Angel Olsen Quotations

People should know each other because they want to, because they have things in common.

I was adopted legally around age three, but it's not like this thing I think about when I wake up every day. I was adopted by my foster parents, so I was comfortable with them. I wasn't in this alien place.

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

I feel really good about the future and working with people.

I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.

The family that raised me are awesome people and they are my mother and my father and my brother and my sister. I've never viewed them as these "strangers" that took over. It's never been this crazy, dramatic, Lifetime-movie situation. It's been chill.

It's hard to force a relationship with a stranger even if they happen to be someone you happen to share blood with.

I learned how to be more theatrical and have more fun, and to take a song and sing it over and over again in different ways, and make it different each time. I'm not just singing the song - it's this thing that's affecting me.

A lot of people ask me if I'm OK. I'm capable of crazy - a lot of people are - but I'm OK.

If you can't be psyched about your own thoughts, then how are you supposed to have a meaningful interaction with anyone?

You want to create things as purely as possible without allowing the universe to interfere so much that it's manipulating it and making things unreal to you.

I sometimes write as if I were talking to myself, or to a mirror, or to someone for the last time. There's this element of confrontation.

You get to a certain age and it really occurs to you: "My mother and my father will not always be here. My spouse or my girlfriend or boyfriend are here right now, but someday they won't be." You realize that you need to like yourself.

It's very important to enjoy time alone with yourself and just existing, because existence is kind of cool.

I'm ready to take on different selves and experiment and see what happens.

Sometimes I'll hit a note and sometimes I don't. Why not at least try?

Music is the first thing I ever cared greatly about. I've been singing and writing songs since I was six or seven.

I wasn't an only child, but I was the youngest, and no one else in my family played music.

I know it sounds so lame, but the songs are like my children.

I don't believe people when they say their songs have nothing to do with their personal life.

I just want to scream: "I'm being honest, I swear!" Maybe it's embarrassing, but I don't care anymore.

I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar.

I listen to tapes a lot. I have a car that only (has a cassette player). I like the nostalgic factor.

People are buying more vinyl now than they did in the late '90s or 2000s. I like having different mediums of the record. It's always interesting to see how the tapes end up looking because they are so tiny.

In high school I was in a band called Goodfight, but it was more me running around on stage. It was very punk inspired. Then I started to get into indie-rock and older music and decided I wanted to write my own stuff. I quit the band. Around 16 or 17, I started recording myself at home on keyboard and piano.

If, you know, all your life you're making films or whatever, and somehow along the way you lose meaning in whatever you're doing when you're making the films, they're just not the same as they used to be to you. That doesn't mean your life is over; it just means maybe go try to live a different life.

Different cultures have different audiences.

I'm sure that the meaning of the songs that I've written will change for me over the years, the same way that I can't even say what inspired some of the songs that I've been singing for a long time anymore.

My first ever tour of my music was in the Netherlands. I didn't really have a grace period to grow or anything; people just started booking for me. I feel pretty lucky.

There's a lot of expectation after you do something that seems to have been well received. It's kind of unfair.

It's a bit of a weird thing to know that (my music) has translated to that many people.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!

When people disappoint you, it's just as much your responsibility to be aware of it and what you don't want.

I'm not trying to prove that I'm capable of doing many things.

Share yourself with others after you have first spent some time with yourself.

I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

In the music industry, it's pretty easy to make an album just because you want to keep going, like, 'This is the formula.' But the formula is your life. You have to live your life and you have to live it well-that's the formula.

Go and experience life the way that someone else might experience it. Maybe you'll find meaning in a different corner of your brain. The fact that it changed doesn't negate the fact that it ever mattered.

'Sweet Dreams' is such a dark-sounding song, but it's about not taking anything for granted; share yourself with others after you have first spent some time with yourself.