Angel Olsen discusses her favourite Leonard Cohen track ‘Night Comes On’
Angel Olsen has cemented her place as one of the finest songwriters of her generation. Her beautifully crafted works toy with the conventions of folk and dream pop and express the nature of anxiety and mental health in a way that few of her contemporaries can. She is a true storyteller in every sense of the word.
Olsen recently recounted the story of meeting a 90-year-old man a few miles away from where she lives. Visiting a lake in the area, she and her friend bumped into a man named David. “He said we could use his canoe whenever we liked; anyone in the community can use his canoe between 12pm and 12am,” Olsen explained. “Of course, we loved that idea, so we went.”
She then continued the story of David by noting her favourite Leonard Cohen song ‘Night Comes On’. Olsen had been listening to Cohen “on and off” throughout her life and thinks that the master songwriter “articulates corruption in a way that no one else was really doing, even his own corruption.”
‘Night Comes On’ came on the car stereo one day when Olsen was driving, and it reminded her of David and what it meant to be a father figure. “David is that kind of archetype where he seems like a good father,” Olsen said. “Every time I go out to the canoe, I end up getting into a conversation about life with him, about his experience with fascism and the experiences that we’re having now in America.”
Olsen admitted to having something of a difficult relationship with her own father. She added: “I’ve never felt super-close to my own father – we’re close, but typically we’re not very emotional with each other. It took him about eighty years before he said he loved me, but, you know, sometimes it takes people a while to say these things out loud.” So evidently, meeting David was an important part of her life.
Something about Cohen’s song, perhaps himself something of a father figure, reminds Olsen of David. She said: “David is the new person I’ve met in my life who has been really inspiring to me. When I think about the lines of ‘Night Comes On’, where Leonard Cohen is speaking about a father reminding him that these people have lied – he was right. It’s all there in the song, and it’s pretty clear what it’s about, but I just keep thinking of David.”
This story beautifully relates the importance of fatherhood, and only Olsen (and perhaps Cohen) could have told the story so carefully and succinctly. Olsen concluded, “When I think of a father, that’s the kind of human I’m thinking of, and to me, ‘Night Comes On’ is about fathering yourself through something and going out into and back into the world.”
