by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that I watched an Austin City Limits episode featuring two female singer-songwriters, one
I’d heard of before, Norah Jones, and one I haven’t, Angel Olsen. Norah Jones
is one of those people I admire more than I actually like: she writes pleasant
songs with literate lyrics, and in the mini-interview she did at the end of her
set (an annoying affectation the producers of Austin City Limits instituted in the last few years after blessedly
allowing the musicians merely to present their music without having to talk
about it) she mentioned that since the mega-success of her first album she’d been
able to indulge in experiments, like shifting from piano to guitar and taking
up country music (her band for this included herself on piano on four songs,
guitar on one, as well as a Hammond B-3 organ player and a pedal-steel guitar player) before returning to
piano and making a second album that included songs in both styles. I found her
pleasant but not all that compelling: she did five songs and, since I’m not
familiar enough with her to recognize them and Austin City Limits does not
give chyrons containing the song titles the way the local show Live
at the Belly Up does, I can only guess at
the titles: “Peace Is For Everyone,” “Don’t Be Denied” (a Neil Young cover but,
since Neil Young has written so many songs and I’ve not kept track of his
career anywhere near obsessively enough to keep track of all of them, I didn’t
recognize it, either), “(It’s
Hard to Touch) The Other Side,” “So Carry On” and (her one guitar song) “It’s a
Hand-Me-Down,” which was actually the most infectious thing she did all night.
Angel Olsen was quite a bit more interesting, though there’s a certain mopiness
about her music that takes some of the edge off an otherwise quite good
performer and songwriter. She herself dressed in a black top and black skirt,
but all her band members (male and female, and she seemed to have both) had to
wear matching grey suits and white shirts with string bolos instead of ties.
She did only three separate selections, though judging from the way her lyrics
rambled from one poetic theme to another it seemed likely to me that each
separate selection actually consisted of two or more songs she was presenting
in medley form. She seems like the result of a bizarre experiment to hybridize
Chrissie Hynde and Nico — she has Nico’s ethereal monotone and at least some of
Hynde’s strident power, which is as odd a combination as you’d think from that
description — and though she mumbles so much it wasn’t always that easy to tell
what her songs are about (the guesses I made as to her titles included “Nothing
Else but the Feeling,” “I Want to Be There” — an odd song whose sentiment is
that she wants to be there with her former lover and their new partner — “All My Life I’ll Change” and “You and
My Mind”), she sounds like a compelling performer and I might want to seek out
her CD’s (she’s made two, Burn Your Fire for No Witness and My Woman — an album title that makes me wonder about her sexual orientation —
as well as a third one she released only on LP, Half Way Home). Incidentally, her LP was released on Bathetic
Records, Burn Your Fire for No Witness came out as a limited-edition cassette (that’s right, cassette! In 2014!)
on Bathetic with the CD and LP versions released on a label called Jagjaguwar,
and My Woman is also a Jagjaguwar
release.
