Angel Olsen's songs of herself are even better 9 years later

It’s an assurance delivered with all the confidence in the world, but it turned out to be half-right at best.

“It’s not going to break you, it’s just going to shake you,” sings Angel Olsen, sounding all the world like some version of Grace Slick who had subsisted entirely on the one pill that makes you larger. “Shake you alive.”

The line comes deep into “Not Gonna Kill You,” the fifth song on Olsen’s excellent 2016 album, My Woman, a work that wound up both shaking and breaking Olsen in different ways.

The sound of Olsen’s third album was a shake-up when it came out. It took a step away from her predominately folky debut, Half Way Home, and blog breakthrough sophomore effort, Burn Your Fire for No Witness. While My Woman still has some twang, the album heavily incorporates elements of earthy AM radio rock and includes sly allusions to glam gods.¹ It’s also a bifurcated album, with a mostly punchy A side and a more molasses-like B side. Nine years, three LPs and a handful of other releases later, people who care know to expect changes to style, approach and structure with a new Angel Olsen project. That wasn’t the case in 2016.

The album also broke Olsen into the mainstream consciousness — to the extent a Jagjaguwar release that features a 7-and-half-minute spacy and spare exploration of womanhood could breakthrough. My Woman is Olsen’s lone album to crack the top 50 of the Billboard 200, and her sole album to spend more than a single week on the chart.² “Shut Up Kiss Me,” the album’s second single, is handily Olsen’s most-streamed song on Spotify and is now feted as one of the best songs of the ’10s.³

Olsen’s biggest song absolutely deserves its place of distinction. For one, it’s an extremely catchy off-kilter love song with an instantly memorable chorus “Shut up, kiss me / hold me tight / Shut up, kiss me / hold me tight / stop your crying, it’s all right / shut up kiss me hold me tight.” Olsen wields her voice like a sledgehammer when singing those words, breaking through whatever defenses might prevent a listener from remembering their melody. She’s excellent throughout My Woman, but “Shut Up Kiss Me” might be the most immediate tour de force. The instant-classic chorus somewhat obscures that “Shut Up Kiss Me” is a pretty weird song. Olsen delivers its verses in a dramatic, arch voice, enunciating words in a way that approximates a Transatlantic accent. A wordless wail from Olsen serves as a bridge. It concludes with spare guitar chords with a hum that sounds like a hovering UFO from a ’50s B-movie. Assembling these pieces into something approaching a crossover hit is impressive, and worth celebrating.

My Woman had critical success as well as commercial success. The album was deservedly nearly universally lauded upon its release. According to review aggregator Album of the Year, it wound up as critics’ No. 9 album of 2016. That’s an impressive feat considering 2016 saw the release of Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Leonard Coen’s You Want It Darker, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree, Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Mitski’s Puberty 2, Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, David Bowie’s Blackstar, A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here…Thank You For Your Service, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Car Seat Headrest’s Teens of Denial, Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Run the Jewels 3 and about a dozen other albums that probably deserve a mention.⁴

Despite that contemporaneous high praise, My Woman might be an even richer work of art and more interesting listen nine years later. Subsequent releases have left its live rock band sound unique within Olsen’s oeuvre and over the past decade, Olsen has evolved significantly as a public figure. That latter process has included coming out as pansexual and public romantic relationships with men and women.

At the time of its release, My Woman — both the album itself and its title — was broadly interpreted as a statement of self-possession akin to “I’m my own woman.” That’s a fair reading because much of the album does deal with how Olsen and her autonomy exist within the context of others. If the album has an overarching theme, “then it’s maybe the complicated mess of being a woman and wanting to stand up for yourself, while also knowing that there are things you are expected to ignore, almost, for the sake of loving a man,” Olsen said in a statement around the release of the album. “I’m not trying to make a feminist statement with every single record, just because I’m a woman. But I do feel like there are some themes that relate to that, without it being the complete picture.”

However, in hindsight, the consensus takeaway from the album was also a partial reading. My Woman and its title can be read as a plain statement of romantic possession, and its irrepressible, typically second-person love songs as expressions of queer desire.

When Olsen, voice dripping with urgent yearning, sings “In my arms and fast asleep/ In my arms and all my dreams/ Where you are is where I want you/ Where you are is where I want to/ Where you are is where/ I want to be,” the object of her desire isn’t gendered. However, given the title of the album and new context, it’s distinctly possible the “you” is Olsen’s woman.

It’s a recontextualization that adds depth and possible interpretations to multiple songs on the album. The verse “‘Til I am nothing else but the feeling / ‘Til I am nothing else but the feeling / Becoming true / Becoming true / Can’t help feeling the way that I do / Can’t help feeling the way that I do / Become a prophet / Become a fool,” that’s accompanied by the mad rock of “Not Gonna Kill You,” is one example that reads particularly differently.

The use of Americana-tinged rock’n’roll to render these open-to-interpretation expressions of love, lust, longing and vexation, also becomes a bit subversive in this context. My Woman is a great guitar album with earnestly excellent solos in its more raucous first half and interesting tones in its subdued second half. The consistently excellent guitar work — outside of the departures that bookend the album, synth-pop “Intern” and piano ballad “Pops” — is thanks to the trio of great guitarists who worked on the album. Guest guitarist Seth Kauffman was brought in for My Woman, joining Olsen and her regular guitarist Stewart Bronaugh. Bassist Emily Elhaj and drummer Joshua Jaeger comprise the album’s rhythm section. The three-guitar lineup allows for layering that makes simple riffs hit harder, or maintain a sense of propulsion during spacy moments. “Give It Up” with its pleasantly crunchy churn and an instrumental break that echoes “L.A. Woman” by the Doors.⁵ The familiar sounds are used for an unfamiliar purpose. It’s unlikely that a million Jim Morrison’s working at a million typewriters would have written, ” I dare you to understand what makes me a woman.”

My Woman is entirely enjoyable as a surface-level classic rock-inspired album, but its use of those tones to fully explore Olsen’s personhood make it delightful as a correction of the record. There’s been no shortage of queer people in rock and Americana music for the entirety of either genre’s existence, but that aspect of an artist’s identity is sometimes obscured, omitted, or overlooked, especially if the artist’s rise to prominence happened when rock music was still a pop culture hegemony. Olsen asserting her full humanity in terms she was comfortable with is no minor rebellion. As electoral results would prove later in 2016, and again more recently, there are many people from Olsen’s home state who could and would find this combination of art and artist identity to be transgressive.⁶ This enriching element was missing in contemporary analysis of My Woman and makes it a more fascinating work in hindsight.

By weaving in this facet of identity while reserving it as possible subtext and setting an exploration of self against rugged, American vistas makes My Woman something like an album-length Walt Whitman poem. Ultimately, 2016 is even richer musically than we realized for having included Olsen’s songs of herself.

1. In 2016, Olsen told the always-fascinating Song Exploder that subtle piano pounding on the track, “Shut Up Kiss Me” is a nod to the then-recently passed David Bowie.(https://songexploder.net/angel-olsen) ↩︎
2. It peaked at 47 the week of Sept. 24, 2016, and spent two weeks on the chart. All Mirrors nearly matched those heights, peaking at 52 in 2019. (https://www.billboard.com/artist/angel-olsen/) ↩︎
3. Spotify shows “Shut Up Kiss Me” at 60.5 million streams with “Unfucktheworld” in second at 40.1 million. No other Olsen track has more than 30 million streams. ↩︎
4. Camp Cope, Muncie Girls, Tacocat, Danny Brown, ScHoolboy Q, Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam, Anderson Paak, Frankie Cosmos, GLOSS, Jeff Rosenstock, Woods, A$AP Ferg, The Hotelier and Martha all put out albums in 2016 that are still part of my personal rotation. The year was stacked. ↩︎
5. My Woman was coincidentally recorded in Los Angeles’ Electro-Vox Recording Studios. ↩︎
6. Olsen was born in Missouri and is now associated with Asheville, North Carolina. ↩︎