Did Angel Olsen’s ‘Go Home’ turn out to be the defining song of lockdown?
We often feel like we intimately and immediately know our favourite artists from their debut, second, or maybe third album. But just like everyone else, artists are constantly evolving, learning, and growing. If they revealed everything there was to know about themselves on their early recordings, we wouldn’t have 18 albums from Nick Cave, 19 from Joni Mitchell, or, quite frankly, more albums than we can count from Bob Dylan.
When Angel Olsen wrote her sixth album, Big Time – featured as our Album of the Week upon release – she was experiencing her first gay love and heartbreak. Weeks after she publicly came out, her mother and father both passed away in quick succession. Having already booked recording time with producer Jonathan Wilson in his Topanga Canyon studio in southern California, she didn’t want to cancel. She started laying down the record, using her time there to heal and cleanse – three weeks after her mother’s funeral.
During an interview with Pitchfork upon the album’s 2022 release, Olsen explained: “There’s a song on the record called ‘Go Home’, which is sort of a letter to myself about how you can’t pretend to know what anything is. You really just have to live the experience and be able to be corrected and humbled by community. And that’s the hardest thing, to not feel offended or attacked, to take that as part of the healing process.”
The track was written in the summer of 2020—the year that universally makes our eyes twitch and knee jerk involuntarily. It was a time when nobody could know what anything was or what anything meant, and many of us certainly felt attacked by loneliness.
So yes, amid a global pandemic, Angel Olsen was grieving both the loss of her parents and a first love while coming to terms with having her own sexual identity now as common, public knowledge. But like any great artist, she channelled all of the ensuing hurt, confusion, and anger into song.
The opening lyrics sing, “The world is changing / You can’t reverse it” – few other eight-word combinations sum up the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sparse instrumentation hugs the delicate vocal line throughout the first verse – reflective of the isolation that came knocking on each of our doors during the time. With a glimpse of turbulence delivered by propulsive drums in the chorus, Olsen returns to that piano-vocal collaboration – this dynamic shift is perhaps representative of tumultuous waves of emotion. The track intensifies as drums and horns enter and converse, whirling in a crescendo of frustration and anger.
“I wanna go home / Go back to small things” soars above the summit points of tension throughout the song. Home and those “small things” Olsen sings of are elements of life we sometimes take for granted and certainly took for granted pre-2020—from simple conversations with loved ones to mundane tasks.
“During the pandemic, I started to realise how much I hated touring, not because I didn’t like playing music, just because I missed feeling known,” Olsen concluded in an interview with Uncut. “I miss my friends a lot. I miss not talking about music. I miss the other things I do, even the mundane tasks. I love making music and sharing it, but it isn’t all I love.”
