Angel Olsen - Big Time

Angel Olsen - Big Time

Tracklist:
1. All the Good Times
2. Big Time
3. Dream Thing
4. Ghost On
5. All the Flowers
6. Right Now
7. This Is How It Works
8. Go Home
9. Through the Fires
10. Chasing the Sun

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and
bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know
these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand
can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile
moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten,
complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel
Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash.
Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this
brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense
of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness
and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully
accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a
hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of
34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and
shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the
shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—
are scattered throughout the album.
Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was in the studio, recording
this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a
subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the
reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill
energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves
Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working
with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and
artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning,
but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.