Angel Olsen

From Chicago to Asheville

Angel Olsen was born on January 22, 1987 in St. Louis, Missouri. She joined the local band Good Fight at sixteen, moved to Chicago after graduating from Tower Grove Christian Academy, and was invited by Bonnie "Prince" Billy to tour as a backing vocalist. She now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She plays vocals, guitar and keyboards, including a 1979 Gibson S-1. Her first releases were the Strange Cacti EP (2011) and Half Way Home (2012) on Bathetic, and in 2013 she appeared on Leroy Bach's Tim Kinsella Sings the Songs of Marvin Tate.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness (Jagjaguwar, February 17, 2014) was produced by John Congleton and was her first record with an established backing band, the guitarist Stewart Bronaugh and the drummer Josh Jaeger, both of Lionlimb. It reached 71 on the Billboard 200 and 64 in the UK, and Pitchfork later ranked it 26th among the 200 best albums of the 2010s. She followed it with My Woman (September 2, 2016, produced with Justin Raisen, Metacritic 87), the B-sides compilation Phases (November 2017), All Mirrors (October 4, 2019, produced with Congleton, strings conducted by Jherek Bischoff, Metacritic 89) and Whole New Mess (August 28, 2020). Aisles (August 20, 2021) collected five 1980s covers, and Big Time (June 3, 2022), produced with Jonathan Wilson at Fivestarstudios in Los Angeles, won a Libera Award for Best American Roots Record.

She has worked with Mark Ronson on "True Blue" (2019), Sharon Van Etten on "Like I Used To" (2021, produced by Congleton) and Emile Mosseri on "Mr. Lonely" for Kajillionaire. Live, she has played the NPR Tiny Desk concert published on January 27, 2014, a KEXP session in March 2014, The Current's studio on May 2, 2014, and a Tiny Desk (Home) concert on October 7, 2020 from a porch in Asheville. Pitchfork compared All Mirrors to the Cure, Cocteau Twins and Siouxsie and the Banshees.