I'm a huge Angel Olsen fan, and so was super-excited to listen to her new album this week. I'd been humming the single "Big Time" for weeks already, its infectious country soul is irresistible to me. That song, the album's title track, is all about good feeling and the joy of falling in love.
Other songs, however, go in far darker directions. On my first listen the song "Go Home" stopped me in my tracks. It might be about a relationship ending, but I hear it as an elegy for the country. It slowly builds in a way that sends a knife into my soul, like "Bridge Over Troubled Water." The crucial line is "We watched it all burn down and did nothing."
Looking at the wreckage around me I get the feeling that the point of no return has long passed us by. The courts are poised to revoke rights, the fascists who tried to overthrow the government on 1/6 are about to sweep the election, mass shooters murder and nothing happens.
In times of extreme futility like this it's natural to want to "go home" and "go back to small things." In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting I suddenly understood quietism. If this world is irreparably broken and resists all attempts at being fixed, might as well retreat into the monastery of my mind. This might not be the intended message of the song, but it's the one that speaks loudest to me right now.
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