Angel Olsen Makes Music For This Whole New Mess
Lately I’ve been chasing anything that feels like life, as if “life” is some distant experience separate from waking up and breathing. I hang out with friends in city parks, I read books on the subway, I walk my old route home from school and into Brooklyn only to end up, tired and hungry, in a neighborhood I no longer live in. I revisit places from my past in an effort to transport myself back to the world I lived in a year ago. Instead, surrounding myself with the once-familiar makes me feel like I’m stuck in some uncanny valley, only mimicking the ebbs and flows of what used to be the everyday.
However, one thing remains the same between this summer’s end and last year’s: I’m in New York, listening to new Angel Olsen songs. Olsen’s voice captures the drama of stormy skies suddenly cleared; her lyrics match the emotional intensity brought on by late August heat. It is a city and a season where moderation of any sort seems an absurd value to uphold, and Olsen is a master of explosive self-expression.
Last year it was the vast and orchestral single “All Mirrors,” off the later-released album of the same name. This year, it is the spare and contemplative Whole New Mess, which features acoustic recordings of songs from All Mirrors plus two original singles. Recorded in 2018 in a church-turned-music studio in Anacortes, Washington, it marks the first time Olsen has worked without a band since 2012. While Whole New Mess isn’t directly a product of 2020’s treacherous spring and summer, it echoes in new ways against our changed world. What is ostensibly a document of Olsen’s own heartbreak and solitude becomes a touchstone of artistic creation in the midst of chaos, both personal and global. She looks at her own world, suddenly shattered and different around her, and seems to question how much of that transformation really came from the outside, and how much of it occurred within herself.
The fraught ties between past and present are a constant thread through All Mirrors and Whole New Mess. “All Mirrors”—titled “(We Are All Mirrors)” on Whole New Mess—harps on Olsen’s anxiety about her past catching up with her. She sings, “I keep moving, knowing someday that I will be / Standing, facing, all mirrors are erasing.” For Olsen, history is an ensnaring and suffocating force. But All Mirrors includes glimpses of moving beyond this fear: the album opens with the magnificent and sweeping “Lark,” which begins, “To forget you is to hide, there's still so much left to recover.” In order to move forward, she must face what lies behind her.
Where Whole New Mess expands upon All Mirrors is in offering an unvarnished depiction of the healing process. The title track sees Olsen promising to follow through with change, gently declaring that she’ll be “getting back on track,” only to “make a whole new mess again.” The song feels reminiscent of the intimate, lo-fi folk that populates Olsen’s 2012 album Half Way Home and her 2010 EP Strange Cacti. However, “Whole New Mess” possesses a new self-assuredness: it views the all-consuming tides of emotion that drive her earlier work as part of an endless process of destruction and reconfiguration. She goes deep inside her pain and solitude without succumbing to it. She rises above, and is able to see outside the moment. On “Waving, Smiling,” the second single off Whole New Mess, Olsen sings that she has “cried out all of those years,” now to look out her window and see that “the sun is shining.” The moment she describes is so fragile and insular that even noticing it is half the battle. In tumultuous times, Olsen reminds us it can be necessary to turn to those things existing around us that communicate messages other than doom.
Aside from the unexpected gut punch of walking past some of my favorite movie theaters and cafes to find them dark and desolate, New York seems filled with signs of natural endurance. Streets are lined with restaurant tables, music blasts from passing cars, children ride tricycles down my street at dusk. Slowly, the echo of life I got stuck in moves closer to the real thing. The relationship between All Mirrors and Whole New Mess is reminiscent of the simultaneous proximity and distance between this year and the last. It is difficult for me to see time solely as a linear progression—rather, it is as if each year is drawn out on a sheet of tracing paper and layered over the one preceding it, all coming together to form one complex image. “It’s every season where it is I’m going,” sings Olsen on “Whole New Mess”—spring and fall, the past and the future, all tangled up in one. Without an orchestra behind it, her voice only feels more expansive.
As the days dip back into cold mornings and dark evenings, we are faced not only with the end of a year that tried to destroy us, but of a new year opening at its close. That’s not to say that a switch on the calendar will make anyone’s problems disappear. Coming up on another fall season, it’s difficult not to mourn what has changed. But stronger than the sadness, I feel a push forward to consider what we can carry with us out of this mess, and what we can build in its aftermath. I watch the same skyline come into view through the subway windows, and with Angel Olsen playing in my headphones, the distant city starts to feel like home again.
