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Angel Olsen On Her Spectacular Sonic Evolution

Angel Olsen's fourth album, All Mirrors is a departure from her indie rock sensibilities of albums past, but that wasn't always the plan. The songs were initially recorded as sparse and stripped-down numbers — in the style of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. Then, Olsen went the other way, and the songs grew as she worked with a different group of musicians. The results are spectacular. All Mirrors is a lush and big album, with strings and keyboards doing a lot of the heavy lifting — an inverse version of the Nebraska situation.

In this session, Olsen talks about finding a place for those strings, why she was surprised to hear the album was being played at fancy restaurants and what her favorite song is on the album — at least at this moment. Hear all that and more in the audio player above.

Copyright 2019 XPN

Since 2017, John Myers has been the producer of NPR's World Cafe, which is produced by WXPN at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Previously he spent about eight years working on the other side of Philly at WHYY as a producer on the staff of Fresh Air with Terry Gross. John was also a member of the team of public radio veterans recruited to develop original programming for Audible and has worked extensively as a freelance producer. His portfolio includes work for the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, The Association for Public Art and the radio documentary, Going Black: The Legacy of Philly Soul Radio. He's taught radio production to preschoolers and college students and, in the late 90's, spent a couple of years traveling around the country as a roadie for the rock band Huffamoose.