Spring - Angel Olsen
aka thought daughter anthem
By Julianna
When I was a junior in college, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do after I graduate, but more importantly, who I would be. I incessantly reminded myself that these feelings of anxiety and helplessness would resolve themselves in a year when I walked across the stage and received my diploma. In a year, I would be confident in who I was going to be and that these feelings were only temporary — merely the cost of living a life after college so rewarding that I would forget what it was like to feel that way.
Fast forward to that year later, and those feelings are still present, and what I thought would happen when I graduated never actually occurred. Recently, I’ve been playing “Spring” by Angel Olsen a lot, which is off her 2019 record All Mirrors. I realized that I listen to a lot more music when I’m home in California because I drive a lot. I am preoccupied with nothing other than what’s playing in the car and the road in front of me, and I’m usually by myself, so I have that too. I have the luxury of ruminating on lyrics and playing whatever I want over and over again, until eventually I’m sick of it and I have to switch the song.
I found out about Olsen when I was in high school, through her song “Unfucktheworld”. I remember being entranced by her vocals and her lyrics, and it was not until later on that I realized how influential she had been as a singer-songwriter over the past decade. Her painfully honest lyricism reminded me of other singer-songwriters of the 2010s and 2020s — think Courtney Barnett, Adrienne Lenker/Big Thief, Jay Som, Weyes Blood, etc.
I don’t know how I came across this track. Perhaps by the Spotify algorithm, perhaps by the music gods who knew what I needed in the moment. “Spring” is one of those songs that I’ve played so often in the car and on walks that I get sick of it and forget about it for a while. But when I’m reminded that this song exists, I fall in love with it all over again, like I’m hearing it for the first time. Suddenly, I’m so overcome with emotions that I hadn’t even begun to process until I began writing this piece.
There are three ideas this song explores that I found important: 1) how time reveals itself, 2) the concept of the fruitless search, a continuous longing, and 3) what does it mean to love, and how do we understand when it’s real? How do we accept love? Olsen packs a lot to explore in just three and a half minutes.
I was initially drawn to this song because I imagined myself well into my future (late 20s) reminiscing on what Olsen is singing about in the first verse. She describes holding a friend’s baby, whom she said would never have children, and “how time has revealed how little we know us”. The line seems scary, and it reminds us of how uncertain the future is no matter how prepared we think we might be. Because I’ve been feeling so uncertain, the line was reassuring to me — that life won’t always feel like this, and literally anything can happen. It’s especially reassuring because kids at Columbia have their lives planned out 10 years in advance, and I’m guilty of it too, but it’s assured me that it’s never too late. These lines also remind of a Timothee Chalamet quote that’s recently gone viral on TikTok, where he pulls a verse from William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus:
“You can be the master of your fate, you can be the captain of your soul, but you have to realize that life is coming from you, and not at you, and that takes time.”
And of course, it takes time to realize who we truly are, and there’s no way of truly knowing what our life will be like and who we will be in the future.
It’s something that’s been repeated to us too many times before, but we can use a reminder every once in a while. And that example from Olsen’s personal life is just so touching.
The person Olsen is referring to in the song is her friend from childhood — someone who had played in all-female punk bands and dropped out of school, but now jogs every morning, has two children, a job, and a home in Chicago. I couldn’t help but think about my friends, and the things we’ve sworn off like children or living in the suburbs, and how that can just completely flip one day. I imagine ourselves as successful women in our 30s, recounting what it was like at this period in our lives to feel so uncertain and worried about the future. Time is ultimately what reveals what we know and don’t know about ourselves. What a strange feeling it is, to envision yourself in the future envisioning yourself in the past.
The verse lends itself over to the next idea, the concept of the fruitless search, the perpetual longing. For what seems like 8 years, I’ve been in this fleeting, transient, rapidly changing era of my life, where it seems like everything I do in the present is in anticipation of the future. It’s a fruitless search. This philosophical concept is so brilliantly revealed in just six lines:
“How time has revealed how
Little we know us
I’ve been too busy
I should’ve noticed
Days that keep slipping
A life that I’m missing”
I keep ruminating on that final line: “a life that I’m missing”. How can you not be present for your own life? The line’s irony is one of the most troubling aspects of being such a meticulously planned, future-oriented person.
Olsen sings about regret in the most angelic way possible against the backdrop of billowy, melodic piano chords and a simple drum pattern. Her voice blossoms with the music, fading in and out like memories. The last verse before the guitar break slowly slips away, echoing off into the distance. It’s like a dream you had last night that you’re trying to remember but ultimately you’ve forgotten about. Perhaps this was Olsen’s point, as she sings about a lover who’s left, or whom she’s left. The essence of the song is captured in these wickedly cruel lines:
“I’m beginning to wonder
If anything’s real
Guess we’re just at the mercy
Of the way that we feel”
If everything’s changing, and everything’s fleeting, how do we know love when we see it? It seems as if we’re constantly subject to our feelings. They are our metric of reality. If it feels like love, it should be love, right?
My favorite line is at the very end, where Olsen sounds is crying out, yearning for something tangible, as her voice starts to fade away:
“So give me some heaven
Just for a while”
I initially struggled with understanding the relationship between the track’s title and its lyrics, but now it is painfully obvious. What Olsen has brilliantly mastered is the ability to make her personal thoughts universal — like a window into a diary entry. The feeling of being stuck in this eternal Spring, where change is the only constant.
