This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the penultimate post about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.
“Spring,” Angel Olsen
Last night Ian and I were talking about how little he cares for lyrics. It’s not that he doesn’t like songs with words, he told me—he’s just completely indifferent to them. You could sing the words shit, shit, shit, he said, and if they’re sung with a certain level of emotion and depth and skill, I will cry. He’s always known this about himself, but he was reminded while being moved to tears as Tituss Burgess sings about Patti LaBelle’s pies on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This might sound ridiculous, but you should judge for yourself. Burgess is a powerhouse singer. Maybe you, too, will tear up over pies.
Though I usually require a bit more from songs than shit shit shit, lyrics-wise, I think, like my friend Ian, I would have been moved by “Spring” no matter what Angel Olsen was singing. Following her foremothers Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, and Fiona Apple, there’s just something about Olsen’s vocal styling that scoops out the tender, wanting heart on a plate. The calling card of one of my favorite songs of hers, “Unf***theworld” off of 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, is that Olsen somehow manages to sound like she’s on the verge of tears without the performance being overly-wrought or sentimental, a series of guttural pronouncements over lost love not unlike Nashville Skyline-era Bob Dylan. But they’re not quite comparable; the stakes seem lower for singers like Dylan, even in heartbreak. His persona is a rambler, not a piner. Perhaps that’s why he was never going to be the bluesman he wishes he was, despite good efforts, because he seems to lead with words (and blues chords) and hopes feelings will follow. As a fellow mercurial beast, trust me when I say a words-first approach never works. A truly chest-cracking ballad means the heart leads, or at least heart and words walk alongside one another. Even off of a more bluesy album like Love and Theft, songs like “Lonesome Day Blues” and “Cry a While” leave the listener with the sense, ironically, that Bobby D is having a blast. It’s the blues musician’s catch-22: perhaps if you love playing blues enough to make you happy, you start to lose the reason you wanted to play blues in the first place.
I digress. Sort of. What I’m setting up here is that this catch-22 could be the downfall of any artist (like Olsen) who seems to mine her pain for creativity. Unlike feelings, words are always there. What happens when the pain fades? The art has to shift somehow, to change shape or find another source of inspiration, and you can’t blame wordsmiths like Dylan for choosing the more mobile, versatile medium for expression. If I’m honest, after listening to Burn Your Fire for No Witness, I wondered if Olsen would never be able to top it. Even if she troubled her wounds, she had trucked in so much anger, so much loneliness, so much grief, I thought there was no way she would be able to replicate what Lindsay Zoladz at Pitchfork called a “strange, anarchic electricity, always flickering on the edge of blowing out.”
And yet she did. Rather than loss and rage, she stepped into the raw, swirling confusion of new love for 2016’s “Shut Up and Kiss Me,” and now, for 2019’s “Spring,” she paints the bittersweet melancholy of solitude, of adulthood, the second coming-of-age that happens when you finally understand how little you know: “How time has revealed how / Little we know us,” Olsen sings. “I’ve been too busy / I should’ve noticed.” Throughout the entire All Mirrors album, the vocal fullness of Olsen’s crackling-fuse sound—along with Ringo-like fillers, the precarious climbing chords, the Roman candle sound of a distorted snare—reminds me of John Lennon in the midst of his primal scream phase, laid bare on Plastic Ono Band. I could never have predicted how “Spring” would be born of “Unf***theworld,” just as I could have never known the same Lennon who made “Yer Blues” would make “Hold On.” But maybe that’s because when I first heard them, I still thought every feeling I had lasted forever.
Both Lennon and Olsen were my high-volume drinking companions on some of the most miserable winter nights I can remember, those of 2015, 2016. Like “Hold On,” “Spring” feels like an opportunity to go back and put a comforting hand on the shoulder of 25-year-old Lara, head down on her desk, sobbing and confused. You’ll never not be confused, I want to tell her, but you won’t have to grip it so hard. To her own past self, Olsen sings, “Don’t take it for granted / Love when you have it / You might be looking over / A lonelier shoulder.” Though there’s an implication here that now is the lonelier time, Olsen doesn’t linger. She goes on to speak to a friend: “Remember when we said / We’d never have children / I’m holdin’ your baby / Now that we’re older.” This is a familiar conversation to any of Olsen’s fellow thirty-somethings. What used to be boring is now welcome rest. What used to be cheesy is now ritualized and heartfelt. For the families growing around me, “children” and “baby” mean literal children, yes, but for those of us who are childless, these words also symbolize anything that could grow. Anything that had previously seemed impossible but is now within our reach. Maybe that’s not partnership yet, for me, but certainly freedom from alcohol. A passion for teaching. Making art that feels wholly mine.
And if there’s a present self to sing back to the past, perhaps there’s a future self that sings back to us now. Inside Olsen’s croon, I listen for a voice that tells me to hold on, that the love I want is waiting, that I’m not stuck inside forever. “Spring” sends visions of family, of fearless outings, of the happy din of being in public, of putting your arms around someone without worry. It’s hard not to listen and let your heart break with hope.
Lara Avery 