The tale of the creative type retreating into the country in order to restart their creative process is an age-old one, a myth that has been cemented into the Western canon thanks to folks like Jack Kerouac and Henry David Thoreau.
But while singer-songwriter Angel Olsen’s own tree change certainly affected the process she uses to write the powerful, unclassifiable tunes she has forged her reputation with, the rural landscape didn’t have the exact effect on her work that most expected.
“When I moved, a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, you’re going to the mountains so now you’re going to write lots of folky music,’” Olsen says. “But I wrote more folky music when I was living in California than now living in the mountains. It’s more that I really like having a lot more space. So living in the country really allows me more space to think and to process.”
Not only does that selfsame creative breathing room afford Olsen the creative energy she needs to write a record like My Woman – her bold, critically acclaimed new work – it’s also an all-important way of unpacking after time on the road: a way of staying sane, essentially. “The thing about touring and travelling is that, though you get to see the world, you have to be present so often,” she says.
“You have to be present for your audience and you have to present onstage. You have to be aware. You can’t really afford to deeply reflect on things because you’re moving – you’ve got to keep moving. So when I’m home, that’s when I usually write. I mean, sometimes things come to me on tour, and I’ll write then – I’m open to both. But most of the time it’s afterwards, at home.”
My Woman dropped in early September, a mere year-and-a-half after the release of Olsen’s previous record, Burn Your Fire For No Witness: a heartbeat when compared to the drawn-out album cycles of some other bands. But Olsen admits such a quick turnaround was surprising even to her, a byproduct of the lengthy amount of time she had to stew on the songs before they took properly structured forms.
“I didn’t expect to have a record this early,” she says with a laugh. “Last fall I wrote five songs in a row after a trip – I don’t really know what it was. They were all different styles, so I didn’t know where they were coming from. I think because I had put off this record for so long, some of them might have been inspired by things that weren’t really present or things that were happening to me that I wasn’t necessarily processing in the moment of writing. They were just reflections on things that had happened, and then I tried to make them more dramatic, in a musical way.”
The record certainly has drama, though it’s of a different variety to the kind that has defined Olsen’s previous work. My Woman has a kind of stylised urgency to it, a knowing yet utterly real sense of danger that underpins the balladry of a song like ‘Intern’, or the garage pop of ‘Heart Shaped Face’. That heightened power is also reflected in the visuals for the record, from the striking, moment-captured-in-time cover to its three vibrant videos.
Indeed, Olsen had a bigger hand in the album’s visual element than ever before, directing and co-directing all of the associated clips. The roller skate rink-set and silver wig-saturated clip for ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’ in particular was something that she had wanted to produce for some time, and the video also provided a good way of reclaiming the visual narrative.
“I wanted to aesthetically go all the way on this record,” Olsen says. “I really wanted to revamp the vibe a little bit. I’m working with a bigger band. It’s not a folk band anymore. It’s not been a folk band for a while, not since 2012. So there were things I needed to suggest and change about my own image. But also, I just wanted to have fun. I wanted to roller skate. I threw on the wig because I knew how to style it. But what everyone now thinks is that I’m going to perform in the wig.” She laughs.
Ultimately, helming the videos filled Olsen with both a sense of artistic anticlimax and deeply personal fulfilment that many creators have after sending their works out into the world. “It’s definitely a humbling experience, everything that goes into a music video,” she says. “I mean, everyone puts so much work into it, but at the end of the day, it’s all over in five minutes. It’s over. It’s done. But, you know, the people that you meet during the process and the amount of work that you put into it, just to make the perfect shot, that’s so important to me.
“I mean, with the third video single, ‘Sister’, we shot that at Joshua Tree,” she continues. “We didn’t know that it was going to be a full moon either. I mean, we were just there. But experiencing such a beautiful moment, it felt like we were all at a crossroad in our lives. We’re all at similar ages. We were all going through different things. It wasn’t just about making the video: the video was just something that we did together.”
Angel Olsen playsSydney Opera House on Monday December 5;Factory Theatre on Tuesday December 6; and Fairgrounds Festival, Friday December 2 – Saturday December 3 at Berry Showgrounds.
