Our First 100 Days seeks to aid in that protection. Joining together with artists and labels we will be releasing one rare, unreleased or exclusive song per day to you via Bandcamp.
For a minimum contribution of $30, supporters will be able to access all 100 songs in the project, including new music from Angel Olsen, How To Dress Well, Toro Y Moi, The Range and many more.
All profits raised from Our First 100 Days will go directly to organizations working on the front lines of climate, women’s rights, immigration and fairness.
The project was started in conjunction with Secretly Group and 30 Songs, 30 Days, and aims to raise funds and awareness for organizations supporting causes that are under threat by the proposed policies of a Trump administration. This project is produced with the help of Revolutions Per Minute, an organization that provides strategy and support for artists making change.
An intuitively smart and fearlessly generous record – this is an artist in complete command of their craft at the top of their game and is already a contender for album of the year. After 2014’s stunning Burn Your Fire for No Witness which dramatically raised her profile, Angel Olsen perhaps felt pressure to make a big statement the next time out. My Woman finds her rising up to the challenge, maintaining a harrowing intensity in full-band rockers and solitary confessionals. Olsen is a brilliant songwriter and an even better vocalist, who can go from stern to tender to deranged, and back again, in a single verse. In the beginning of “My Woman”, Olsen mostly pursues love with wild-eyed fervor, whereas the closing songs disconsolately consider its ruins. Yet, the relentless heat of MyWoman can be exhausting over the course of the 10 searing tracks—the addition of a throwaway would give a weary listener time to regroup. But Angel Olsen’s fearless and eloquent embrace of raw emotions in all their messy splendor ultimately feels oddly uplifting, the way it always does when you witness a gifted artist at her best.
Angel Olsen – “Sister” from the album ‘MY WOMAN’ released September 2nd, 2016 on Jagjaguwar Records
Angel Olsen’s magnificent album ‘My Woman’ on clear vinyl in September. The 29-year-old singer-songwriter came up as a touring member of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s backing band in 2010, playing guitar and duetting with the eccentric folk and country hero (a.k.a. Will Oldham). Despite her increasingly prominent solo career, she’s often labeled as one of his disciples, posited as a protégé even as she has issued three acclaimed albums where her muse is wholly her own. That miscategorization has led to others: When Olsen began releasing her own stripped-back, mournful folk works — 2011’s Strange Cacti EP and 2012’s Half Way Home .
When she added a full-blown band for 2014’s breakthrough Burn Your Fire For No Witness — an ambitious album that was as much fuzzy, blown-out rock music as folk — the gloomy reputation followed her. Olsen, whose voice tends to ring out in a near-tears tremble, has been reluctantly framed as the weepy poster girl of contemporary folk rock, forever salting her wounds for the sake of her art.
My Woman, which arrives on September 2nd, is an unexpected departure for Olsen, her most diverse record yet. It’s not quite synth pop, at least not all of it, but from its first song, “Intern,” she might have had you fooled. Olsen directed and stars in the video for “Intern,” where she plays a tortured, “super famous” pop-star type in a silver wig and Britney-esque headset mic, singing along to moody chords fit for a Julee Cruise ballad. “I don’t care what the papers say,” she croons, turning to the camera as she ignores a sheepish, young interviewer. “It’s just another intern with a résumé.” The song was an anomaly in Olsen’s two-year-long recording process for My Woman, a onetime studio experiment that just ended up fitting. “[I thought], How funny would it be if it was so misleading?” Olsen says. “But what I realized is if I used different instruments like synth and piano, and went away from my guitar for a minute, I could sing differently. It opened up all of these opportunities to use my voice more, to be less preoccupied with trying to be super clever with my lyrics.”
Angel Olsen – “Sister” from ‘MY WOMAN’ out September 2nd, 2016 on Jagjaguwar Records.
It appears we will be getting a new Angel Olsen album soon. The singer-songwriter debuted a video for a new track today that, according to Shazam, is titled “Intern” from an album called My Woman. The clip was directed by Olsen herself with collaborative input from Ashley Connor and Jethro Waters. Olsen’s last album, the remarkable Burn Your Fire For No Witness, was one of our favorites of 2014. Check out “Intern” below.
Angel Olsen last album was 2014’s excellent Burn Your Fire For No Witness (one of our favorites of that year), and it looks like we may get a followup soon. she just put out a new song/video called “Intern” and Shazam says the song is on a release called No Woman. The song is closer to classic ’60s pop than the folk/rock vibes of BurnYour Fire, with her voice backed by nothing more than some atmospheric keyboards.
The video was written and directed by Angel Olsen with collaborative input from Ashley Connor and Jethro Waters.
Having announced her third studio album My Woman – out on September 2nd via Jagjaguwar Records – Angel Olsen has shared the video for excellent new single Shut Up Kiss Me.
Directed by Olsen herself, the video encapsulates everything that’s captivating about her and her music – fiery, yet beguilingly playful, whilst the song itself has a nervy, grungy quality to it with an edge of desperation.
Listen to Angel Olsen once and, without really thinking too hard about it, you’ll listen again. At first quiet, bare, and lovely, “Burn Your Fire for No Witness” unfolds like a good conversation, with a voice that resounds through your bones and stays there. It’s the kind of album that is to be heard as a whole, and is best in the car, at night.Now at home in Asheville, North Carolina, Angel began in Chicago when her first EP “Strange Cacti” was picked up by the then-local (now also Asheville-based) Bathetic Records. After touring with the formidable Will Oldham and his Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie band, she released her second album, “Half Way Home” in 2012. And now, touring her second full album “Burn Your Fire for No Witness,” Angel has acquired her own bassist and drummer and a ton of attention.
Angel brought musician and friend Kevin Morby to our office before their LA show later that night. With a polyps surgery the next day (if you didn’t know either, it has to do with vocal chords), this show would be Kevin’s last for awhile – he was formerly the bassist of Woods and co-founder/guitarist of The Babies before transplanting to LA and starting a solo career. The two, joined by Angel’s bassist Emily Elhaj, talked about quitting music lessons as children, rollerskating as adults, and the strangeness of the media spotlight.
With “Burn Your Fire For No Witness”, Angel Olsen has assembled a record she says felt wholly representative of her vision, a set of songs that take on the shape and skin of punk and country and folk music, sung through a slew of different microphones. Declarations of independence are often bracing, but rarely do they illuminate so ferociously the lonesome reality of being on your own.
There is a lot of heartbreak on “Burn Your Fire For No Witness”, as well as a lot of pleasing anachronism; a lot of hard-won resignation and what you might call stern vulnerability, a quality that Angel Olsen shares with other songwriters like Joni Mitchellwithout sounding at all like Mitchell. Her soprano can be a delicate and ghostly thing … but Olsen’s quaver holds your gaze, using her vibrato for effect, not whining or crumbling.” I love the track “Windows” Angel Olsen’s previous 2012 album “Half Way Home” was a quiet, plaintive affair — a low-key country waltz with minimal, yet affecting instrumentation. Conversely, “Burn Your Fire” found her plugging in and turning up the faders. An album of closeness and distance, heartache and heartbreak. Olsen navigates these ups and downs with her voice as captain. It’s a mesmerizing instrument, sweet, tranquil then suddenly intense in an ascendant vibrato
“Burn Your Fire For No Witness”, Angel Olsen’s new album, isn’t an experimental piece of work by anyone’s standards, but it represents a vast step forward for Olsen. Musically, she’s changed everything, combining her ghostly folk with some beautifully executed ’90s-style indie fuzz. But the real great thing about the new album is this: Olsen suddenly sounds like a real person.
Angel Olsen is singing about the same things on the “Burn Your Fire” as she was on “Half Way Home”: Loneliness and longing, and the way you look at the world when you’re always trapped inside your own head. But there’s also giddy elation there from time to time, and deep connection. The first words she sings on opener “Unfucktheworld” are these: “I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you / I started dancing just to be around you.” And even though it’s not a happy song — it’s about losing all that happiness, not finding it — there’s a conversational directness to it that I didn’t hear on her older songs.
2014 has been a superbly good year for Angel Olsen, with her second studio album “Burn Your Fire For NoWitness” hitting a career high to date for the Missouri-born singer/songwriter. The stark “Iota” forms one of the more brutal lyrical assaults on Olsen‘s amazing album, lamenting the dark inevitability of life against the impossibilities that might just make it bearable: “If only we could turn ourselves around / And all the things we’re looking for were found / If only we grew wiser with each breath / If only we could dance our way to death”. The album– “Burn Your Fire For No Witness” which was so much different than the earlier Angel Olsen’s 2012 lp “Half Way Home” was a quiet, plaintive affair — a low-key country waltz with minimal, yet affecting instrumentation. Conversely, Burn Your Fire found her plugging in and turning up the faders. An album of closeness and distance, heartache and heartbreak. Olsen navigates these ups and downs with her voice as captain. It’s a mesmerizing instrument, sweet, tranquil then suddenly intense in an ascendant vibrato
Angel Olsen’s debut album “Half Way Home” was a pleasant collection of minimalistic folk recordings, largely her vocals were left to carry the charm with just a smattering of instruments as a backing. Having made her name as a backing vocalist with Bonnie “Prince” Billy‘s band it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect from her, it was beautiful sure, but it didn’t hint at the stunning talent that would gradually unfurl itself, and lead to an album as stunning as “Burn Your Fire For No Witness”.
Every aspect of Angel Olsen’s sound has been refined, evolved and improved. Those who typecast her as a folk-singer, would be shocked by the thrashy-grunge sound of “Forgiven/Forgotten” or “High & Wild”, she emerged with all the intimacy of those early recordings in tact but with a new found confidence, where once she seemed almost timid, now she seemed like a star in the making.
Perhaps the albums most moving moment is its last. “Windows” is just aural heartbreak. All sense of joy and anger long since stamped out, all that is left is an aching sadness. It’s a plea for someone who’s lost in the darkness of depression, to let the light in, initially over a lone guitar she begs “won’t you open a window sometime, what’s so wrong with the light?” There’s an attempt to reason with the person, but ultimately she knows it’s too late, they can now only help themselves, “Why can’t you see? Are you blind? Are you dead? Are you all right?” Such is the quality and emotional impact of her vocal, you barely notice the music that slowly creeps in around her, organs subtly drone in behind, drums start slowly and build and build and build to a crushing crescendo, a perfect outpouring of sound, as she simply repeats “what’s so wrong with the light” it’s the sound of pure frustrated, helplessness, it’s overpoweringly beautiful, sad and frankly wonderful.
Angel Olsen hails from sunny, gorgeous, post-industrial St. Louis, Missouri. Beginning her performing career at 16 in coffee shops, she honed her craft further in Chicago through both solo performances and contribution to the album and tour for Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Wolfroy Goes to Town.” 2014 marks the release of her sophomore album to coincide with an international tour across Europe and the US.
Olsen’s intimate songwriting is coupled with a strong, ethereal tone and hypnotic rhythm acoustic guitar, with varied influences including Skeeter Davis, homespun Americana, Spanish guitar and the French New-Wave chanteuse Francoise Hardy. Her début release Half Way Home” is available through Bathetic Records with new album “Burn Your Fire For No Witness” received critical acclaim is available from Jagjaguwar Records now as a deluxe re-release.
The Fat Angel Sings 