Angel Olsen Wants You To Know She’s Not A Cool Dude
"The truth is that I like dumb shit, and I spend a fraction of my time making cerebral music, or whatever you want to call it."
“Like, all of the misinterpretations that have happened around my music are probably the reason my music has succeeded,” says Angel Olsen. “It would be detrimental if I could control anything, anyway.”
There’s no resignation or frustration in Olsen’s voice: talking to me over the phone from her home in North Carolina, she’s warm but matter-of-fact about it. Even among her fans — and journalists, judging by some of the writing about Olsen — there’s a lot of different ideas around her music, coming to a head with 2016’s My Woman, an album quickly contextualised within the year’s hot feminist topics.
“When My Woman came out, Hillary Clinton was up for debate,” she says. “It wasn’t all planned out this way, but it fell into this pocket of politics and then the #MeToo movement, et cetera — at a time where people really wanted to stand their ground and talk about those subjects, and talk about those things. And it just so happened that my record was titled something that seemed empowering to people. And it was about some of those things.”
It was ultimately reductive, though: My Woman, Olsen’s third album, is a maelstrom of ideas and images. It’s precisely the sort of album that defies neat thesis through-lines, jumping in tone and sound between sick love songs (‘Shut Up Kiss Me’), eerie synth ballads (‘Intern’) and sprawling, ’70s influenced epics (‘Woman’).
On title alone, Olsen’s recent follow-up All Mirrors appears to play with that endless refraction: ironically, people immediately took it in a different direction.
“A lot of people said, ‘This has to do with the current state of affairs. Are you talking about social media erasing the self?’,” she says. “And I was just like, ‘This is all cool stuff, but that’s not what I intended.’ But I really like what people come up with when I make something. I’m learning to just feel less like it’s up to me, because it’s not really.”
What is All Mirrors, then? To start with the facts, it’s eleven tracks, built up from acoustic versions — Olsen’s original plan was to have a dopplegänger album alongside the originals. But she landed somewhere different after re-recording them: the All Mirrors we have is opulent yet eerie, with opener ‘Lark’ keeping its 11-piece orchestra, as the Guardian note, on the “constant verge of dissonance”.
On the verge of dissonance might be the best way to describe All Mirrors, an album which plays with its audience by mashing synths, strings and Olsen’s ethereal yet ominous tone. Meaning is just out of grasp: a swell of feeling remains, which might be why we’re so quick to try to contextualise it.
‘All I Have Is My Cerebral Music’
All Mirrors, Olsen’s fourth album (or fifth, if we include 2017’s Phases, a collection of B-sides), arrives just a few months after her biggest moment to date: ‘True Blue’, a roller-disco track on Mark Ronson’s most recent album, Late Night Feelings.
Her distinct voice — flecked with distance, often sounding, even live, as if it is arriving via an old radio transmitter — suits Ronson’s ’70s leaning production well. She passed on a song she didn’t know what to do with after Ronson got in touch, somewhat out of the blue.
“[Ronson said], ‘Hey, I know that you probably don’t work with producers like me, but I really would love to work with you,” she said. “And I listened to My Woman when I was going through my breakup, and this record’s about a breakup.”
“It’s nice to have so much collaboration in your work that you can forget that it’s yours a little bit.”
That’s true for All Mirrors as much as it is ‘True Blue’. It began in isolation, recorded and written largely alone, with Olsen hiding out in friend Phil Elverum’s (aka Mount Eerie) favourite studio in the small seaside town of Anacortes, Washington. It soon became something very different.
“As soon as I got back from finishing recording these songs, a week later I was communicating about how to change them, and make them completely different,” she says. “It was this mind fuck in a way, but it was a really good exercise because I finally had the freedom to change them completely and make them something else, because I had already recorded them in the way that I was used to.”
Working with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Lucy Dacus, Erykah Badu, et. al) as well as composers Ben Babbitt and Jherek Bischoff, Olsen created a sprawling, orchestral world that at once felt her own, and not at all. Hearing the string sections on ‘Lark’ for the first time was bizarre, she says, but in a good way. It was a song she had been writing for six years, and finally, it was correct.
“The truth is that I like dumb shit, and I spend a fraction of my time making cerebral music, or whatever you want to call it. But I like goofy shit, and I am a huge dork. I’m not a cool person. You know what I mean? I’m not like a ‘cool dude’.”
“[For years], it felt like an anthem in my head,” she says. “I could feel the anthem in my head, but translating it to a solo performance sometimes isn’t always… I can do it, but I think it’s really fucking cool with the band, it makes it so much bigger with the band. More emotional.”
A song about trust and support, ‘Lark’ oscillates between hope, compromise and disappointment. Strings swell, guitars come and go, blowing Olsen’s emotions out to all-enveloping melodrama. It’s stubborn in its refusal to be simple, instead continually shifting gear: as Olsen says, “‘Lark’ really went from being this song that I felt triumphant about that people couldn’t hear all the time, to it musically reflecting that.”
If you’ve seen Olsen live, you’ll know she — like Perfume Genius, Sharon Van Etten or other baroque-pop leaning contemporaries — is quite funny on-stage, far from the mysterious, foreboding presence on her music. We talk about how profiles often make her into this mythical figure (or sad girl, as we spoke about last album cycle): as with Lana Del Rey circa 2011, there seems to be this need to pin her down in order to understand the music. But Olsen isn’t that interested in performance.
“I think people listening to my music are like, ‘This is a person walking around the world always thinking these things and always feeling these things,'” she says. “[But] the truth is that I like dumb shit, and I spend a fraction of my time making cerebral music, or whatever you want to call it. But I like goofy shit, and I am a huge dork. I’m not a cool person. You know what I mean? I’m not like a ‘cool dude’.”
“When people describe me in a way that’s like they’re trying to figure out who I am. I don’t know, it’s weird… All I have is my cerebral music, that’s my only disguise when it comes to any amount of cool. The rest is just bullshit, you know? So it’s interesting to me when people try to write about me as a whole, as a person, as a character in this way, because I know that it’s just funny. It’s always completely wrong.”
Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors is out now, via Jagjaguwar Records.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. He is on Twitter.