A couple of years ago, Angel Olsen performed a show inside a church revival-style tent in Luck, Texas. I’ll wager that most of us camped out on those wooden benches had never actually been to an actual revival, and the situation in which we found ourselves, below the low, pointed roof of a round canvas tarp out of which a succession of bands played on a tiny wooden platform, was more akin to a production design rendering of what a revival might look like. In fact, we were on a film set. Olsen’s concert was part of the daylong Heartbreaker Banquet at Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger ranch, the setting for his 1986 film of the same name. Outside the tent, there was a fake jailhouse, a fake opera house, people streaming by with South by Southwest wristbands and plastic cups of keg beer. Inside, as dusk fell and darkness filled the tent, Olsen went on, delivering a spare and haunting performance in tune with the murky glow of the lanterns.
It was a year between two pivotal albums for Olsen—the stunning and scarred folk songs of Burn Your Fire For No Witness, and 2016’s My Woman, writ much larger in every sense—still contemplative, but escalating in power. She seemed to summon Stevie Nicks in arena-ready songs like “Sister,” she skated backwards in a tinsel wig in the video she directed for “Shut Up Kiss Me.” Though she’s graduated to bigger stages, backed by a full band, cracking jokes between songs, it occurred to me there in the tent that this wasn’t just a singer downsizing to a smaller venue, but that Olsen was using the setting in a hyper-explorative way, approaching the idea of a song as a transfiguring, mutable thing. It’s in that spirit that her new album, Phases, which collects a dozen of Olsen’s demos, B-sides, and cover songs recorded over the past five years, arrives now.
“[I]t’s like a diary was stolen and mass produced,” Olsen wrote in a recent Instagram post, “but that’s chill with me, I got nothing to hide.” She was being, of course, a little bit coy. By its nature, Phases isn’t as cohesive as her previous albums but, terrific and revelatory in its own right, it feels like a link between them, a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen. Sequencing tracks out of the chronology of their recording, the album nevertheless forms its own arc—a trajectory between daring and solace, a protagonist learning what it means to risk love. Songs like the demo “Sans,” which yearns for a solution “as easy as just picking up the phone,” and “Special,” recall Exile in Guyville-era Liz Phair in their spare, strumming core—they draw fuel from their admission of longing. “Only with You” is a cry-yourself-to-sleep lullaby and lament (“You can love you can love you can lose/ Even at your own game”), but the song that follows “It’s All Right,” also from the Burn Your Fire for No Witness sessions in 2013 is a beautiful bolstering, as if the same person woke up and delivered herself a self-affirmation.
I’m partial to the dirty guitars, desert echo, and pounding drums of “Sweet Dreams,” the way Olsen turns the word alone into an incantatory Roy Orbison wail. By this point in the album, Olsen seems to be trading vulnerability and power equally. There’s nothing so risky and naked as revealing your heart’s desire, as she does in “California,” where the album crescendos. When she sings, “I’ve never felt quite so open for love/ I’ve never felt quite so open before,” her voice gapes wide, hitting a high soprano vibrato so tremulous it feels like she’s on the verge of tears. But that’s just Olsen fooling again—right when she reaches a kind of emotional and vocal free-fall, she snaps it all back, reminding you she was in control the entire time. This isn’t the story of someone defending a delusory romance—“I’m not dreaming this time”—but a person with newfound confidence and a thrill in finding herself in new territory, even at the potential cost of a broken heart.
Phases is worth it for the covers too—her take on Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher than the Rest,” from Tunnel of Love, removes the swagger of that song for a disquieting come-on, spelling out a different definition of tough. Olsen does heartfelt justice to Roky Erickson’s “For You,” one of the most rarest and most beautiful of his solo songs; a forthright declaration of love in a jaunty Orbison-esque rhythm. Olsen’s home-recorded rendition, with a guitar and chorus, is warm and unadorned—there’s little you need to add to a line as indelible as “I’m cooked to you so rare.”
I’d always figured “Endless Road,” which Olsen regularly includes in her set lists, to be a Johnny Cash ballad I’d somehow never heard. It exists somewhere in that gruff, gothic timbre, a hymn to lonesome waywardness, dropping wholesale references to the dark folk blues of “In the Pines.” But “Endless Road,” in fact, is a cover that appeared on an episode of Bonanza, sung by Hoyt Axton, who’d guest-starred as a singing drifter. Olsen first heard it while watching rerun TV with her mother; later she learned that Axton’s mother wrote the song. In any case, Olsen plaintively identifies with the curse and blessing of being the restless seeker, refusing to be pinned down, but also acknowledging its costs. Her voice soars far past the even timbre of Axton’s delivery, reaching treacherous heights at its apex: “Till I can lay this lonesome body down.” It’s her traveling song, and the perfect closer to an album that pulls together winding, thrilling paths, united here in their searching.
