The early months of the pandemic were feverish in more ways than one for Angel Olsen. “Since the lockdown started, I have been in queer relationships. One right after the other. In the first one, the person was like, ‘Is this an experiment for you, or is it real?’” the cult singer-songwriter says from her home in Asheville, North Carolina, as she prepares to return to Ireland for a long-awaited live performance.
Those same doubts nagged at Olsen. Was her queerness – she identifies as pansexual – just a phase? She received the answer when the love affair went sour and she found happiness in another gay relationship, with her partner Beau Thibodeaux (who is trans and non-binary). So it wasn’t something she needed to get out of her system: this was her true self. At a dark time – personally and in the world at large – that revelation was a moment of grace in the gloom.
“It happened again. For me, it was important that it happen twice. Because I did wonder if it was just an experiment,” she says. “It wasn’t, obviously. I was still learning how to access that part of myself.
“It took the heartbreak for me to be like, ‘Wow, that’s what that’s supposed to feel like – when a relationship ends’. That’s what break-ups feel like. It took breaking up in the first one for me to be like, ‘Oh, I was really gay for this person’. Which is ridiculous. I mean, I’ve been destroyed by relationships, sure. But with cis men, it’s easier to be like, ‘Well, they’re stupid’.”
Love, loss and how to live through both are the themes unpacked in Olsen’s extraordinary sixth album Big Time, which was released over the summer. A record about circling back to your true self – whether that be romantically or musically – it has been universally heralded as one of the year’s essential listens.
“A joyful, triumphant breakthrough,” said Rolling Stone. “The kind of music that recalls the kind of artists who operate on universal levels – Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley or Emmylou Harris, for example,” agreed the NME.
All those artists lived their lives through their art and vice versa. That is equally true of Olsen – and never more so than with Big Time. As she was reconciling herself to her queerness – finally learning how to accept it and nurture it – so she was coming home in a songwriting sense. She did so by making an LP steeped in the country music she was raised on in St Louis, Missouri.
People are afraid of saying the wrong thing about bereavement. So they don’t say anything
Dolly Parton, Dusty Springfield, Hank Williams and the late Loretta Lynn are among the influences in whose likeness the stunning record was hewn. It’s a tour de force that gives a new lick of paint to old-time Americana, even as it unpacks the darkest chapters of Olsen’s tumultuous lockdown.
Her romantic upheavals are in the mix. But if Big Time pulsates with heartache and sensuality, it is, above all, a meditation on bereavement and making it through to the other side. This was inevitable, given that it was written in the untethered days and weeks after the deaths of her 78-year-old mother and 89-year-old father in 2021.
[ Angel Olsen: Big Time — Loss and love permeate her best album so farOpens in new window ]
There’s a matter-of-factness to how Olsen sings about loss that is both refreshing and devastating. All The Good Times, with which the record begins, recalls one of her final conversations with her mother. It took place over the phone as her mother lingered in the bed in which she would die and her daughter, hundreds of miles away, tried to communicate her love and gratitude.
“Thanks for the free ride/And all of the good times,” sings Olsen. Around her, guitars twang, filtering the sadness into a great big country-rock sob.
Her parents, who had adopted Olsen, died within two months of each other. As she speaks to The Irish Times, the first anniversary of her mother’s death has just passed.
“It’s been a hard week. It’s been kind of intense. And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be another day’. Then the brothers and sisters call. And it’s almost like, ‘If you could just ignore your calls and maybe think it’s another day’.”
I kind of let myself go a little bit. I went back to old habits for a while and forgave myself
The loss has rewired her as a person, she feels. “The only way I can describe it is, the veil is lifted,” she says. “The most intense part of it is not even really missing them. I do miss them. But it’s also that you are faced with your own mortality. You don’t find joy in the stupid conversations you used to find joy in. Then you’re like, ‘S**t – I have to find someone to get deep with’. It can be a little sad because you lose people in the process.
“And then some friends don’t even know how to ask, so they don’t ask. I remember having to tell my friend, ‘It’s okay to ask me about it – it would be cool if you brought it up some time’. It’s hard for people until they go through it. People are afraid of saying the wrong thing. So they don’t say anything. It takes a while – but everyone will go through it [losing a parent] in this life.”
Grief is a haze that leaves you flailing in the dark but which, paradoxically, can bring clarity. Those were the poles between which Olsen swung when she packed her stuff and drove from Missouri to California the day after her mother’s funeral. She’d left St Louis for Topanga Canyon outside Los Angeles and a studio operated by producer (and one-man prog rock revival) Jonathan Wilson. Without a project on which to focus she might have gone dangerously adrift. As it was, Olsen – who has previously struggled with drugs and alcohol – became slightly rudderless.
“I was drinking a lot and smoking cigarettes. Doing stuff I hadn’t done in a while,” she says. “I kind of let myself go a little bit. I went back to old habits for a while and forgave myself. I didn’t really care about anything else other than making a record, and I put all my focus into it. I’m glad I had something, because I would have just been doing a whole lot of disruptive s**t.”
It’s scary to tell your parents you’re coming out, because you’re afraid you might lose them
Olsen is among the most singular voices of her generation of songwriters. Within the indie community there is a sense that she is a potential superstar. “Angel’s making a lot of new fans right now,” Jon Coombs, vice-president of A&R at her record label Jagjaguwar, told the LA Times in June. “I think about her peers, folks in the scene, and I think Angel’s kind of the one.”
Adopted at age three by her foster parents, Olsen grew up the youngest of a religiously observant family of eight in St Louis, which has one of the highest crime rates in North America. She moved to Chicago in her early 20s, intending to break into music. There she met Will Oldham, aka gothic troubadour Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. She became a member of his touring band, the Cairo Gang, while writing what would become her 2012 debut album Halfway Home.
[ Angel Olsen: ‘I want to burn the house down, that’s the vibe I want to set’Opens in new window ]
That record went under the radar. Two years later, though, Olsene became an “overnight” sensation with her follow-up Burn Your Fire For No Witness. “Wringing maximal yearning out of minimal arrangements,” said Rolling Stone, which labelled her a “no-budget Roy Orbison”. Further acclaim came with 2016′s My Woman, which carried a jagged post-punk edge, and 2019′s lushly-arranged All Mirrors, which was praised by Pitchfork as a series of “grand gestures about romance, authenticity, and being simply at the mercy of how we feel”.
But even as Olsen’s profile grew, she was falling apart. The artwork of All Mirrors was taken by her then boyfriend, a professional photographer. He framed her as a femme fatale – mysterious, provocative, alluring and unknowable. She regretted going down that route almost immediately, as she told me the year after the album came out.
“I was participating in being objectified. I still struggle with that. I do want to feel good. I want to be pretty, I want to be handsome. I want to be interesting-looking. Just like anybody. The power of an image is still powerful,” she told me in the summer of 2020 (around the time she was coming to terms with her sexuality).
“The power of an image can change your life. But what I’m realising is also I need to give myself a break. I’m going to get older. I can’t just play this pin-up girl role. I have to play other roles. I’m not against using image as an advertisement for work I care about. I wouldn’t put music into the world if it wasn’t talking about something. What I’m saying is, f**k what you think about my pin-up girl look. I don’t care any more. Can’t I just be able to get old in front of you – so just get used to that?”
Big Time is different. There is no soft-focused artwork. And the songs are almost straightforward: they brim with twanging guitars while Olsen sings as though headlining the country music temple Grand Ole Opry circa 1977.
Lyrically, too, it’s the most uncluttered project Olsen has put out. With her early work, you had to sit with her songs to divine their meaning. Now she’s coming out and telling you what she’s thinking. “And I’m losing, I’m losing, I’ve left it behind,” she sings on the title track – a paean to that lockdown romance which unravelled but left her with that precious understanding of who she truly was.
“It’s probably the most easy listening, comprehensible thing I’ve made,” she says. “For a while, I was really trying to out-genre genre, chasing different themes and different kinds of sounds so much that people couldn’t catch up. This record offers people a listening experience that’s more immersive, maybe, because the songs are all related to each other. The sounds are similar enough that they are related to each other.”
I don’t know if it’s something in the air, but I’m like a magnet for weirdos. They come to me. They find me
She came out to her parents a few weeks before her father died. Around the same time, she went public with her relationship with Thibodeaux on Instagram. It was difficult and she had doubts as to whether she was doing the right thing.
“You know, it was scary for me, as a 35-year-old, to come out late and be like, ‘I’m queer’. And I’ve been in this relationship I’ve been hiding for months, you know, from my parents and everyone I know. I needed to make sure that I wasn’t hiding and that I didn’t fear hiding. And it’s scary to tell your parents because you’re afraid you might lose them.”
What kept her going was knowing that coming out might be a source of solace to fans who may, like her, have struggled with their sexuality. Perhaps it would help them to know they were not alone. She also feels it is important to take a stand in the aftermath of the Donald Trump presidency and its legacy.
“I was like, ‘Well, at least the gays will have another. You know, it’s a win for the gays’. Perhaps they’re having a hard time coming out. Or they came out and they lost their family. I’ll be part of their chosen family. You know what I mean? I think that’s important to say. Especially now, as we’re living in a world where we’re trying to deconstruct the Trump administration, which is bringing us back to the 1950s.”
I don’t know if it’s my perspective or if it’s my attitude, or what. The fact is, I’ll probably continue to write songs about love and heartache because that’s vulnerability. That’s life
Olsen has stopped smoking again and is taking care of her health. Her romantic life is stable too. She is proud to identify as pansexual (defined as an attraction to people regardless of their sex or gender identity) and at ease about having her personal life out there for her fans. But does she worry that, without a gushing well of anguish on which to draw, songwriting might run dry? Smiling, she says there is little chance of that happening.
“For whatever reason, I attract the weirdest people and the weirdest scenarios,” she says. “I had a really strange week this week. And I don’t know if it’s something in the air, but I’m like a magnet for weirdos. They come to me. They find me. And I get ‘got’ by them sometimes.
“I don’t know if it’s my perspective or if it’s my attitude, or what. The fact is, I’ll probably continue to write songs about love and heartache because that’s vulnerability. That’s life. That’s the whole thing.”
Big Time is out now. Angel Olsen plays Vicar Street in Dublin on October 24
