Videos by American Songwriter
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In the Rickshaw Stop, it’s still not totally quiet. Olsen is finishing up a new song: I wish I had the voice of everything…to scream it back into nothingness. Afterwards, someone calls out: “Play a song!” And she tosses it back, kind of flirty: “Do you want to play it?”
Next up is “Acrobat,” which was named a top new track by Pitchfork when Half Way Home was released. She expands it, leaving gaps and spaces, and just like that there’s a power shift between her and the audience. Her face goes still and her gaze is penetrating and personal. Oh to be that distant thought, some growing meaning in your mind.
The loud audience voice says something to her and she says: “Someone is talking to me from the crowd. It’s awesome what we’re doing.” She peers out onto the floor. “Let’s talk later. I’m serious.”
After this, she has only a few more songs in the set. The crowd is all the way with her now. “It’s about to get real,” she says, adding, whimsically, that “hating makes you die faster.” And then she starts “Sweet Dreams,” a recently released rock song (on the seven-inch LP, Emily Elhaj plays bass and Emmett Kelly’s on rhythm guitar and drums). And then she shifts into the wistful half-lullaby, half-waltz “Some Things Cosmic.” It is a beautiful song—the one that Coombs of Jagjaguwar says hooked him and pulled him in deep; that will go down as one of her greats. People are swaying, captivated and sweetened and saddened. She takes a lot of care with each word, and for a minute the room feels old. I want to be naked. I don’t need my body. I don’t need my body, I’m floating away. I’m floating away.
So now the fans are really crazy about her, and she has to warn them that it’s almost over. “One more,” she says. “I need a break, I need a sandwich.” After that “one more,” she disappears with her band and comes out alone.
“Congratulations,” she says. “I’ve got a burrito waiting for me upstairs. And I started unwrapping it. And I heard you guys.”
After the show, in the green room, the burrito is still wrapped in a bag on the table. There’s a collection of empty cans of Hamm’s beer, and graffiti scrawls on the wall from other musicians who’ve passed through (“Yourself and the Air;” “Don’t put Twinkies on your pizza.”), and a plastic zip-lock bag with toothpaste and dental floss. It’s the end of day one: until last night’s house show, she and her bassist and drummer just sent tracks to the cellist, who was living in Oakland but who is now moving to Chicago. (The cellist, Danah Olivetree, once played with Sabrina Rush; “she’s classically trained and a free spirit,” Olsen says. “Danah knows her shit.”) Angel says that after playing alone for so long, she’s taking small steps toward something bigger with her band. She’s not going to let her voice down, though. “I wouldn’t write anything I don’t feel honest about,” she says. “I don’t want to conceal it.” She’s got a theory about how to stay true to your music and your vision if you’ve got a band. “When Bob Dylan goes from solo to performing with a band, it’s a different experience for the audience,” she says. “It’s up to the artist to realize how it stays intimate, and that it needs to be intimate.”
For the encore that night, she had begun playing “California,” released on the other side of the “Sweet Dreams” LP. “I can’t remember this song,” she said, and someone in the audience fed her a line. “What is it?” she asked.
Barrier of bodies!
She sang that.
“What is it?” she asked again.
We’d already be inside.
She laughed really hard and stopped. “That was a really cool encore,” she said. “Should I just sing a Joni Mitchell song?”
When people seemed to get excited, she said: “Go see Joni Mitchell, then. I hope you guys are buying a lot of drinks so you forget about….”
Then she took up “Strange Universe,” the song she’s said people assume is related to her adoption. It is haunting, one of her saddest, and tonight it arrested everyone. People stood, hands folded, not touching anyone else, in a lonely space. And at the time, I was only a child, about to lose my childlike mind. The way you touched my hands like you never did before. It wasn’t you anymore.
Silence.
“You guys made me nervous,” she said, before leaving the stage again. “It’s like I’m on a first date.”
Olsen’s voice is a little like her. She’ll go from deadpan (or, when singing, from straight melody) to some crazy new idea or jarring note. Whatever people say about a difference between her stage persona and personality, she always keeps a split nature.
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“I think the way she sings is really brave,” says Matt Kivel, L.A. musician who became a friend after they played together at the Bootleg. He’d requested to open for her after hearing her on a Bonnie “Prince” Billy record.
While her career momentum got going so quickly this past November and December, Olsen was writing. She went on a women’s retreat off the coast of Seattle and would record and send tracks to her new band. “There was a lot of change in my life with relationships,” she says. “I’m watching my friends get older.” Some of them have gone from DIY to owning their own spaces; from punk rock to business owners. And she’s making her career decisions. She calls it organization. “People start to recognize your music, and you’ve got to organize it,” she says. “I was trying to complain about that to my friends, but they’re stoked about it. So, you have to organize, you have to make decisions, you have to put yourself on the line.” She pauses. “As much as an artist might say it’s not personal, you’re always baring yourself. It’s good to take risks. And you need to get out the guitar.”
Part of the organizing was picking out her band. “She’s helping out musicians who are doing it for the right reasons,” Emily Elhaj says. “And that will help her. She’s got the big picture in mind.” Olsen had to make the call to sign with Jagjaguwar. She hadn’t been ready when Jon Coombs first approached before Half Way Home. And, anyway, she wanted to keep her intimate vibe. After Half Way Home, with people coming out of the woodwork, Hency convinced her to reconsider. “Since he was far away, it was hard to see how much energy he was using working for me,” Olsen says. “He was doing PR for me. And then, when we toured together, it was really apparent how much his heart was in it.”
Angel Olsen – Sweet Dreams (Official Video) from Randy Sterling Hunter on Vimeo.
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After San Francisco, she had a show in Santa Cruz, filled up with friends. Now she’s in L.A. The band is traveling in Danah Olivetree’s van—“Danah and the boys are driving my princess ass around.” Before the sound check at The Echo, a small club on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, they were having issues with the bass. But the sound guy got them a deal and it’s fixed now. Olsen perches behind the merch table and says to her bassist: “Stewart! Where did you put the car?” The car’s fine, he says. And Olivetree comes over with receipts to get her dinner order. They talk money matters. “Some shows you get a guarantee,” Olsen says. “Like this one. Others are door deals—you get a certain percentage after they make their money. It’s so uncomfortable, asking for money. It sucks to be in that position. But you have to live.”
She’s mostly been making her living with music since she toured with Will Oldham, except for a couple of months off where she waitressed at a Chicago panini place called the Bourgeois Pig. Now that she’s getting booked up, the work in front of her keeps building. She has to stay nervous about her talent to grow, she says, and take criticism and criticize herself. She’s thinking about these things as she loses that buffer she once had, of being able to send songs to friends before performing them. Now, she’s got to write on the road and introduce new work to an audience. “Maybe it’ll be better, maybe it’ll be worse,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll stop.” And then: “It’d be cool to take a break from it at times. It would be good to get into woodworking—something creative that’s different, that doesn’t dry you of information when you’re hitting a wall.”
First-in-the-door fans are starting to drift by. They see her at the booth and shoot straight over. “I’m lucky,” she says. “I wasn’t playing music for people for so long.”
These early fans, all male, not all hipsters, want her to sign their records. Hency’s re-presses of Strange Cacti are stacked on the table. “I’m having the hardest time finding Strange Cacti,” one guy says. “I had to pre-order Half Way Home.”
The credit card machine isn’t set up yet, and another guy doesn’t have cash. “Will they be sold out before the reader comes?” he says.
“We brought more this time,” Olsen says.
The club starts to fill and the band and Jon Hency trickle back inside, and Olsen escapes to the green room. When it goes dark, and the disco balls start spinning, and the first opener comes on, she’s back in her horn-rimmed glasses, hanging out with Hency. “I gotta disguise myself sometimes,” she says. “Or I get into funny situations.”
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“She’s not comparable to anyone else,” says a fan, before the show. He’s driven up from Orange County. Then: “It’s as if Joan Baez were an angel—but Angel Olsen.” And he also brings in Simon and Garfunkel. Matt Kivel says she’s like no female singer except maybe Joanna Newsom. She most reminds him of Leonard Cohen, the way she delivers a song. Others have said: Edith Piaf, Connie Converse, Sharon Van Etten.
She’s different, though: “You can either sound like somebody else, or you can sound like yourself—and figure out what that is,” Kivel says. She’s got her secret weapon, her volatile upper register. “She pulls it out with certain lyrics, and it’s brave. It’s a choice. It’s not an easy thing to do.”
The Echo’s vibe is different than San Francisco’s. It’s effectively silent. No one’s talking, everyone’s absorbed in her as she stands with that penetrating dark-eyed gaze.
“Man, it was huge,” Hency says of the first time he saw her. “I kind of fell in love. It was something really special. I’m married now, this is a nervous question, but that’s what it does to me every single night. Every night seems totally different, but she grabs the audience and everyone’s captivated. She’s that person every single time.”
“I don’t know any of you guys,” Olsen says to The Echo crowd. “But I’m glad I’m here.”
