Angel Olsen’s 2014 album Burn Your Fire for No Witness is, at its core, an album about being alone. “I am the only one now,” Angel repeats over and over in the album’s opening track, “Unfucktheworld.” For several months after I moved to the Bay Area in 2015 — perhaps the loneliest months of my life until this past year — I listened to Fire every day. On my bike rides home from work or campus, I would pedal around the five-block radius surrounding my apartment, playing it on my phone speaker or through earbuds, stretching out the time between being not-home and being home.
Home, at the time, was a 250-square-foot studio where I lived alone. Within the first few weeks of living there, I got very, very sick. A large abscess developed in my throat; it kept me from swallowing and, sometimes, from breathing with ease. My friend Eli came to visit for a few days and noticed I seemed sick, but they left before it got really bad. That is to say, before I couldn’t eat or sleep at all, before I dragged myself to the hospital, where a nurse told me I was so dehydrated that my heart rate was 120 beats per minute, which is called tachycardia. A doctor hooked me up to two liters of intravenous fluids and asked me why I hadn’t come in sooner. I told the truth, which was that I was trying to see if I could wait it out until my health insurance kicked in. That date was only three or four days away. I asked the person who gave me the bill if they could just change the date of my visit in the records; she said no. They put me in some sort of non-emergency medical transport vehicle and drove me to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist who stuck a foot-long needle down my throat to drain the abscess and then gave me three weeks’ worth of antibiotics that made me so incredibly tired. I know people say that’s not really a side effect of antibiotics and that there’s no medical or scientific proof for it, but that’s how I felt. But no one can vouch for this, because I lived alone.
I told the story of the throat abscess at my friend Brianna’s graduation dinner (questionable choice I realize now as I type it out), and everyone laughed, which — okay, it was funny, and okay, this was also because I really emphasized the part where the doctor asked me if I had been giving unprotected blowjobs. But they also laughed because they hadn’t seen how scared I had been, trying to swallow antibiotics, hoping that they wouldn’t come out my nose like the ibuprofen I’d tried to take before the abscess-draining had, alone in my studio. I got sick in that studio; I was heartbroken in that studio; I took naps and cut my own hair and wrote thousands of words and read thousands of pages, and no one ever saw me doing or feeling any of those things. I’d wake up in the morning and do whatever it was that I needed to do at home that day, and then I would ride my bike to campus, or I would ride it to a coffee shop, or I would go on a run and come back and eat something. I saw people all the time: in classes, on the street, in the coffee shops. I didn’t know any of them, and none of them knew me. I moved around feeling mostly very alone and very small in the grandness of the California landscape.
Fire kept me company. It’s a big album. Where Angel’s previous records had a mostly acoustic sound and sometimes maudlin lyrics, Fire is electric; it’s percussive; it’s serious. It’s even loud at times. In it, Olsen sounds like someone who, on ending up alone after a life-changing love (“In all of my dreams, we are husband and wife / I’ll never forget you, all of my life” she sings in “May As Well”), has taken it upon herself to catalog each ensuing feeling with ruthless accuracy.
There’s wry amusement: “Are you lonely, too? / High-five! So am I!” in “Hi-Five”
There’s sad acceptance: “I can hear you crying / And I’m crying, too / The world might be lying / But so are you” in “Dance Slow Decades”
There’s tempered optimism: “I want the best for you / So I won't look your way / Maybe the clouds will clear / And I'll be seeing you someday” in “Enemy”
And, in the line from the song “White Fire” that gives the album its title, there’s profound loneliness: “If you've still got some light in you then go before it's gone / Burn your fire for no witness, it's the only way it's done.”
Unlike in the rest of the songs on Fire, the “you” here is not Olsen’s former lover. She’s singing to herself.
Listening to Fire now, after a year of lockdown, of burning my fire for no witness, I remember the strength I pulled from that line during those lonely months in the Berkeley flats. I also remember how long those bike-riding, walking-around days felt. I had to constantly remind myself I existed. I couldn’t see my life — the fact of my being alive, of things happening to me — because it was never reflected back to me by anyone else. This is a crucial piece of being human: having others bear witness to the things that happen to us.
Lockdown has robbed us of that. Some days I’m in a great mood, and it makes no difference in anyone’s life but mine. Other days I’ve gotten on Zoom — where, I think, because we’re on a screen we’re expected to perform perfect moods — and no one could tell I’d just been crying. That wouldn’t happen in physical space. Someone would notice; someone would ask what was up. A few months ago, my friend Aaron, master quipper, said something about the pandemic that’s stayed rattling around in my head: “everyone is just out here having a crazy-ass life inside of their room.” Crazy as my life might be inside of my room, I’m aching for someone to bear witness.
P.S. Workers at Secretly Group, which includes Angel’s label Jagjaguwar, have formed a union! You can learn more about it and how to support here.