Big Time, the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, was released in June 2022 to much anticipation and even more acclaim. Released by Jagjaguwar (Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten), the fiercely independent album is underscored by a creative concept that marks a new phase in the artist’s self-ballasted evolution. Big Time is at once ethereal and terrestrial. The ethereality that popularized Olsen’s unique sound is here ensconced in a lyrical realism set in the soil of the artist’s recent upheavals. At the age of 34, Olsen came out to her parents, the joy and courage of which was pruned by the devastating loss of her father three days later. Two weeks later, she got the call that her mother was in ER, followed by hospice care and a second funeral in an excruciatingly short period. This is the difficult terrain from which Big Time grew, an album whose title song explores the double entendre of “I love you big time” and how grief can expand into the size of a small planet that our lives must orbit over and over. 

Recorded in Topanga Canyon, California, the album’s soundscape is similarly spacious, spreading upwards and outwards in symphonic swells and digging down towards the rocky gizzard of memories. So compelling was the aura and atmosphere of this sonic reality that Olsen, an equally gifted actor and storyteller, created a companion film (Big Time Film) for the June release. In it, she relives the events and realizations that animated a few chosen songs, with scenes that seem to be connected by a time machine and cast in the dim memorial glow of a fading photograph. 

From her dazzling dreamscape that is Big Time to her appearance in the Karen Dalton documentary, In My Own Time, Olsen joins smART Magazine to talk about future aspirations in film and current creations in music. She also dives down into the aesthetics and influences that tie the visual universe of Big Time together. With a lot of growth and change in recent years, Angel uplifts the importance of embracing the difficult lessons that only grief can teach and the connections that she is forever grateful for.