{"id":35105,"date":"2022-06-03T14:53:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T14:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/angel-olsen-on-the-love-and-loss-that-led-to-her-new-album-big-time\/"},"modified":"2022-06-03T14:53:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T14:53:00","slug":"angel-olsen-on-the-love-and-loss-that-led-to-her-new-album-big-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/angel-olsen-on-the-love-and-loss-that-led-to-her-new-album-big-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Angel Olsen on the Love and Loss That Led to Her New Album, ‘Big Time’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Angel Olsen’s new album, \u201cBig Time,\u201d is the kind of rare, generation-spanning album that you could give to your sister, your aunt or your grandparents. Its 10 soulful, country-inflected songs recall everything from Dusty Springfield’s 1969 masterpiece, “Dusty in Memphis,” to Shelby Lynne’s 2001 Grammy-winning “I am Shelby Lynne,” from Tammy Wynette to Lucinda Williams – and at the center of it all are Olsen’s soaring songs and crystalline, versatile voice. It’s also a memoir of coming out, of the pandemic and of mourning her parents di lei (who died within months of each other in 2021), without explicitly being about any of those things.<\/p>\n

Like most working musicians, Olsen saw her thriving career screech to a halt in March 2020, after nearly a decade of constant touring and five increasingly critically praised and diverse indie albums, capped with 2019’s stellar “All Mirrors.” Yet she’d also been struggling rather publicly with her sexuality di lei, with men-are-kinda-shitty-am-I-gay? musings in interviews over the years, and she found the answer to that question in her relationship with writer Beau Thibodeaux, which the pair announced last spring. She came out to her mother di lei shortly before she died.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she already kind of knew,\u201d Olsen says. \u201cAnd about a week later, I was there with my partner at my dad’s funeral, so that was intense. But my mother was a very loving person and I think she found it in her heart di lei to be understanding. She said, ‘I just want you to be happy,’ which was all I wanted to hear. “<\/p>\n

While Olsen says all of those factors contributed to the bittersweet tone of “Big Time,” they’re front and center in the 28-minute companion film of the same name, which was directed by the singer with Kimberly Stuckwisch (Olivia Rodrigo’s \u201cSour Prom \u201dconcert film) and released Thursday on Amazon Music’s Twitch, a day before the album (watch the film below). \u201cIt’s sort of an homage to my mother,\u201d Olsen says of the film. \u201cI had a lot of vivid dreams after she passed. When I saw what Kim had done with Olivia Rodrigo, I realized she was already doing short films around music, and I said I’d love to do something like that – where we talk a little bit about the fear of coming out and my mom’s death and all that. It allowed me to grieve in a different way. It’s probably the most personal work that I’ve ever made to share with the public. “<\/p>\n

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