Angel Olsen and I are sitting in the quiet Brooklyn office of her record label, Jagjaguwar, but with the serious emotional questions we’re probing, I could forget we’re not at therapy. “So much stuff in my life just shifted,” she says of the period since 2016’s My Woman—namely, the end of a serious romantic partnership and some lost friendships. “It was like the ground was crumbling underneath me, and I was trying to re-find my place.” This tectonic force takes hold on Olsen’s newly released fourth album, All Mirrors, where she sounds more colossal than ever. The scale of the music is matched by the rigor of her thinking: In the weeks that follow our conversations, Olsen’s insights about interpersonal relationships echo in my head while parsing almost any dilemma. Her wise lyrics also have that effect.

The album began as a set of sparse solo songs—recorded at the Unknown in Anacortes, Washington, where Phil Elverum has often worked—but soon the project took a conceptual turn. Olsen decided to create a second, totally different recording of each song, using string arrangements and synths by the new-music composer Ben Babbitt and the prolific multi-instrumentalist Jherek Bischoff, as well as production from her Burn Your Fire for No Witness collaborator, John Congleton. When she realized how powerful All Mirrors 2.0 had become, she couldn’t go back.

Below, Olsen walks me through the personal tumult, experimentation, and hard-earned resilience that powers All Mirrors.

1. “Lark”

The lyrics started several years ago, right before I made My Woman, but the song didn’t fit—it was too dark or something. After the My Woman tour, I went on a few solo tours, and I had time to revisit Strange Cacti [her 2010 tape] and my older material, including this song. It reminded me of the way I used to write, which was kind of meandering. I’ve never really had chorus-verse-chorus stuff, but this felt like four different songs in one. I thought of it more as a piece—almost like piano music that sometimes goes on for several minutes, and there’s a fast, intense orchestral part, and then it’s really quiet.

A lot of the song, for me, is about verbal abuse and people saying they support me, especially men in my life. But that’s always an issue: I always make more money, and I’m gone, and I’m not asking anyone to forgive me for that. Both [aspects] have been problematic: One is emasculating, and the other is like, “No, you’re my songbird, you’re supposed to stay inside. I believe in your dreams.” And I’m like, “You don’t believe in my dreams. If you believed in my dreams, you would trust me. You wouldn’t make me feel bad for living my fullest life.” There’s a lot of that in there. A lot of people I’ve been with have needed to be needed, but that’s not how I view love. I like my solitude, and to be with someone out of safety is actually the furthest from safety you could get.

This song is specifically about getting into arguments and realizing: You’re not listening. You’re just looking at me with listening eyes because you’re not getting what you want, and what you want is for me to remain smaller than you. And I refuse to do that. I did that so much. I used to be so fucking shy. I used to let everyone make me feel small because I didn’t want to be in the way. But I can’t do that anymore. You will see my rage.

When you are abused in general, it can be a trigger for past things. At a certain point, in relationships, I didn’t even hear the yelling anymore. I would be thinking about what kind of dinner I would make. But when I went into the next relationship, it followed me, like a demon in my life. If someone can’t support my dreams, I could fight with them all night and forever, but they’re not going to listen. The song for me was an exercise in letting go of those demons, like: I have to burn this house down.