Angel Olsen is a natural at writing mantras for jaded souls. Burn your fire for no witness. Unfucktheworld. Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind. No one’s gonna hear it the same as it’s said. While her music has evolved from lamp-lit folk to boisterous rock’n’roll and ritzy synth-pop, she has always emphasized the importance of self-conviction. This steadfast philosophy, coupled with how wryly she appears to withstand heavy emotional weather, has made Olsen talismanic to fans. But halfway through the tour for her 2016 album My Woman, a messy fallout from a breakup made Olsen realize how disconnected she had become from herself. She decided to make her next album as she had her earliest releases, working almost alone (in remote Anacortes, Washington) to focus on bare-bones songwriting. It also meant trying to elude the accrued weight of her identity: Olsen has said that she and her friends often “joke about how dumb ‘Angel Olsen’ is.”
In the songs Olsen wrote in Anacortes, love and, consequently, her identity became an illusion. What ended up on her fifth album, All Mirrors, are bemused questions about why she would suppress her needs, why she had to deny what she was going through, why the past must keep repeating. The lyrics are often softer and less certain than on her first four scalpel-sharp records. If there is one mantra among them, it’s in the stoned ambivalence of “Spring”: “I’m beginning to wonder if anything’s real,” she sings. “Guess we’re just at the mercy of the way that we feel.”
We don’t yet know what the music from those Anacortes sessions sounds like: A few months after its completion, Olsen recorded a second version of the album with show-stopping string arrangements from Ben Babbitt and Jherek Bischoff (and production by John Congleton). She intended to release both records simultaneously, then realized the power of the orchestrated version meant it had to come first. The two incarnations, one lavish and one threadbare, embody that lyric about how feelings shape reality and identity, and pose a striking challenge from an artist variously misunderstood in the past as “sad girl at the bottom of a well,” feminist autodidact, and silver wig-wearing “character.”
Once both takes on All Mirrors stand side by side, they’ll offer an intriguing case study in interpretation and how form suggests content: Is authenticity regarded as a magisterial group effort or just a lone voice and a guitar? Does devastation hit harder at volume or a whisper? The two albums are also a massive, meta juxtaposition of the feminine archetypes that Olsen has wielded over the past decade—fragility and excess, interiority and high drama, submission and rage—that dares us to distinguish between the person and the performance.
