OLSEN’S NEW ATTITUDE
Part of POP Montreal
Angel Olsen cradles her electric guitar and strums the opening chords of a song that will explode into two million homes across North America.
For about four minutes on a Monday night in August, Olsen and her bolo-tie-wearing bandmates own the CBS airwaves. One imagines the typical Late Show viewer — lying on a sofa at 12:30 a.m., covered in potato chip shrapnel and sweat — quietly having their mind blown.
The song, Shut Up Kiss Me, sounds less like Olsen’s typically haunting material than a romping, roller-skating good time.
Imagine the ghosts of Buddy Holly and new wave competing with a voice that could short-circuit a soundboard.
Pegged by critics as a purveyor of emotionally painful country music, Olsen enters something of a new era with her latest album. My Woman takes her band into more adventurous territory — the album is structured around pop melodies, guitar solos and a sense of fun that occasionally pierces through the darkness.
When they roll into town for a show Friday night at the POP Montreal festival, Olsen says, they’ll take the stage at the Rialto Theatre with a bit of an edge.
“Right now I just kind of want to kill this set, just slay it, you know?” said Olsen, 29, in a phone interview last week.
“It’s our first three shows of the new record, so we probably have some stuff to work out, but I feel like this band is killing it right now.”
My Woman comes on the heels of Olsen’s breakthrough record Burn Your Fire for No Witness (named one of 2014’s best albums by Pitchfork, Village Voice and AV Club). The album channels Nashville country music and folk through layer upon layer of distortion.
Olsen jokes that Burn Your Fire also cemented her image as the resident “sad girl” on the music festival circuit. But My Woman isn’t an attempt to shed that reputation.
“I’ve accepted that to some people, I’m this super sad, intense character from one of my songs,” she said.
“Once I was willing to move past that, to make fun of myself and laugh about it, I was able to just have fun playing music with my friends.
“It’s a very weird thing to play your songs over and over and over again to a point where you don’t know if you’re even there in that moment. After a while I thought, ‘If I’m going to be doing these songs over and over again, I want to be writing songs that I’m going to like more.’ ”
The songs that would become My Woman began pouring out of Olsen’s guitar from a tiny room in Asheville, N.C., last year.
It took just one sitting in her apartment for Olsen to reel off Shut Up Kiss Me.
Next came Not Gonna Kill You and Woman. Within a few weeks, Olsen had enough material to start rehearsing for the new album with her band.
“In the past, I think I spent too much time trying to make the words make sense, instead of musically diving in,” she said.
“For this record, I really wanted to let sounds happen and for my voice to open up and to sing more.”
To Olsen’s point, there’s a moment on Not Gonna Kill You — a psychedelic rock song about allconsuming love — where it feels like her voice will crash through the speakers and burst into flames. But somehow Olsen holds the wailing, high-pitched note and takes it a step higher before the song peaks.
This isn’t a feat of studio magic. Like most of the album, Not Gonna Kill You was recorded live rather
than overdubbed and assembled piece by piece.
“There are humbling moments within each song where we just play through it,” Olsen said.
“In Sister, the guitar solo goes out of tune and comes back in . ... My voice is flat at the beginning of some songs and I’m just like, ‘Oh, f--- it, we’ll just leave it.’
“Sometimes you lose something when you just add on a perfect guitar part later or the album is too crisp. With the album, we just wanted to learn it, play it, record it and know that we can perform it like that on tour.”
The tour is the latest step in Olsen’s decade-long journey as a professional musician.
She grew up in St. Louis, Mo. — where, as a child, she would write songs on a plastic Yamaha keyboard and record them on cassette tape — and moved to Chicago after she turned 20.
In Chicago, she auditioned for a spot backing folk-rocker Bonnie “Prince” Billy and paid her dues playing bars and clubs across the Midwest, before releasing her first album, Half Way Home, in 2012. Success and the madness of promoting Burn Your Fire taught Olsen about the life of a battlehardened musician.
“When I made Burn Your Fire, I was exhausted,” she said.
“I played 150 shows in a year and I was gaining weight and not eating well and not exercising. I was depressed and I was just like, ‘I want my life back.’
“Then I realized, ‘Oh, I don’t have to drink after every show.’ Or, ‘Oh yeah, if I play guitar for seven hours, my shoulder’s gonna go out.’ S--t like that started happening to me. I started to lose my voice and I realized I have to drink water. I just got older.”
Now, Olsen says, the band is intent on not burning itself out on the road.
The tour bus stops at a hotel every other day so band members can run on a treadmill, do laundry and grasp at some sense of normalcy.
The idea, she says, is for the musicians not to descend into a purgatorial state where a combination of repetitiveness, cabin fever and homesickness consumes them.
“Things are great right now — we’re excited, we’re happy, we’re anxious to be in Montreal,” Olsen said.
“I’m gonna eat so many bagels. I don’t eat bread but, I’m sorry, I just have to eat those bagels.”
In the past, I think I spent too much time trying to make the words make sense, instead of musically diving in.