LOS ANGELES — The most emotionally committed music of Angel Olsen's career grew out of the possibility that she might quit making it at any minute.
A singer and songwriter known for her impassioned melancholy, Olsen, who's 35 and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, arrived at producer Jonathan Wilson's Topanga Canyon studio last year amid a stretch of serious personal upheaval. Three weeks before she began recording what would become her sixth album, "Big Time," her mother died at age 78 of heart failure; two months before that, her 89-year-old father died in his sleep, mere days after she'd told her parents she was gay.
"I'd already planned to come here and make the record before all that happened," she recalled during a recent return visit to Topanga. "So I was just kind of like, 'F— it, I'm gonna go and see if I can get through this, and if it's weird then I'll stop and pick it up another time.' And it was honestly the best decision I could've made, because it was so much better than sitting around feeling disassociated." The rustic location — "being able to take a break and go on a hike or go to the beach," as she put it — was another balm, Olsen said.
