- Written By David Bevan
- | March 24, 2014 - 12:51 pm | Updated 4 years ago
Home » Features » Cover Story » Angel Olsen Will Be Heard
On a wet Friday morning, one week before Valentine's Day, Angel Olsen receives an unexpected e-mail from a friend named Sergio. "He's asking me if I want to come to an island somewhere off the coast of Portugal," she says, lips tightly pursed. "He wants to know if I'd like to record there for two weeks, in a studio, for free. It sounds great, but you read something like this and you're like, 'What's the catch, exactly? Why me? Why do I deserve this?'"
Sergio and his wife live in Lisbon, where they run Galeria Zé Bois, or ZDB, a non-profit art center housed in a gargantuan 18th-century palace. For years, he's been booking European shows for Will Oldham, the American folk iconoclast with whom Olsen began working, harmonizing, and touring the world when she was 23. While she says it's unlikely that she'll be able to take Sergio up anytime soon, her last two questions are easily answered: He's clearly heard her sing.Because Olsen, now 27, has a voice that can trigger a collision of feeling. Consider "Hi-Five," from her sophomore LP Burn Your Fire For No Witness, a thrilling number in which she pays Patsy Cline-like homage to Hank Williams at its opening ("I'm so lonesome I could cry") and offers revelation at its summit. "Are you lonely, too?" she asks, a whisper before a thunderclap. "High five! So am I!"At this particular moment, the dagger-eyed singer-songwriter is stirring in her new home in Asheville, North Carolina, packing a bag to take with her to High Five, a coffee shop we'll walk to not because of said song's title, she swears, but simply because she likes the coffee. It's unusually cold in Asheville right now, a storm having left a thin coat of ice on the Blue Ridge as it passed through in the night. And Olsen, bleary-eyed in a black wool sweater, was up late with a small group of friends, hand-rolling T-shirts to be sold on an extensive headlining tour of North America and Europe that will take her away from Asheville for much of the next four months, in support of Burn Your Fire For No Witness, a feverish set of high-wire torch songs that doesn't deserve an audience so much as it cautiously demands one. Recorded here last summer, it's the first album she's written since leaving Oldham's outfit in the summer of 2012, and the first she's recorded while leading a band of her own, in this artist-friendly mountain town she decided she'd make her home a few months later.In a week, her bandmates will arrive from Chicago for a handful of rehearsals before they embark on tour. To help with the driving, she very recently and reluctantly obtained a North Carolina driver's license — her first since allowing her Missouri license to expire five years ago, not long after she'd left her hometown of St. Louis for the Windy City. In the past year, as her small but passionate following has grown exponentially in size, she's quickly been forced to reconsider her art: its value, its needs, and the ways in which she relates, as a writer and performer, to the absurdity of the idea that making records could change her life so much in such a short period of time. She now has a fan that one could, not unkindly, deem a stalker. She now has, much to her surprise, a team of people working for her, and a newly minted LLC in her name. She has no car, no clear sense of Asheville just yet. She has a long, handwritten list of medical debts hanging on her refrigerator door. She is a self-described "dumb-ass," who, for the first time, can show fellow musicians the world like Oldham once did for her."I wouldn't normally do this," she says as we walk, "but two days ago, I got a massage." She laughs at herself. "It's the stress: Maybe I'll never get to make another record; maybe I should just enjoy this. Because all of it wavers on whether or not people find my music and my thoughts interesting. That's my life: It's pretty fucked up, if you think about it."
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But part of Olsen's allure was and is that her own story seems so tightly woven into every word she sings, that she makes us believe her feelings arrive completely unfiltered, without artifice. "I'm not afraid of revealing myself," Olsen says. "For the sake of being a little embarrassed sometimes, why not write about things that people don't write about?"
Eventually, she adds, she had to decide whether or not she'd do that for herself, or to continue to sing someone else's songs for them. "I ended up feeling like I was cheating myself by not following my own course," she says, of parting ways with Oldham. "By not taking my own chance, by not doing what he was doing, but for myself." The parting was amicable but awkward, in the way their off-stage partnership seems to have been. Upon receiving a text message from her team later in the day, asking if she thought they should send Oldham a copy of Burn Your Fire, Olsen balked. "I don't know," she told me as she thought aloud. "I don't want to be selfish. He sort of extended his insight, told me that if I ever have any questions, about anything, I could call him. But he's one of the most challenging people to talk to sometimes. I wonder if he knows what's going on with me, but at the same time, I hope that he's not being judgmental. He probably is."



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