Angel olsen burn your fire for no witness lyrics

First Listen: Angel Olsen, 'Burn Your Fire For No Witness' The singer's new album is the musical equivalent of a deep, questioning stare from a lover. These are delicate songs, with lyrics stripped to their essence.

First Listen: Angel Olsen, 'Burn Your Fire For No Witness'

February 9, 201411:00 PM ET

Burn Your Fire For No Witness

Audio for First Listens is no longer available after the album is released.

Angel Olsen's new album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, comes out Feb. 18. Zia Anger/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

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Zia Anger/Courtesy of the artist

Angel Olsen's new album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, comes out Feb. 18.

Zia Anger/Courtesy of the artist

Angel Olsen has made an unforgettable and entrancing record. Burn Your Fire for No Witness is the musical equivalent of a deep, questioning stare from a lover, and what draws me to her voice is its peaceful, subtle touch. It has me leaning in to listen. Leonard Cohen does that, too, and it's a fine line to walk between pale and enchanting. These are delicate songs, with lyrics stripped to their essence. "White Fire," the song that has the title of the album buried deep within, dispenses one killer line after another, including this:

I heard my mother thinking me right back into my birth
I laughed so loud inside myself it all began to hurt

John Congleton produced Burn Your Fire for No Witness, a record full of songs that took shape in Asheville, N.C., last summer. Olsen is working with a new band, including Josh Jaeger on drums and bass player Stewart Bronaugh. With Congleton's help, the trio found ways to make these songs calm and combustible. I've been living with this music for a few months, and it's become my friend, my comfort; it shakes me, saddens me and lifts me.

“Hi-Five”, the third song on Angel Olsen’s second album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, has got to be one of the most cheerful songs ever written about being lonely. A twangy electric folk tune that begins with an invocation of its muse, Hank Williams, the song is all stomp-and-rollick until it stops to catch its breath for a moment in the bridge. “Are you lonely too?” Olsen warbles. A beat later, her band’s back in full Technicolor, and the next line hits like a title card in an old “Batman” episode: “HI-FIVE!/ SO AM I!”

Olsen’s voice is enchanting; it sounds like the result of a spell that called for Leonard Cohen’s blood, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s larynx, and a still-operational old-timey microphone emblazoned with radio call letters. Her songs are powered by a strange, anarchic electricity, always flickering on the edge of blowing out. By the laws of the unique universe she creates on her records, Wanting, Waiting, and (probably the most popular pastime in her songs) Thinking are not passive stances but active ways of being in the world; unruly emotion is a virtue. “You don’t sing so high and wild,” she sneers at one point to a detached lover, and in an Angel Olsen song this is an insult so harsh it’s almost obscene. This guy may as well be dead.

Olsen first gained notice as the stand-out eccentric in Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s mysterious band the Babblers (given that all six of them were known to perform in hooded pajamas and sunglasses, this is saying something). In 2010, she released an arresting tape on Bathetic called Strange Cacti, which gave off the impression that she’d recorded it after falling down a well, trying to sing loudly and cavernously and urgently enough to be found. And she was, more or less—her cult following multiplied with the release of 2012’s excellent Half Way Home, a surreal and lyrical collection of folk songs that sounded a bit like Vashti Bunyan playing a midnight game of Ouija. Most of the songs on Half Way Home were driven by Olsen’s hushed acoustic guitar, so her 2013 single “Sweet Dreams” was a thrilling left turn—a swirling, psych-pop reverie. To overpower the percussion and charred electric guitars, she sang even wilder.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness picks up where “Sweet Dreams” left off, blossoming into a fuller, louder sound and embracing punchier song structures. It’s not as weird or raw a record as Half Way Home, but producer John Congleton manages to sand the rough edges off Olsen’s music without quite taming it. She and her band (Joshua Jaeger on drums and Stewart Bronaugh on bass and guitar) talk to each other effortlessly: On the great lead-off single “Fogiven/Forgotten”, the kick drum accents her open-hearted declarations like expertly placed exclamation points (“I don’t know anything!/ But I love you!”), and as the energy of “Lights Out” mounts, she passes the baton to Bronaugh for a perfectly timed solo. The blown-out, full-band energy enlivens Olsen, kindling an intensity that’s always been present in her songs and fanning the flames even higher.