Angel Olsen
Gets Comfortable with Change and Calamity
she’d had to reschedule our interview due to a nagging sinus infection, the kind that refuses to vacate the body in spite of press obligations and looming rehearsals.
She’s seated in a sun-drenched, plant-filled room in her home in Asheville, NC, and through the windows behind her you can see the culprits — Asheville is heavy with spring, a place overflowing with green and blossoms and pollen.
“It’s so pretty, but then the wind blows,” she says, laughing. “And then I’m like, ‘Maybe I should stay inside.’” Safely inside the walls of her home, she’s been practicing Big Time songs for a series of upcoming solo performances. She sounds at ease as she describes playing the new songs alone on her guitar, their three-chords-and-the-truth tenderness a world away from the sci-fi extravagance of 2019’s All Mirrors.
“I was surprised by it, but I love how easy these songs are to play,” she says of that left-turn from a left-turn. “I’m excited about that. Because playing ‘Lark’ seven times in a row at a rehearsal in a back room is like, psychotic.”
Big Time doesn’t completely abandon the grandness of Olsen’s previous full-length, but it’s an altogether warmer and gentler vision, horns and strings arriving like sun showers rather than hurricanes.
“I know the songs are still sad, but ... country music can be sad and happy at the same time. And I can kind of convince myself that it’s easygoing,” she says.
Despite its hard-earned sense of acceptance, Big Time is anything but easygoing. Olsen spends the album grappling with a domino-collapse of loss and discovery that left her to revaluate three decades of life, and to find comfort — even humour — in change and calamity. As she sings on the loping “This Is How it Works,” “I’m moving everything around / I won’t get attached to the way that it was.”
“I’m realizing that, yeah, it does get harder,” she says. “It does. They lied to me! Everyone lied about how it gets.”
She continues, “The plot is continuously thickening in my life. And I think I’m at a point where I’m more at peace with that, and I’m learning to laugh more at it.”
Though a large portion of the record was written beforehand,
Big Time came to be partially shaped by the loss of Olsen’s parents. They passed within a month of one another, not long after Olsen came out to them as queer.
“I’m gonna be working on that shit forever,” Olsen says, her smile softening. “But I’m learning to just be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna try to get through this once more.’”
Getting through it has proven both painful and rejuvenating, and Olsen describes long bouts of directionless frustration as she attempted to make sense of this new version of the world.
“I watched so much TV. And I would wash the laundry, but it would never get out of the basket. And I would just get so fucking pissed at, like, the superficial conversations that I would have with people,” she says. “I would be so annoyed that life just continued on. Like, people were fine.”
She continues, “For me, there was a big unraveling. I thought I knew myself before. And then a lot of stuff came to the surface. I haven’t really thought about any of this stuff because I’ve been so busy trying to fit into the world. And now that the world is maybe ending, where do I fit in with myself?”
Part of what came floating to the surface was Olsen’s understanding of her queerness. It’s a journey that’s addressed in sensitive, glittering oaths across Big Time; as she sings on “Go Home,” “The truth is with you / You can’t rehearse it / Pretend to know it / It’s time to live it.”
“I might regret it later. But right now, I guess I feel like — maybe it’s the pandemic — I’m just tired of the bullshit,” she says about this newfound approach of considered openness. “And like, this is my life.”
Or, as she sang more than a decade ago on Strange Cacti’s “Some Things Cosmic,” “I want to be naked / I don’t mean my body.” “It helps me to be able to share [these songs] and feel like, ‘Oh, someone relates,’” she says. “That makes me feel less alone, too.”
But being transparent about this new frontier has introduced Olsen to fresh challenges with press, a part of the job that she’s long said leaves her drained.
“It’s overwhelming, when there’s a certain personality that’s like, ‘Okay, that was great Angel. But if you could say that again, in this way?’ Like, bitch?” She’s laughing again, but there’s a small ember of genuine frustration in her voice as she recounts the attempts to blanche and pre-package her queerness for soundbites and pride-approved blurbs.
“I want to celebrate being queer and being proud,” she says. “[But it doesn’t] have to be like, a targeted moment.” Even in her good-natured indignation, Olsen says she understands the quiet (though sometimes overstated) value in visibility.
“I don’t think [my mom] understood me being gay, but she thankfully was very loving about it,” she says. “And that’s not always the case for other people.”
She says, “In reality, some people need to know, because it helps them feel like somebody out there understands their experience and is in their corner. So ultimately, that’s why I say yes to the commercial pride stuff.”
It’s another thickening of the plot, and Olsen’s clarity on the subject — that there is no clarity, that life’s bends can’t be explained in soundbites, or even songs — is a gift that she partially attributes to the ache of the past two years.
“I think the loss of my parents has really brought stuff to the surface that matters most, and the kind of conversation that I want in life has been clear to me since that,” she says. “So, I’m not mad at that lesson.”