Angel Olsen
The singer-songwriter explains how heartbreak triggered a creative left turn
Welcome to Asheville, North Carolina, where ANGEL OLSEN is poised to release her new album, All Mirrors. Erin Osmon joins the singer-songwriter at home to discuss heartbreak, fantasy property deals and her latest bold pop experiment. “Sometimes your dreams are not what they seem,” she says
THE Montford neighbourhood of Asheville, North Carolina feels like a secret garden. Historic homes are framed by kindly old trees, crawling ivy, blooming hostas and rustic stone. A chorus of birds flies in constant song. Walking the narrow streets, there’s a congruent sense of charm and mystery, the product of its fiercely protected antiqueness, like a fairytale hideaway from the Brothers Grimm. “That’s the house,” Angel Olsen explains, pointing across the street. “That was my dream house.” Olsen has lived in Asheville for six years, and has recently become a homeowner. But the house she gazes at is not hers. This house is a relic of a former life. Its pitched roof and gable are reminiscent of the so-called Storybook homes built throughout the 1920s, part English cottage and part Swiss chalet, with a generous helping of Seuss-ian whimsy. For years, Olsen admired this charming little home. It was an aspirational symbol of the security and prosperity she desired for herself and her future family, one that seemed increasingly realistic amid her growing success.
A native of St Louis, Missouri, Olsen has been making records for a decade, but her breakthrough came with 2014’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness, her folk-rock crossover and debut for indie stalwart Jagjaguwar. She was first a fixture on the Chicago DIY scene, playing basement shows and releasing homespun cassettes of modern folk songs characterised by her wild and unique voice. In Chicago, Olsen gained momentum with her second record, an earthen folk tome titled Half Way Home, which she recorded at the home of the singer, songwriter and producer Emmett Kelly, with whom she played in Will Olham’s backing band. She then moved to Asheville and released Burn Your Fire… – a breakthrough set that reframed her as the leader of a rock band, and presented an equally vulnerable but more assertive and sparky version of the singer, songwriter and guitarist. She followed that with My Woman in 2016, cranking the individualistic rocker version of Olsen to 10 and making her something of a star. In June, she appeared on the track “True Blue” by omnipresent pop producer Mark Ronson.
From the outside, then, Olsen seemed to have it all. But early last year her long-term relationship ended, sending her into a tailspin of isolation and doubt. Taking a drag from an American Spirit cigarette, her hair in a sculptural pile, and eyes lined in black, Olsen considers that acute sense of loss.
“I was never married but I consider it a divorce because I was with this person for a very long time,” she says. “I deeply love this person still, and we’re still friends, and I really respect them. We can hang out and get a beer and support each other. We’re both just trying to find our way.”
Suddenly, she was a single woman in a small, tight-knit community, in Asheville and in the greater stratum of indierock, worlds that recognised her as a successful musician, but maybe not a human being.
“Being humiliated by it, and feeling like somebody everybody talks shit about or says, ‘You know, she’s a genius at work, but what is going on with her personal life?’ With that sort of fear and insecurity, isolation ensues,” Olsen says. “Imagine if your friend group and community left you, or didn’t take a stand when you were left behind.”
Largely informed by the heartache and uncertainty Olsen felt as the relationship ended, she recorded new album All Mirrors in LA with John Congleton – whose credits include St Vincent and Sharon Van Etten. It’s an epic survey of love, heartbreak and rebirth that trades the vintage rock sound heard on My Woman for a bold symphony of synthesisers and strings. Olsen and Congleton worked together on Burn Your Fire For No Witness and had remained friends. But according to Congleton, this experience was wildly different than the first. “My feeling going into it was that I was hopefully going to get to make a record that was a little more adventurous, like a little more adventurous for her,” he says. “But I assumed it would feel somewhat conservative because that’s sort of the way she was when we worked on Burn Your Fire… She was protective. Not in a bad way at all... she just wanted it to be fairly literal as to just how the band sounded, which I had no problem with.” He soon learned, however, that Olsen was becoming attracted to sweeping arrangements, electronics and strings – an entirely new sound for her – and was open to Congleton’s input on how to make that happen. “She was awesome... bright and bold. I really appreciate how trusting she was,” he adds. Olsen is a master at shattering expectations of her, and All Mirrors continues that tradition. For her, it seems the only constant is change.
AFTER her breakup, Olsen began spending a lot of time in LA, and considered moving there. In the fall of 2018, she embarked on her first solo tour since the release of Burn Your Fire… It provided needed distance and clarity. “It was special,” Olsen says. “I realised a lot of the stress I felt wasn’t at all to do with my relationship with this person. It was from the responsibility I felt to make everyone feel happy and valued. No-one thought to check in about my happiness because I had everything. People were buying tickets to my shows, and my records, and I was dancing my ass off on stage. Why would they need to check in with me?”
Before she left for that tour she made a radical choice. One day last summer, as she was driving past the Storybook house that had once symbolised so much, she noticed a dreamy brick Tudor across the street. “I walked around the property and then told my realtor I wanted to put an offer in,” she says. “She [the realtor] was like, ‘Are you sure? I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t even want to see it. I want to put it in an offer.’” A week later she was going through inspections. Today, it’s her home. “I didn’t know it was going to be such an emotional thing,” she adds. “It’s like a marriage. It’s like death. Having a baby. It’s this incredible feeling that I needed.”
A renewed sense of community soon followed. “It was really nice that I was able to build it back up the way that I wanted with the people that I knew were there,” she says. Cultivating new friendships and repairing old ones created a support network for Olsen that complemented the roots she was putting down. “After that I was like, ‘Man, I’m so glad I was heartbroken because I’m so glad I have a heart,” she says. “And now I can see people’s hearts for what they are under pressure.”
On a tour through her sloping backyard, Olsen motions to the garage that she plans to renovate into an office with a loft where guests can stay. She also wants to install a Jacuzzi near the fire pit that’s framed with gravel and outdoor chairs. “Not yet though,” she adds. “Someone’s going to have to lift up all the rocks, and I have to be here for that shit.” Framed by a sea of mature trees, it feels like Olsen’s own little bit of wilderness, a far-off place just a few miles from downtown.
Olsen’s beloved cat Violet greets her as she enters the kitchen through the side door of the house. “She’s my best friend,” Olsen says, nuzzling Violet’s long grey fluff to her cheek. In the living room, crates of records sit on the floor near a fireplace, and an antique upright piano with ivory keys is pushed against the wall. It was a gift from the drummer Eric Slick of Philadelphia rock band Dr Dog. “I just found out that Moses [Sumney] recorded one of his records with it,” she says. “Moses knows Eric too, the world is so small.” The original red-andwhite illustration from the cover of Burn Your Fire…, by the Asheville artist Kreh Mellick, hangs on a wall in the dining room. Olsen grabs a can of beer, cracks it, and heads to the back porch.
OLSEN has just returned home from the North Carolina coast, where she shot a video for the song “Lark”, a single from her new album. Olsen and cinematographer Ashley Connor, a longtime collaborator, worked on the concept together, which involves the beach at sunrise, horses, drones, rain and multiple locations. “This one was the hardest we’ve made because there was like seven minutes. It felt like we were in [the film] Twister, chasing a tornado,” she says. “We got up at 5am trying to get the horses on the beach, which was frustrating because we couldn’t really get them to run to the ocean.”
Olsen’s been in her new house for about a year. At this point she finds that living across the street from an emblem of a shattered dream has its advantages. It’s a visible call for reflection, to contemplate and grow from the past.
“Sometimes your dreams are not what they seem,” she says. “But you need to dream them to lead you to the thing that is the purpose in your life.” Each day when she wakes up to the reminder of what was, she uses it to celebrate what is. “I spent all this time dreaming about how this was the perfect thing for me, and right across the street is where I’m putting down my roots,” she adds. It’s a fitting metaphor for the genesis of her new album.
All Mirrors marks yet another dramatic shift in Olsen’s sound. Centred on glimmering synthesisers, atmospheric synth drones and sweeping string arrangements, it reframes the folk singer-turned-rock band leader as a glorious and devastating torch ballad orator, melding the left-field quality of Kate Bush, the atmospherics of Brian Eno and the time-honoured sound of jazz singers like Mildred Bailey. Much like Olsen’s journey from metaphorical dream home, to actual dream home, the material that comprises All Mirrors went through a broad reimagining before it became the album it is today.
Olsen’s original vision for All Mirrors was to release it as a double LP. The first record would be a stripped down affair recalling her singersongwriter roots, without many overdubs or added instrumentation. She travelled to Anacortes, a port city on Fidalgo Island in the Pacific Northwest, to record with producer Michael Harris, who worked on My
Woman, at The Unknown, an independent recording studio housed in a former Catholic church.
She then sent these songs to a few trusted collaborators with the intention of creating the second record, a version that would flesh out the tracks for a more fully produced interpretation. Amid the conceptualisation, Olsen invited La-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Babbitt to a rehearsal studio she’d rented in LA. The pair have known each other for a decade, dating to their shared roots in the Chicago DIY scene. Today, Babbitt scores films and video games, in addition to collaborating with songwriters like Cross Record and Weyes Blood. “She was starting work on this new record and wanted to see if we would gel playing together, and working together in some way,” Babbitt explains. “Immediately I knew I’d love to write some string arrangements for any of the demos she was showing me. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do since I heard her music for the first time about 10 years ago.”
Olsen also enlisted the composer and avant pop musician Jherek Bischoff for string arrangements, which provided a lush and romantic juxtaposition to Babbitt’s experimental edge. Bischoff also conducted the 11-piece string section that became so integral to the expressions of heartbreak and rebirth on All Mirrors, a masterstroke melding past and future touchstones for a profound meditation on the symbiotic relationship between love and loss.
Because they worked together so well in preproduction, Babbitt’s role soon expanded to playing an entire suite of synths, guitars, piano and even some percussion and strings. He fleshed out Olsen’s original lyrics and melodies to form a cinematic world of light and shadow. “We were trying to find a path towards something more unusual for her,” he says. “She didn’t want to use the same instrumentation, the same collage. She wanted to do something more expansive, and that was really exciting.” He contributed so much that Olsen credited him as a co-writer on eight of the LP’S 11 tracks. “I couldn’t deny his contributions,” Olsen says. “There’s no bone to pick about it. I’m so happy he contributed his heart to it.”
Olsen has a propensity for keeping the matters of her career in her chosen family. It’s a matter of trust, and also of practicality. She values the relationships she’s built over time, and knows that it requires a lot of work to build new ones. “I never let anyone in very easily,” she says. Because of this she tends to work with people she’s known for years, which allows her to remain hands-on in a way that many artists aren’t or don’t
“SHE WAS AWESOME… BRIGHT AND BOLD”
JOHN CONGLETON