The song Angel Olsen didn’t expect to take off: “I have no fucking clue!”
With just a guitar and a pen, Angel Olsen has the power to wreak emotional havoc on her listeners. The singer-songwriter has spent the last decade honing a sound around soft indie folk soundscapes and achingly vulnerable lyricism, charting her own feelings, anxieties and breakups with abandon.
As a result of her personal writing and gorgeous guitars, perfectly placed amidst the sad girl indie revolution, Olsen has garnered huge critical and commercial success. Between the defiantly delicate ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’ and the swirling ‘Some Things Cosmic’, she has created some of the most well-loved songs in the genre.
Though it has now been almost a decade since its first release, ‘Unfucktheworld’ remains one of Olsen’s most successful songs. In just two minutes, Olsen tells the story of a breakup, charting lost love, self-preservation, and loneliness over simplistic, lo-fi strums.
Olsen’s words are equally simple but devastating. “I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you, I started dancing just to be around you,” she laments in the song’s opening moments. By its close, she repeatedly states, “I am the only one now,” a sad but hopeful declaration in the face of a breakup.
“I was really upset when I wrote this song. It’s about a typical breakup. I was at a point where I had to make a choice between their sadness and mine. It was that thing where you’re in a relationship and you just can’t pass the torch anymore,” Olsen told The Line of Best Fit while picking out her own biggest hits.
The track opened her second record, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, but it was never released as a single. Nonetheless, it found huge success with fans, much to Olsen’s surprise. “I put ‘Unfucktheworld’ in the list mostly because it’s kind of unavoidable as part of my catalogue. I didn’t expect it to take off and I think it’s weird that it did,” she explained.
She goes on to state that she has “no fucking clue!” why the song became so popular. “I think it’s probably because it’s so to-the-point,” she observes, “It’s really straightforward. In my mind, I feel like I’ve written so many other songs that are way better. But it’s always like that with music, right? Often you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the one that people love? Interesting.’”
Explaining the phenomenon as resulting from the song’s position on the album – at its opening – Olsen suggests that the song belongs to audiences more than it does to her now. “I think I just appreciate the song more now in terms of how other people relate to it. It’s more for them than for me at this point,” she explained.
Though the songwriter herself may not understand it, the beauty of ‘Unfucktheworld’ is certainly in its simplicity. It’s a distillation of heartbreak, loss, and self-preservation, and the demo-like quality only serves to intensify its vulnerability. At once personal and universal, ‘Unfucktheworld’ is a timeless entry into the indie folk breakup song canon. It also has an undeniably cool title.
Revisit ‘Unfucktheworld’, the song Angel Olsen didn’t expect to take off, below.
