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nickpassarelli · 8 years ago

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every time a bell rings

a few years ago, when i was music director at Chicago radio station WLUW, i invited then-local resident Angel Olsen to join me on my weekly radio show for a live interview and performance. to my gratitude (and surprise), she obliged.

during the set, which aired back in 2013, Olsen performed two songs from 2012’s Half Way Home (“Acrobat” and “Sky Opened Up”), as well as an unreleased track (“May As Well”) that would later be released on the deluxe version of Burn Your Fire For No Witness. in between songs, while i was barely keeping my cool, we chatted about the Chicago music community, growing up on Mariah Carey, and writing songs on her rooftop in Palmer Square. the full audio clip of the set is below, and up on my Soundcloud, but here are a few choice excerpts from our chat.

Nick Passarelli: Your album Half Way Home is a favorite of our DJs here at WLUW — it’s a really, really beautiful collection of songs. If you had to pick one track off of that album that you either like performing, or that you really enjoyed writing, what would that be?

Angel Olsen: I think I’m going to play two of those tracks today. One of them is “Acrobat” — I just really loved the way that it sounded on the recording that we made. It was just really mellow the way that it came together. And then another one is “The Sky Opened Up,” and it’s one of the last songs I wrote for the album so it was like, as I was sort of reaching a turning point. And I think that you can kind of tell, but maybe that’s just me. I don’t know how deeply people think about songs on an album. But, for that particular song, I was starting to develop a different kind of interest in music so I think it was a changing the way that I saw lyric writing.

NP: [“Acrobat”] is one of my favorite songs on the album. There’s this one line in there: “I want to be made out of love / I want to be made into life.” I mean, that’s so beautiful and poetic. What’s your inspiration when you’re writing songs and where do these kinds of lyrics sprout from?

AO: I guess all of the songs that I write are inspired from different things. Sometimes about situations that I’m in with people directly and then other times just like, while admiring other people. This song was written while admiring someone, and sort of falling in love with their character. Not necessarily being in love with them. Just being totally stunned by someone. So, I don’t know, sometimes it takes me months to write, and then other times it’s like I’m just writing constantly about everything around me.

NP: You’re often pegged as a singer-songwriter, or “songstress.” What’s it like to be in that tradition of soulful women with a guitar, and how did you find yourself in that tradition?

AO: I started out playing by myself and I’ve been pretty used to it over the last couple of years, but I think that my music is changing in that I prefer now to work with other people and to have more of a background behind what I’m doing; to have more of a band situation. And so I don’t know that my being a singer-songwriter with a solo acoustic guitar will be what I am forever, you know? I think that my music has evolved and changed and I just prefer working with people now.

NP: Before the show you were mentioning that you’re just starting working a new band that’s going to playing on some songs, so what exactly are you working on with them?

AO: We’re working on some new material and then I’m also working with them on the songs from Half Way Home. They’re taking a new approach to songs that have already been recorded and it’s kind of cool to see what other people hear in my songs.

NP: So I know that you relocated to Chicago from St. Louis. What was that transition like and what drove you to Chicago?

AO: It felt like the next big step or something. I mean, granted I was pretty young when I was living in St. Louis, so I wasn’t really experiencing that much music happening — I couldn’t find places to play, I didn’t know how to approach performing, so most of the shows were house gigs. I had some friends that had moved to Chicago for school or whatever and then I also had a bunch of musician friends that played music here and would tour in St. Louis and tell me about it. I just came and spent a few days here, I guess over a couple of months. I kept visiting and I just made this crazy decision to move here. Like, I told my mother, “I’m leaving in like 3 weeks.” But I’ve been here since and I’ve enjoyed the fact that I took that step. It seems like so many other people come from these small towns or whatever and they end up re-building the small-town vibe here. It’s kind of cool how it works out.

NP: Yeah, I feel like the community, at least of musicians here, are all pretty tight-knit. Did you find yourself entering the Chicago music community pretty easily?

AO: Yeah. I don’t know why or how it happened so easily for me, but I had a group of friends that ran a DIY space from their house and I immediately started playing shows at their house. My first venue was Ronny’s Bar, which is kind of crazy. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but it’s a pretty intense place. But, I feel like people welcomed me in very quickly, so that was fortunate.

NP: When you were living in St. Louis, you said that you didn’t really have that many opportunities, or at least venues, to kind of express your musical tastes. What exactly were you doing during those times and what were you listening to?

AO: What was I listening to…

NP: Maybe I’ll give you an age range. Like, what were you listening to at 16?

AO: Wow, okay. I’m embarrassed to tell you. It was probably listening to like Nirvana or something.

NP: That’s not embarrassing. It could be a lot worse.

AO: I mean, I don’t know. I think I probably at that point I was listening to a lot of R&B, like Mariah Carey. If any of her songs come on the radio, I can still sing every single word.

NP: You and I have that in common.

AO: Let’s do that sometime [Editor’s note: HI YES PLEASE DOES THIS OFFER STILL STAND].

NP: Please, yes. She’s definitely good inspiration in terms of range and just ability and skill. She’s definitely, like, an exemplar of talent.

AO: She’s a force of nature.

NP: So what exactly were you doing in between the release of Strange Cacti in 2010 and then Half Way Home, which was released two years later? What were doing to kind of build yourself as an artist, or develop your sound, or anything like that?

AO: I feel like during that time I was taking a step back from performing myself. I was performing with a group instead and learning a lot about how to harmonize, how I could extend my voice or change my voice — how to develop it. I spent a lot of time writing and just thinking a lot about how I wanted to approach touring. I feel like I had this really cool grace period, so I’m lucky that I took a break.

Angel Olsen is now very famous with an extremely successful musical career, and her last album, MY WOMAN, is out now on Jagjaguwar.

#angel olsen #wluw #college radio

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