arrived at producer Jonathan Wilson’s Topanga Canyon studio in California last year amid a stretch of serious personal upheaval. Three weeks before she began recording what would become her sixth album, “Big Time,” her mother died at age 78 of heart failure; two months before that, her 89-year-old father died in his sleep, mere days after she’d told her parents she was gay.
“I’d already planned to come here and make the record before all that happened,” she recalled. “So I was just kind of like, ‘(Expletive) it, I’m gonna go and see if I can get through this, and if it’s weird then I’ll stop and pick it up another time.’ And it was honestly the best decision I could’ve made, because it was so much better than sitting around feeling disassociated.” The rustic location — “being able to take a break and go on a hike or go to the beach” — was another balm, Olsen said.
Is she a beach person?
“Not really,” she replied with a laugh. “But in the morning, when no one’s there and it’s not too hot — when you can kind of have a reflective moment — that’s my kind of beach.
“I’m not trying to get a suntan,” she added. “I’m just there to, like, look at the waves.”
Olsen’s contemplations on grief, family, memory and the loneliness of the pandemic come through vividly on the deep and moving “Big Time,” which puts her powerful vocals at the center of arrangements rooted in the sounds and textures of classic mid-20th-century country music. Throughout the album, Olsen explores the extremes of her voice — the dreamy upper register, the sultry low end, the “midrange that just smacks you over the head,” as Wilson described it — to embody the overwhelming fullness of loss.
Yet “Big Time” also takes in the healing promise of fresh romance; Olsen co-wrote the lightheaded title track with her partner of over a year, Beau Thibodeaux, whom Olsen introduced in an Instagram post in April 2021 captioned, “My beau, I’m gay.”
The LP’s much-discussed excellence — not to mention widespread curiosity about the recent dramatic events in Olsen’s life — has established big breakthrough energy around the singer a decade after she got her start in the scrappy indie-folk underground. “Big Time” has earned rave reviews in Rolling Stone and Pitchfork; she performed the title track on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show; Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy posted an admiring cover of the title track on the day the album came out. Some of Olsen’s moves lately have suggested a growing interest in pop: She sang a few bars of Harry Styles’ “Boyfriends” on TikTok, and she made a short film based on “Big Time” with director Kimberly Stuckwisch, who oversaw Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour Prom” concert movie.
“Angel’s making a lot of new fans right now,” said Jon Coombs, vice president of A&R at Secretly Group, which includes her label, Jagjaguwar. Said Wilson, who has also worked with Father John Misty and Lana Del Rey: “I think about her peers, folks in the scene, and I think Angel’s kind of the one.”
Olsen insists real-deal pop stardom isn’t her goal. “I don’t aspire to be there. I like where I am,” she said. That’s partly to do with lifestyle — an aversion to “the personal trainer and the nutritionist and the insane schedule,” as she put it — and partly to do with snobbish old reflexes.
“You know, when a book is blowing up and everyone’s telling you to read it, and you’re like, ‘I’m not reading that book’? That’s kind of how new music is for me.” She laughed. “But then every now and then, you’ve got friends who are piano teachers, and they’re telling you all the kids are learning Olivia Rodrigo, and you can’t get the songs out of your head.”
Olsen said she’s unfamiliar with modern Nashville acts like Carrie Underwood and Jason Aldean, but digs country (or country-ish) music from the ’70s and ’80s: Lucinda Williams and J.J. Cale and Dolly Parton.
Asked whether the notion of a queer country tradition resonates with her, she pondered the question briefly, a slightly skeptical look on her face. “Here’s what I’ll say: I’ve always written songs about love and heartache and all those things, and I don’t feel like I’m a different person now,” she said. “I mean, I am different, but I don’t feel like I was hiding myself or that my writing before was a lie. So I’m hesitant to call this a queer love album, only because I might end up with a cis man — though I’d still be queer, you know what I mean?”
Olsen grew up in St. Louis, the youngest adopted child in a religiously observant family that included eight other kids. After high school, she moved to Chicago, where she eventually befriended Will Oldham, the enigmatic singer-songwriter also known as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who invited her to go on tour as his backing vocalist. She released her debut album, “Half Way Home,” in 2012; more records followed, each to increasing acclaim and each with a slightly different framing of her voice: jumpy rock,
fuzzy psychedelia, icy synth-pop.
For “Big Time,” Olsen said she wasn’t trying to “be experimental about what an Americana band should do. I’m sure many of these chord structures have been done before. But my experience has been different, and my voice is different. It was more about spotlighting the lyrics than anything.
“But,” Olsen said, “I think the sound of the record — the focus that I’ve got on it — had everything to do with me not feeling afraid to lose anything because I was just so exhausted — so pummeled by everything that had happened” with her parents, whose deaths made her consider “my own mortality and who the people are that I want to spend my time with.” Wilson said he “witnessed the catharsis of the process. It was palpable. When she howled, you could feel it.”
Olsen will have some downtime ahead of a summer tour with fellow singer-songwriters Sharon Van Etten and Julien Baker.
In Asheville, Olsen said, she tends not to talk much about her music. “I take all the makeup off, and I don’t see people except for my very, very close friends,” she said. “I’m hanging out with my cat, going on aimless drives, checking on my house to make sure it’s not falling apart. Just normal-people (stuff ).
“I really like that,” she added. “Sometimes I need to forget what I do.”