Angel Olsen finds the light

From the terrace you can see the sea.

Also a handful of palm trees, and the tennis court that is inside the enclosure where your apartment is located.

His apartment is a rental apartment because Angel Olsen (Saint Louis, Missouri, 35 years old) is these days away from his house in Asheville (North Carolina), which means that he is away from his cat

.

"We're rehearsing here," he says.

Here is Los Angeles.

When Olsen picks up the video call, there is a little over a week left for the release of his sixth album,

(Jagjaguwar / Everlasting, 2022), which sounds like a very personal Americana, a kind of

highly luminous seventies-rooted

“Oh yeah, during the pandemic I listened to Stevie Nicks a lot.

I listened to their records

and a bunch of other '70s records, JJ Cale and stuff like that," he says.

He just felt like it.

"I couldn't stand anything that sounded even remotely dark," she says next.

She soon remembers that a year ago she lost her parents.

“It's funny, the songs on this album were written before they died, but somehow they condense what I've been thinking about ever since.

That you have to appreciate the little things, and live in the moment, ”she says.

Her parents were always older.

She was adopted when she was three years old.

At home there were eight.

Since she was little, she was obsessed with how her childhood should have been.

She came to investigate what life was like in the thirties and fifties.

By then she already wanted to be a pop star.

She though she then she got to high school and she decided that she liked punk rock infinitely more.

She started playing guitar and piano.

She got into a band that, she says, sounded like what No Doubt was doing at the time.

Her meteoric and brilliant career —six unique albums, with a hypnotic and mutating sound: in just 10 years she has gone from singer-songwriter to world

star of deep and majestic depth, with albums like

(2016) and

(2019) to the head of a wild animal-like, achingly beautiful production—started backstage, appearing as a backing vocalist for the prolific and unstoppable Bonnie Prince Billy.

But

(2012), her first shot, placed her at the forefront of something that was about to form, a

Feminine with very deep roots in their own universes that orbited only around themselves, and in which Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker also militate.

Although it was she, in a sense, who opened that path.

“Yes, it's true, the album is luminous.

Because I think I'm someone else,” she says.

“We have to live every moment as if it were the last.

Nothing is as horrible as it seems.

Because nothing is final.

Everything can be changed”

In what sense is it other?

“I have matured.

I don't know, I'm 35 years old.

I am infinitely more aware that death is there, somewhere, and that we have to live each moment as if it were the last.

Nothing is as horrible as it seems.

Because nothing is final.

Everything can be changed,” she replies.

And is that a consequence of the pandemic?

“In part, yes.

And part of it too, I think, has to do with getting older, being aware of what you have and what you're going to lose,” she adds.

He dreams a lot, she says next.

“And I write down my dreams.

They always tell me about things.

It is fascinating.

Now that I'm with the band, I often dream that I arrive at the studio and no one is there.

Or that I can't hear them.

I am scared because everything is new,” she says.

There is a song on the album called 'Dream Thing' in which he narrates a real dream, and a discussion that lasts 25 years.

“I dreamed of someone I had not seen for a long time and he was there, before me, much later, and I remembered him as he had been then, but he was no longer the same person, and where had that other him gone?

The song talks about that other you that continues to live in the heads of others if they don't see you again, ”she says.

His songs are sometimes short stories, poems.

Voracious reader?

"I want to believe so," she replies.

“And I also write things that aren't songs.

I've been writing a lot lately.

I loved

by Rachel Cusk.

I really like Joan Didion.

In general, all literature that starts from an interior monologue fascinates me,” she says.

Although she insists that dreams tend to be the main material of her songs.

"I think it's the way I communicate with my unconscious," she says.

As a child she loved to go to sleep because she could dream.

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