Q: All Mirrors by Angel Olsen
A: “The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
- Marcel Proust, A Remembrance of Things Past
If Angel’s Olsen My Woman was about coming to terms with womanhood, All Mirrors is about coming to terms with love. Olsen spoke in an interview that the album’s opener “Lark”:
“...is a lot of different songs in one. The original demo of that song still speaks to me personally the most, because it’s very free-form. It’s an example of the writing process for me, and it’s very, very cinematic. I’m not saying that to be pretentious. I think of things visually, which is why I direct my videos sometimes. I think of narratives, and that song is an example of different angles of viewing the same kind of love. And it’s such a weird, intense beginning, and then after that you can release and listen to the record.”
Which makes sense, because my first listen immediately made me think that the album’s tracks had a narrative to it, and that yes - it’s very cinematic.
The title All Mirrors belies at first. For an album about lost and gained love (love, we assume, to be the most real thing there is) the lyrics and album’s title suggest a disconnect with reality, others, and oneself. The idea of mirrors in 2019 makes one think of “black mirrors” and tired screeds about identities lost in the labyrinthine funhouse of social media, but the funhouse metaphor does work. The title refers to the house of mirrors that is selfhood or subject-hood, where representations of yourself repeat endlessly, a person multiplied outside of you until there’s nobody to turn to except the reflection. This interpretation of the album claims that when we see things and talk to people it is, quite tragically, all mirrors, that our interactions with the world can’t help but be selfish projections of what we want, what we see. Which isn’t to say that people are inaccessible or unreal because of how inescapable the lens of selfhood is - they’re just really really far. The expectations and desires that Olsen hops between throughout the record forces you to find safety not in another person, but in this space between you and external projections, Olsen singing at the album’s end, “All that space in between where we stand / could be our chance.” This might sound harsh to those confident in their relationships, so to lessen the severity of the blow it’s important to recognize that our consciousness as a hall of mirrors isn’t an excuse to double-down on the primacy of the individual like a bunch of Randian Objectivists, but to realize that real love and communication occurs when we admit that this lacana between people is where real dialogues occur, where we can’t delude ourselves into believing we really really see someone when we really really can’t. What we can do is listen.
But let’s go back to the record’s start, an album with a narrative even if it’s just underneath warbly-sung lyrics and devastating string arrangements that oscillate between airy confessionals and declarations belted out as if in cathedrals. Angel Olsen’s controlled vox seems the perfect narratorial voice, making her the auteur or director that we trust till the credits role. The inclusion of synths and strings rather than a profusion of power chords and country rhythms modernizes but also sustains the record’s preoccupation with sensations and feelings rather than the conventions of a pop hit, rendering the songs more symphonic and experimental than the usual package of bangers and laments.
The opener, “Lark,” is where we orient ourselves, a slow-burner that reaches intense heights without so much of a backbeat until the last minute of a six minute song. The song doesn’t even really have a chorus, just sections that rise and deflate as organically as our expectations and concomitant letdowns - until suddenly crescendoing in Olsen’s accusations at a former lover: “What about my dreams? / What about the heart?” As an introduction, the song is as sweeping as a Hollywood epic. Olsen sprinkles in hints that our interactions with others are largely reflections of ourselves instead of the other: “Learn to look me in the eyes / Yet I still don't feel it's me you're facing” and “Every time I turn to you / I see the past, it's all that lasts.” We can’t pretend as if the people we love are right there; we project our expectations, our past, and ignore those little disagreeable things that make up the other. The album’s structure begins with the rise and slow crumbling of a recounted breakup in “Lark” and is followed by the immense void that is “All Mirrors.” “All Mirrors” sounds and feels like the epiphany following a breakup, an epiphany of repeated emptiness that all you’ll ever know and can know is yourself, all those things you took for the real were nothing but a lark.
Speaking of repetition, the oft-repeated line, “Losin’ beauty, at least at times it knew me,” returns to what retrospection can clarify: that the moment is evanescent but memory gives us our sense of the present. The epigraph of Marcel Proust above does not discredit love. It admits that our ego-trapped faculties are reliant on memory, and that people are aggregates of memory not nearly as immediate as we tell ourselves: “Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” Of course, this goes both ways. Our self-centered psyches are just as dependent on others as they are to us, Proust writing, “Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.” The fragmented self can’t love a fragmented other, only the idea of the other. Self-centered as we are, our idea of another person is never truly that person but a projection.
Thankfully, the two tracks that follow are of the loves that flower from this self-examination, “Too Easy,” and “New Love Cassette.” If we choose to listen to the record as a narrative of moods rather than plot, we’re given the pleasures of love in a new lover with the past sloughed off the back like so much snakeskin. The dominance of the past overpowers the present until this release from the past allows us to slip into the immediate and access love, love as the dynamic between two fragmented selves hearing each other. The upbeat but plaintive “Spring” functions excellently as a segue back into the necessary doubt that healthy relationships necessitate, keeping listeners on their toes.
This bittersweet song transitions into the sixth track, “What It Is,” placed at the center of the album and its most lyrically aggressive: “And knowing that you love someone / Doesn’t mean you ever were in love.” Because the song starts with “Go on, on ahead tell your friends I was wrong / Take it all out on me, I’m too caught up to see / Everyone will believe, will believe, will believe.” Love isn’t the thing that we think it might be, “It's never easy to admit / That maybe you just want / Just to feel something again / You just wanted to forget / That your heart was full of shit.” Olsen explains in an interview that “The hardest thing to admit to yourself is that you just want to fill a void with someone and they’re filling a void with you. Sometimes we’re just doing that when we think we’re in love.” It’s interesting to consider whether or not this applies to some people or everyone: certainly more than others, but love is a symbiotic relationship - what kind of love would it be if only one person gives and the other just receives? This is characteristic of toxic relationships in which one person receives all the love while the other gets off on giving it. Harsh words for such an accessible melody.
She follows up this unpalatable message with more melancholic theatrics in the next track, “Impasse.” “Impasse” describes the impasse of two people who are incapable of reaching out into that space between and instead, retreat into themselves, Olsen wailing, “I never lost anyone / I’m just living in my head.” The repetition of these lines conveys the sense of being trapped in a hall of mirrors with its heavy use of reverb and plodding tempo. This framing reminds us that there is something fearful about being constantly trapped in yourself, how fatalistic it seems to be completely cut off from the other. But the value of this is immense. We need to register that we are trapped in our bodies, not out of some radical pessimism, but to be closer to others, admitting that people are individuals with their own baggage and unresolved histories rather than being here in the moment. The here in the moment mantra we hear so often has value, but it ignores the weakness of our agency in the same way that Sartre’s existentialism insists that agency just requires a strong will. Olsen suggests the centrality of the self admits that others create you, that we are dependently independent.
“Impasse” is followed by “Tonight” and “Summer,” two songs about moving past an impasse. Olsen responds with the following two songs. Moving past the impasse is the nearly whispered, “Tonight,” a song about the peace after moving past a failed relationship, not being “in fear / Without you,” and “Summer,” an obvious counterpoint to “Spring,” where we find a recovered speaker looking back at the gauntlet she’s finally extricated herself from, celebratory at her emotional liberation. Olsen sings, “Took a while, but I made it through / If I could show you the hell I’d been to,” as if she’s telling her new lover of the past partner at the album’s start how she was also trapped in these delusions of how true love is forever or fixed.
Both of these songs represent the peak of the album’s narrative before the final dyad of songs that conclude the record. If “Endgame” is the denouement, “Chance” functions as its epilogue, the former appearing before the narrative’s completion and the latter right after. Just listen to “Chance” and I dare you not to hear it play to the rolling of credits. When “Endgame” repeats, “I needed more than love from you,” a line that clarifies how the word “love” can be used to justify anything, “Chance” (as the name suggests) refrains from certainty: “It’s hard to say forever love / Forever’s just so far / Why don’t you say you’re with me now / With all of your heart.” The sense of an ending these two songs provide only reach peace through an acceptance of impermanence and individuality.
This emphasis on being here in the moment, brings us back to the oscillation between past and present. If Proust claims, as stated above, that we are indebted to memory for our present feelings, then is the present invaluable? While the present can be overvalued, it’s the present’s collision with the future that makes love possible, the vacuum of future possibilities. But we have to remember that the chance of the song’s title isn’t aleatory but the chance of an opportunity: “All that space in between where we stand / could be our chance.” Theorist Ian Bogost is interested in just this kind of consideration of the self and the other. Usually writing about video games with a background in the pretentious-sounding “object-orientated-ontology,” Bogost develops the thought that when we interact with things, our ability to operate them comes through a dissolving of self. Our very survival depends on this outward projection and attempts to embody the tools we use whether they be toasters, vehicles, or video games. Bogost writes that the complications of knowing someone or something isn’t a conundrum contingent on not knowing but on knowing too much. He writes, “The moment one finds recognition, the idea of the other becomes subsumed into the domain of the same, of the self. But without that recognition, any particular other remains indistinguishable from the nebulous universe.” When we think we know an object or a person we only bring to the object our own experiences and senses of what this might be. Ergo, the only way to know something is the balancing act of the golden mean where we recognize a quality of a thing but remain distant enough to let the qualities of that thing exist independently, lest we dilute a thing’s intended functions with wants and desires that just don’t jive with its integrity.
The journey Angel Olsen takes us on blurs the line between lovers lost and gained, see-sawing between the two enough that the listener has to ask themselves whether or not the album is linear in a narrative sense or linear in a psychological sense - or even whether it’s linear at all. Is she merely reflecting on a slew of various lovers with a hodge-podge narrative of recollections that functions as a series of emotions that complement each other in their placement? Or is there this initial breakup and reflection in the first two tracks with a second (and third? fourth?) lover that is having this recounted to them, the same problems with the first lover bubbling up even here, albeit with the speaker a little bit wiser? The object of love that is purposefully masked by Olsen is something transitory, but as All Mirrors chorus suggests, love between the two, speaker and lover, might live on if one rejects the stock romanticism of forever, a clichéd expectation parried by Olsen’s line “I never lost anyone / I’m just living in my head”. The speaker surrenders to the idea that spatial absence of someone doesn’t mean they’re actually gone. A heart not full of shit, would be a heart acknowledging the space between, a multiplicity of things rather than a totalizing of things. That appreciation of the multiple rather than the singular keeps love from subsuming things in themselves, an idea shared by Olsen in the climax of the opener “Lark:” “They say you love / Every single part / What about my dreams? / What about the heart?” It’s only when we admit how much we don’t know that we can begin to come closer to knowing what love might really be, the act of listening and appreciating the sovereignty of the space between individuals.
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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.