“It was a bit Fleetwood Mac…”
Angel Olsen talks to Victoria Segal.
How are you?
“I woke up with a head cold so I’m a little bit out of it. Other than that, I feel really grateful – I’m really excited about this record. I’m looking at outfits and stuff for the band to wear on tour. Last time, I got them these baby-blue suits, but they were a wool-polyester blend and they absolutely hated me for it because they were so stinky. I was thinking, ‘What if, since this is a country record, I have everyone wear denim?’ Then I saw that Harry Styles’s backing band was playing with all denim on at Coachella. I was like, ‘OK, whatever – we can still do denim.’”
You think of this as a “country record”?
“I think some of it is leaning toward Americana and stuff like that but it’s not, like, a Kacey Musgraves record. It’s not country in the way a lot of people think of country. I listen to a lot of ’70s stuff like Neil Young and Kris Kristofferson and I like that kind of music.” You’ve peeled back the goth atmospheres of All Mirrors…
“It wasn’t my intention for the vocal to be that loud! When we were mixing, I kept saying to Jonathan [Wilson, co-producer], ‘You know you can bring the band up!’ I like that the instrument of the record is the voice and what I’m saying. A lot of my career since [2010 EP] Strange Cacti was me trying to build a wall of sound behind me that would sort of get people’s attention to hear the words – and now I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head, it doesn’t have to do backflips. We can just make something good that’s classic-sounding and has space in it.”
On Dream Thing, you sing about trying to remember the lyrics to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s Black Captain [Olsen was in Will Oldham’s band around 2011’s Wolfroy Goes To Town]. What’s that about?
“It’s kind of a reflection of working with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and [his collaborator] Emmett Kelly. My relationship with them now is non-existent. You spend two years working with someone and memorising all their songs to never speak to them again. It was professional almost to a fault. I was having dreams a lot about Emmett because we had dated briefly and I had finally seen him after years of not talking with him and it was really nice. It was such a formative time for me, I couldn’t really let go of how weird that experience was. I’m really grateful for all the things I learned about being in a touring band – but when I got my band together and started to tour, I was like, ‘I want to do it differently, I don’t want it to be disconnected, I don’t want it to be cold.’ I was such a child then, I was just learning and it took me a long time to grapple with the fact that I would never be close to these people I spent this really excellent time with. It was a bit Fleetwood Mac
– I didn’t understand at the time maybe don’t date someone in the band. Would I be here without having that experience? Would I have written Burn Your Fire For No Witness? I don’t know if I would have written it. Part of that record was me being like, ‘Fuck the patriarchy and fuck bitter dudes!’”