After completing her new album My Woman, Olsen turned her creative focus
Not wanting to “spend $30,000 on art school,” Olsen left St. Louis and enjoyed
to a trilogy of music videos that she predominantly produced, directed, edited,
several years embedded in the Chicago art scene, attending whimsical,
and starred in herself. The striking clip for synth-laden album opener “Intern”
surrealist-themed dinner parties and eventually cutting her teeth touring as
begins with a close-up of the singer in a tinsel wig—bangs trimmed in her
a singer with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who had taken note of her preternatural
signature hairstyle—piercing the fourth wall with her defiant cerulean gaze as
pipes. It was at a show in Australia where someone requested songs from her
if to say, “Yes. I can see you there, too.”
2010 debut EP Strange Cacti that the singer was surprised to find her audience
already waiting for her.
It didn’t take long for viewers to get hung up on her silvery mane. Was she trying
to bury herself in some sort of character? They were feeling around in murky
“That was when it occurred to me that people in the world knew about my
bathwater, missing the point, she felt. Of the myriad aspects of filmmaking,
music,” she says. A couple of years later, following a tour in support of the full-
Olsen has quickly taken the most lustrous shine to editing, as it affords her extra
length Half Way Home, the logistical hurdles that most artists take years to clear
control in articulating whatever message she wishes to convey through her work.
would seamlessly align for her. “I booked a tour and then after that tour I had a
But recently, she has been coming to grips with the fact that her struggle will
booking agent, I had a PR agent, I had a label after me. It was super weird—and
sometimes prove to be in vain.
easy. I was lucky.” Olsen’s early releases saw the light of day on her friend Jon
Hency’s Bathetic Records, whose Asheville base would set the stage for a sort of
“Really, the wig was just, like, low budget, no stylist, it looked pretty,” she
cottage industry that coalesced around the singer.
says over the phone from Asheville. “It’s funny because the friends that
know me are like, ‘It’s so cool to see how much of you is in it, like, [of] your
“I went to Asheville on the last show of this tour where my mind was blown [by
actual personality.’” In contrast, the video for the eight-minute-long album
discovering] that people listen to my music,” Olsen says. “I met this woman who
centerpiece “Sister” closes the video triptych with a shot of a wig-free Olsen
converted a small chapel on a hill to a house that she lives in. We were talking about
emerging from a shimmering Los Angeles swimming pool, baptized and
our lives: she was adopted, I was adopted, we talked about being aliens. It was
beaming with a knowing grin. It’s a welcome moment of levity that follows
like with each subject we had a synchronicity.” M.E. Bethel, a sort of progressive
a piece of music with real emotional weight. “All my life I thought had
renaissance woman, would serve as a mentor figure for Olsen. Her son even
changed,” she repeats in the coda, her delicate vibrato quivering like that of
appears as a greenhorn journalist in the “Intern” video. The pieces would fall into
a young Stevie Nicks.
place from there, setting the scene for Olsen’s embrace of her newfound home.
In a sense, it had already changed by great measure. Olsen was raised in St.
“Everybody is kind of like a community,” she says. “The people I had just met at [the
Louis by her adoptive parents, and she grew up attending inner-city public
time I moved to Asheville] were friends and they were hanging out, but within the
schools, an experience to which she attributes her uncanny toughness and the
last three years, sometimes having to do with my career, they’ve all been merging
DIY approach with which she has taken on a multitude of creative projects.
as a small production company of people who also hang out and go [canoeing and
hiking] together.” At the core of the scene is Olsen’s most formidable vehicle: the
“If anyone ever fucks with me, a part of me refers back to that time when
voice that she has displayed with candor stemming from her earliest, folk-oriented
someone was going to start a fight with me in the middle of the hallway,” she
releases. Yet however tender the treatment of her vocals, the precocious speaker
says. “I kind of go into that zone of my identity as a pre-pubescent tough-ass.”
behind them has had no shortage of thi