![]() What begins in “Not Gonna Kill You” blossoms in the murderers’ row of “Sister,” “Those Were the Days” and “Woman,” except fever clouds part and Olsen stares directly into her pain and longing. She’s always deconstructing experience in the service of locating truth. “And halfway home, in your arms.” She suggests that raw instinct, however feral and unsafe it seems, is where life really happens. “Can’t help feeling the way that I do,” she continues in “Not Gonna Kill You.” “Become a prophet, become a fool.” We’ve seen her toe this line between serenity and oblivion before: “Halfway insane,” goes “Always Half Strange,” from 2012. Which is the point.īy using both reckless and world-worn voices, Olsen validates all experiences of human entanglement. Or, if we’re not comfortable with that thinking-who’s “wiser,” the stoic or the libertine?-her initial delivery is surely less subtle. “However painful, let it break down all of me,” she sings, “‘till I am nothing else but the feeling, coming true.” She is, to my ears, deliberately less wise a few beats earlier. ![]() The second half of “Not Gonna Kill You,” five songs into MY WOMAN, positions Olsen closer to the author of Strange Cacti, Half Way Home and Burn Your Fire for No Witness-not the caricature of the lonely heart Olsen is currently dispelling in interviews, but the woman with a seer’s touch.
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