Jagjaguwar Vinyl, CD & Tape 127 Items

Another remarkable new Dinosaur Jr. album from the bands original lineup

Many of the superlatives describing Angel Olsen refer to how seemingly little it takes for her to leave an audience speechless, even spellbound. But Olsen has never been as timid as those descriptors imply, and the noisy, fiery hints in her earlier work find a fuller expression on her newest LP, Burn Your Fire for No Witness. Here, Olsen sings with full-throated exultation, admonition, and bold, expressive melody. Also, with the help of producer John Congleton, her music now crackles with a churning, rumbling low end and a brighter energy.

Fantastic three piece from American and New Zealand with their 2nd full length!

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"I only started playing the acoustic guitar last year. I'd always preferred the idea that the guitar converts a sound into voltage and then becomes really loud. I thought the acoustic guitar was a little bit too twee for me or something. But after being offered some opportunities to play various acoustic sessions to promote the new record, in situations where it wasn't possible to record the whole band, I decided to treat it like a challenge to try and play acoustic and not have it be lame. After all I was really into Arthur Lee's ability with an acoustic and started wondering if I could make it sound convincing. Anyway, after being somewhat forced to develop some skill on the acoustic through these various radio sessions and things like that I decided to record some songs acoustically an...

In late 2013, Preoccupations (then known as Viet Cong) released a small-run cassette EP only available on tour.

Over the course of a year, Matt Flegel and Scott Munro worked in their basement studio with a mess of old and run down equipment to build a set of fresh material.

Joined by bandmates Daniel Christiansen and Michael Wallace, the band completed work on an debut cassette.

What emerged from the studio was a mixture of sharply-angled rhythm workouts and euphoric 60s garage pop-esque melodies, balanced with a penchant for drone-y, VU-styled downer moments, and became a hard-to-find classic.

Jagjaguwar 25th Anniversary compilation featuring covers of songs originally by Tracy Chapman, Stereolab, Dinosaur Jr., Smog, and more by the likes of Angel Olsen, Bruce Hornsby, Jamila Woods, and other Jagjaguwar artists and friends. Midway through his long, earnest and often very, very funny essay on the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the September 2006 issue of The Believer, writer Paul La Farge proposes that Dungeons & Dragons is not a game at all but rather a ritual. La Farge notes the marked difference between game and ritual. Whereas a game seeks to demonstrate how unequal or distinct players/teams are from one another, rituals seek to do the very opposite. "Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse, for it brings about a union," La Farge writes, himself paraphrasing anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. "Or in any case an organic relation between the initially separate groups." And so, across the 25-year history of Jagjaguwar, an independent record label curiously named using a Dungeons & Dragons name generator, we find this idea of ritual as a conjoining practice. We see it early on when Jagjaguwar joins forces with a midwestern label called Secretly Canadian for a powerful fusion. We see it in familial relationships and collaboration among Jagjaguwar artists, and the ways those artists' most treasured collaborators make their ways to the Jagjaguwar game board. Join The Ritual, the third piece of Jagjaguwar's 25th Anniversary celebration, looks to pay homage to the labels and artists that, whether they know it or not, invited Jagjaguwar to the table, to this wild, dark magic ritual of music. We're talking about independent titans like Drag City, Too Pure, K Records and Touch & Go. We're talking about heroes like R.E.M., Slint, Stereolab and Tracy Chapman. These songs captured the imaginations of our founders Darius Van Arman and Chris Swanson - and ultimately, opened up worlds to them.

In the most literal sense, globally renowned whistler Molly Lewis makes her gorgeous and curious compositions out of thin air. New entrees into the Exotica canon; sprawling, would-be Spaghetti Western scores; and a dash of Old Hollywood glamour _ the whistle-led songs on her debut EP The Forgotten Edge are as complex, delicate and indelible as anything performed with viola or piano. "Whistling is like a human theremin," said Lewis, an Australian native who's spent the last several years in LA, and whose performances there and around the world are changing any preconceived notions of whistling by the room-full. That's not to say Lewis is all serious and snooty about the craft. Quite the contrary. Her sense of humor is witty, self-deprecating and zany. She's as likely to reference the slapstick Leslie Nielsen film series Naked Gun for music video concepts as she is a classic piece of noir cinema. Look no further than the equatorial and breezy opening cut "Oceanic Feeling," a lovely walk across the flotsam-sprinkled sands in the rum-pumping vein of Les Baxter. Meanwhile, the title track _ and really, the entire collection here _ is a loving, and albeit rather haunting, salute to one of Lewis's heroes, the Italian composer and musician Alessandro Alessandro Alessandroni, who's whistle and guitar you hear on the title theme of Ennio Morricone's A Fistful of Dollars. Lewis and her ensemble create classic cinema for your mind. Her own love for the artform began when, around the age of twelve she was given the CD Steve "The Whistler" Herbst Whistles Broadway. Something contained in it clicked. "It wasn't that I was immediately obsessed, but I knew it was something I could do well," Lewis said. The daughter of a musician mother and a documentary filmmaker father who often focused his films on niche communities and topics, Lewis recalls watching a television documentary with her parents about The International Whistlers Convention in Louisburg, North Carolina. "My dad said, `If you ever make it into the competition, I'll take you there'," Lewis said. Turns out, there was no bar to entry, just a small fee. And so several years later, she and her father traveled to the convention. New to the form, Lewis didn't take home one of the bigger prizes, but they were awarded the prize for "Whistler who traveled the greatest distance." "We really just used the trip to drive around the United States," she said. After studying film in Australia, Lewis moved to Los Angeles to be close to the film industry. There, her circle of artist friends grew naturally and with providence _ her unique talent drawing more and more recognition. And over the last few years, Lewis's Café Molly events at LA spots like Zebulon, Non Plus Ultra and The Natural History Museum have become fabled, elegant happenings with appearances from guests like John C. Reilly, Karen O and Mac DeMarco. Recorded with a crack team of friends and musicians during 2020's quarantine, The Forgotten Edge is rife with incredible performances from Thomas Brenneck, Joe Harrison, Eric Hagstrom, Abe Rounds, Wayne Gordon, Gabriel Rowland, Leon Michels, and Dave Guy.

If it's really a post-genre world, why does everything sound the same? The two halves of Tampa rap duo They Hate Change_Dre (he/him) and Vonne (they/them)_first came together in front of the apartment complex where they both lived as teens. Dre had just moved down from Rochester, NY; Vonne was trying to sell him bad weed. It was clear from the start that the two listen to music differently from most people_they're sonic omnivores, obsessive deep-divers, lovers of rare and radical sounds. Starting as kids trawling the internet for tracks, they've been collecting music from around the world and across the decades, amassing a shared sonic knowledge so deep that "encyclopedic" barely begins to cover it _ not just the East Coast hip-hop that Dre grew up on, or the hyperlocal bass-music variants like jook (the Gulf Coast's twerkably raunchy answer to house) and crank (think "Miami bass meets Nola bounce"), but also drum `n' bass, Chicago footwork, post-punk, prog (they're, like, seriously into prog), grime, krautrock, emo, and basically any genre on the map. Once they graduated to DJs on the Tampa DIY scene _ which includes everything from punk rock house parties to the black "teen nights" that pop up in rec centers and ballrooms _ they figured out how to pull all these disparate sounds together into a cohesive style. More importantly, they figured out how to make it something people will actually move to. When they made the transition to rapping and making beats, they brought that pleasure-seeking approach to sonic experimentation with them. "With this album, Vonne says, "it's really like, okay, you know how you talk about the internet breaking down borders? Here's what that actually sounds like. It's not just a hip-hop record with a couple more weird sounds. You want homegrown DIY? This is a record that was written, produced, and recorded in a 150-squarefoot bedroom from the least cool city you could think of." Finally, New is what a truly post-genre musical landscape is supposed to be: building deep connections that transcend outdated distinctions between them, spilling over with the joy of exploration and possibility, and daring other artists to think broader, go deeper, take bigger risks. Let the rest of them keep playing by the old rules_They Hate Change will keep changing the game.

In Early 2018, Nathan Jenkins Returned From The Coast Of Arrábida To His New Home Studio,In A Cottage Tucked Behind The Grand Hotel Setting Of Wim Wenders' Lisbon Story. Breakingfor Lunches Under A Datura Tree In The Garden And A Far Cry From The Finsbury Park Basementflat He Rented The Previous Year, A Set Of Recordings Followed That Galvanised Into An E.P. - Wehad A Good Time. Music Informed By Out-Of-Town Trips In A 1987 Renault 9 Super, Pitchforkattributed `Remarkable Healing Powers' To Lead Song Hula.After Leaving London For A Spell In Portugal, Nathan Lost His Taste For The Night Life And Drewa Line Under A Long-Running Nts Radio Show. Much Of The Time Spent Abroad Was Dedicated Toa Longstanding Collaboration With Westerman, Whose Album They Recorded In A Remote Part Ofthe Algarve Countryside In 2019. Nathan's Own Discography Opened In 2007 With Pet Sounds:In The Key Of Dee, Before Pivoting In A More Electronic Direction Via Get Familiar And Youngheartache. From The Sampledelia Of 2011`S Too Right, The New Wave And Rave Of Say Arr Ee Tothe Robert Wyatt-Influenced Love Me Oh Please Love Me, He's Mapped A Deliberately Peculiarpath. 2015`S Rooster Was Eno & Byrne`S Bush Of Ghosts Given A Shangaan-Electro Lick Andclip. While Nathan's Partnership With Fellow Out-There Pop Auteur, Jesse Hackett, As Blluddrelations, Staggered Like A Half-Cut Prince.Collaged, Rhythmic Alternatives. Syncopated Avant-Garde Sambas. Off-Kilter Sci-Fi Jazz.Think Asha Putli In The Spot At The Star Wars Cantina. Arty, Angular. Rich, But Uncluttered.Frenetic, Electric, Blurring The Boundaries Between What Is Sampled, What Is Played. Nathan'sis A Wilfully Weird Pop, Showcased In 2016 On His Album, Loop The Loop. Wayward, Butwoven With Hooks That Come Out Of Nowhere. Lyrical, Often Beautiful, Solos On Violin, Oboe,And Desiccated Guitars. Songs That Demonstrate A Nose-Thumbing Playfulness, A Refusal To Sitstill. Where There's Always The Urge To Interrupt A Carnival Beat With A Burst Of Galloping...

Ever since childhood, learning to play various instruments in a suburban Cincinnati basement alongside his brother Bryce, Aaron Dessner has consistently sought an emotional outlet and deep human connection through music _ be it as a primary songwriter in The National, a founder and architect of beloved collaboration-driven music festivals, or collaborator on two critically acclaimed and chart-topping Taylor Swift albums recorded in complete pandemic-era isolation at his Long Pond Studio in upstate New York, among many other projects. Through it all, Dessner has brought together an unlikely community of musicians that share his impulse to connect, celebrate and, most of all, process emotion and experience through music. This generous spirit and desire to push music forward has never been more deeply felt than on Big Red Machine's "How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?," the second album from Dessner's evermorphing project with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. In 2008, while assembling material for the charitycompilation "Dark Was the Night," Dessner sent Vernon a song sketch titled "big red machine". Vernon interpreted "big red machine" as a beating heart and finished the song accordingly _ a metaphor Dessner says "still sticks with me today. This project goes to many places and is always on some level about experimentation, but it shines a light on why I make music in the first place, which is an emotional need. It's one of my therapies and one of the ways I interrogate the past." Released in 2018, Big Red Machine's self-titled debut album evolved from improvisation and what Dessner calls "structured experimentalism," with an ear toward building tracks that would work well in a live setting alongside visual elements. When Dessner and Vernon started the Eaux Claires Music Festival in 2015, they staged the original "Big Red Machine" as an improvisation-based performance piece. They later took that show to the People collective's Berlin residency and festival, and to Dessner's Haven Festival in Copenhagen. "Big Red Machine started as this thing we would do for fun, and we fell in love with the feeling of it," says Dessner." Vernon agrees: "I remember it feeling really easy, but we never knew what would happen. It was exciting. As time went on, we just kept doing things together. And our friendship has grown strong, alongside all the collaborative stuff." New Big Red Machine material began taking shape in spring 2019, when Vernon came to visit Dessner at Long Pond. The first week produced songs such as "Reese," "8:22am" and eventual album opener "Latter Days," a haunting number sung by Vernon and Anaïs Mitchell that set the emotional tenor for what was to come. "It was clear to her that the early sketch Justin and I made of Latter Days was about childhood, or loss of innocence and nostalgia for a time before you've grown into adulthood _ before you've hurt people or lost people and made mistakes. Anaïs defined the whole record When she sang that, as these same themes kept appearing again and again," Dessner says. In the ensuing months, Vernon and Dessner would meet up when they could, and in the meantime, Dessner developed the existing material and wrote new instrumental tracks which he sent Vernon, always eager to hear what he would receive back. "Justin is incredibly gifted, but he's also disruptive in the best way," says Dessner, pointing to the first note of the song "Birch" as a prime example. "It's absolutely brilliant, but it was very surprising when I heard it the first time. I can't tell you what that interval is. There are many moments working with him where your head hits the wall in amazement like that." In the early stages of the pandemic, Swift approached Dessner to work with her on what would become the sister albums "folklore" and "evermore." Dessner describes this period as a "creative blur," during which he'd be writing material for Swift and Big Red Machine simultaneously. "I think this was an intense growing period for me, I was learning so much from Taylor and the process. Along the way, I shared all of our unfinished Big Red Machine songs with her and she really found them inspiring and gave me so much positive feedback and encouragement," he says. "I think that helped me realize how connected this Big Red Machine music was to everything else I was doing and that I was always supposed to be chasing these ideas. I was finding new sounds and ways of working through these songs. I just hadn't been able to finish them. So, I did." Beyond Vernon and Swift's encouragement, many of Dessner's previous collaborators and friends show up for him here, continuing the reciprocal exchange of ideas that has come to define his creative community. Songs feature guest vocals and writing contributions from artist friends including Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold ("Phoenix"), Ben Howard and This Is The Kit ("June's a River"), Naeem ("Easy to Sabotage'), Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Nova ("Hutch," a tune inspired by Dessner's late friend, Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison) and Swift herself ("Birch" and "Renegade," the latter an instant-classic Taylor earworm summed up by the poignant lyric "Is it insensitive for me to say / get your shit together so I can love you." The song was recorded in Los Angeles at the Kitty Committee studio in March 2021, the same week when Swift and Dessner took home the Grammy for Album of the Year for "folklore.") "This is all music I generated, but it is interesting to hear how different people relate to it, or how different voices collide with it," Dessner says. "That's what makes it special. With everyone that's on this record, there's an openness, a creative generosity and an emotional quality that connects it all together." As he continued writing prolifically on his own, Dessner noticed a theme emerging -- the idea of sitting with the uncomfortability of personal and family darkness from his childhood and reflecting on how emotional issues he dealt with growing up have reverberated through his adult life. It became clear that some of these he'd need to sing himself; songs such as "The Ghost of Cincinnati" and "Magnolia" address the disintegration of marriage and family and mental health, asking pointed questions of himself and those closest to him. "Brycie" is an ode to his aforementioned twin and National bandmate, who picked up on the musical vibes immediately when Dessner played the song for him for the first time backstage at a National show in Washington D.C. "He picked along to it with me and it immediately sounded like Aaron and Bryce playing the guitar in the basement as kids, which was my intent," Dessner remembers. "The words mean a lot to me. It's about my childhood with Bryce, and how I had pretty severe depression in high school. He was the one who kept me going and took care of me until I was back on my feet. I've lost close friends to depression and this song is about how important it was that Bryce was there for me at that time and is still here." In addition to being one of the more lyrically significant tracks on the album, Dessner says singing it himself felt like an important act of self-acceptance. "I always sing under my breath when I write music, but I usually hand it off to [National vocalist] Matt [Berninger] or others" he says. "When you're in a band for so long and somebody else is that person, you come to rely on it and I've always loved Matt's voice and his words. But singing `Brycie' myself helped rewire my brain to realize that maybe Big Red Machine is the project that not only enables me to create songs with other people, but also sometimes finish songs on my own." Recalling sessions at Sonic Ranch in Texas when Dessner recorded his vocal takes, Vernon says, "Aaron showed me `Brycie' a couple years ago now. I was like, this is beautiful, and you should do more singing. Not only would it be good for the future of your songwriting, but your voice sounds really good to me. It was exciting to see him flourish in that way _ to now be a part of that process and realize the hardships in that and also the victories. On this record, he's leading the charge, wholly and completely." Musically, "How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?" features what Dessner calls maybe the "clearest distillation" of his varying songwriting and production styles. Songs like "Reese," the Dessner-sung "Magnolia" and the elegiac "Hutch" are built on the kinds of tear-jerking piano melodies millions of fans have come to love from The National, but then move at their own pace toward unusual sonic destinations. "Aaron's greatest gift as a collaborator is his ability to evolve and experiment with the emotional sound that is so natural to him," Vernon says of the material. Elsewhere, the dream-like "Hoping Then" sets layered vocals by Vernon, Dessner and Hannigan ("It's the on the edge of why I can't sleep soundly") atop chopped and phased violin lines, programmed drums and countermelodies played on a rubber bridge guitar. His brother Bryce's orchestration ebbs and flows throughout this song and many others. The main instrumental track of the chugging, groovy "Easy to Sabotage" was stitched together from two different live recordings and later enveloped in warm keyboard textures and the head-nodding vocals of Naeem. "It just feels alive and electric, and it just happened," Dessner says of the song. That sense of shared experience extended to the new album's title, which was coined by Swift after Dessner told her he wasn't sure what to call the new album. Intuitively summing up the themes, she suggested titling it "How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?," a question which she pointed out could refer to multiple subjects addressed therein: "childhood, family, marriages, a depression, a losing streak, a winning streak or a creative streak. Taylor saw it all so clearly," Dessner says. "A year ago, we'd never even worked together. It's so cool that this community keeps extending and that everyone who contributed to this album connected so naturally to the emotions at the heart of the music."

The descent into darkness is a trope we find time again across history, literature and film. But there’s also an abyss above. There’s a winding white staircase that goes ever upward into the great unknown — each step, each turn, requiring a greater boldness and confidence than the one before. This is the journey on which we find Angel Olsen.

Olsen's artistic beginnings as a collaborator shifted seamlessly to her magnificent, cryptic-to-cosmic solo work, and then she formed bands to play her songs, and her stages and audiences grew exponentially. But all along, Olsen was more concerned with a different kind of path, and on her vulnerable, Big Mood new album, 'All Mirrors,' we can see her taking an introspective deep dive towards internal destinations and revelations. In the process of making this album, she found a new sound and voice, a blast of fury mixed with hard won self-acceptance.

Clear Blue Vinyl! Van Etten originally recorded "Silent Night" in 2018 for Eric Paschal Johnson 's short film The Letter. Her version of "Blue Christmas" appeared in 2009 on a benefit album titled Do You EAR what I Ear. "The holidays are just around the corner, and since I'm always late to the party, I thought I'd share two holiday songs I recorded. Nothing really beats the Bob Dylan Christmas record for me _ but I hope they bring you joy." - Sharon Van Etten

"Even my subconscious is self-conscious," Okay Kaya sings on "Inside Of A Plum", giving us a sense of the mental state she entered while making SAP, an album she wrote, performed, engineered, and produced alone, sometimes spending weeks at a time without social interaction. This is a concept album about consciousness in which Okay Kaya focuses her trademark combination of abstraction and wit on what happens to her mind unaccompanied, on her tendency to feel less like a human and more like the sticky secretion of a tree. After releasing her Spellemann Award winning album Watch This Liquid Pour Itself in January of 2020, Kaya left her home in New York and moved to Europe to create and show her various interdisciplinary exhibitions. Among others, she made an installation that amplified music made underwater and an interactive sculpture based on Jungian sandplay therapy for children. Between her exhibits, Kaya recorded through lockdowns by herself in the loaned studios of generous friends. SAP first grew from the first single "Spinal Tap" about Kaya wandering in Berlin, tree-touching. "Sap reminds me of the bodily functions I need to remember to do, like sleep. One might say it `resinates.'" The album was further inspired by Ketamine Therapy which is discussed in "The Inside Of A Plum." Kaya explains, "The doctor said this treatment grows literal physical branches in your brain." As she experimented with ego death, the subject of her song "Jazzercise", Kaya found herself writing in the voices of fictional characters she'd encountered in other people's stories. In `Jolene From Her Own Perspective,' she imagines Dolly Parton's nemesis responding to her song. In `Origin Story,' Kaya writes as a mythical goddess frustrated with her creation myth. In `I've Spent Forever Planning A Crisis,' Kaya responds to Cassavetes' film A Woman Under The Influence writing from the perspective of the story's children. Okay Kaya's investigations of mind-body come along with sexy dance beats, unpredictable interlocking synths, delicate soft guitars, and close-to-the-mike R&B whispering. But Kaya likes her falsettos cracking and her soul-inspired hooks careening wildly, a beautiful chaos that somehow fits together. When she returned to New York, Kaya was excited to collaborate again, to get friends to "bless the record." She invited friends to Gaia Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to sing or play an instrument. Most songs on the album unfold with guest performances from artists as varied as deem spencer, Taja Cheek of L'Rain and Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches. Just as the recording process began with isolation and ended with friends, SAP starts with the internal and leads outside to romance, to lovers who serve as funhouse mirrors, reflecting Kaya back to herself from different angles. In "Pearl Gurl" Kaya harmonizes with her multi-tracked second self and sings her uncertain conclusion: "If love is not the answer, it's one hell of a question."

Sharon Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around them, and her sixth album, We've Been Going About This All Wrong, concerns itself with how we feel, mourn, and reclaim our agency when we think the world - or at least, our world - might be falling apart. How do we protect the things most precious to us from destructive forces beyond our control? How do we salvage something worthwhile when it seems all is lost? And if we can't, or we don't, have we loved as well as we could in the meantime? Did we try hard enough? In considering these questions and her own vulnerability in the face of them, Van Etten creates a stunning meditation on how life's changes can be both terrifying and transformative. We've Been Going About This All Wrong articulates the beauty and power that can be rescued from our wreckages. We've Been Going About This All Wrong is as much a reflection on how we manage the ending of metaphorical worlds as we do the ending of actual ones: the twin flames of terror and unrelenting love that light up with motherhood; navigating the demands of partnership when your responsibilities have changed; the loss of center and safety that can come with leaving home; how the ghosts of our past can appear without warning in our present; feeling helpless with the violence and racism in the world; and yes, what it means when a global viral outbreak forces us to relinquish control of the things that have always made us feel so human, and seek new forms of connection to replace them. We've Been Going About This All Wrong is intensely personal, exploring themes like motherhood, love, fear, what we can and can't control, and what it means to be human in a world that is wracked by so much trauma. The track "Home To Me," written about Van Etten's son, uses the trademark "dark drums" of her previous work to invoke the sonic impression of a heartbeat. Synths grow in intensity, evoking the passing of time and the terror of what it means to have your child move inevitably toward independence, wanting to hold on to them tightly enough to protect them forever. In contrast, "Come Back" reflects on the desire to reconnect with a partner. Recalling all the optimism of love felt in its infancy, Van Etten begins with the plain beauty of just her voice and a guitar, building the arrangement alongside the call to "come back" to anyone who has lost their way, be it from another person or from themselves. Hovering between darkness and light, "Born" is an exploration of the self that exists when all other labels - mother, partner, friend - are stripped back. Unlike Van Etten's previous albums, there will be no songs off the album released prior to the record coming out. The ten tracks on We've Been Going About This All Wrong are designed to be listened to in order, all at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told. This is, in itself, a subtle act of control, but in sharing these songs it remains an optimistic and generous one. There is darkness here but there is light too, and all of it is held together by Van Etten's uncanny ability to both pierce the hearts of her listeners and make them whole again. Things are not dark, she reminds us, only darkish.

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 in the studio, 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.