Big Time

AlbumJun 03 / 202210 songs, 46m 49s
Americana Singer-Songwriter Country
Popular Highly Rated

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, 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. *Big Time*, 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 *Big Time* 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 was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “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 things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” 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 *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, 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. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

921

8.1 / 10

Angel Olsen taps deeper into her country influences on a warm, self-assured album whose fluid narration unites love and grief, past and present.

A-

The longtime folk star finds new power with a move toward country for her sixth studio album

7 / 10

9 / 10

Wrapping love and grief together, on Big Time Angel Olsen finds the thread-bare and unashamed side of growth for a remarkable, sweet, open and sun-kissed return

Angel Olsen's sixth album turns a period of intense emotion into an assured, Americana-flecked triumph

8.8 / 10

The singer's highly anticipated follow-up to 'All Mirrors' delivers devastating, urgent triumphs of self-acceptance.

Angel Olsen's 'Big Time'

The singer’s sixth album is a thoroughly blissed-out affair, rocking gently in the warm breezes of vintage country

On the heels of the ambitious All Mirrors, which featured a 14-piece chamber orchestra, and its stripped-down, solo companion album, Whole New Mess, Angel Olsen headed to the studio with first-time collaborator Jonathan Wilson in 2021 to record her sixth full-length, Big Time, at his studios in Topanga, California.

The sixth album from US songwriter Angel Olsen is a glorious symphony in love, loss and alt-country

7.5 / 10

Angel Olsen has lived a tumultuous life over the past two years, perhaps more than most.

8 / 10

Music Review: Angel Olsen - Big Time

A tumultuous couple of years are elegantly worked out on the singer-songwriter’s sixth studio album

8 / 10

Big Time by Angel Olsen – the title says it all really. It's a beautiful portrayal of raw pain and love all at once

8 / 10

With 'Big Time', Angel Olsen draws inspiration from some of popular music's most perennial templates, revamping them and reinventing herself.

8.0 / 10

Big Time by Angel Olsen Album Review by Adam Fink. The singer/songwriter's full-length drops on June 3rd 2022, via Jagjaguwar

Album Reviews: Angel Olsen - Big Time

83 %

3.7 / 5

Angel Olsen - Big Time review: Peaks and valleys

This week’s new releases offer a fresh spin on the country genre, and toy with their audiences’ expectations on more than one level

Recorded three weeks after her mother’s funeral, this is an emotionally raw affair

8 / 10