Big Time

About

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, <i>Big Time</i>, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. <i>Big Time</i>, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on <i>Big Time</i> just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone wa, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she say. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink thing, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Time,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On <i>Big Time</i>, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda William, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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