On a block in the neighbourhood of St Louis, Missouri’s Richmond Heights, there’s a red brick house Angel Olsen walks by every time she returns to her hometown.

This is the house Old Lady Chris lived in with her many cats. Once a week, every week, when she was growing up, Olsen’s mom, a good Christian woman, would go to the grocery store and pick up two bags of ice, a six-pack of Coors beer, cat food, and deli meats. She’d leave the groceries on Old Lady Chris’s front porch, and pick up the cheque left for her, which Olsen remembers always smelled “like cat piss”. Olsen never once saw this woman in the flesh, and Old Lady Chris remains a mystery, long after her death and the gutting of her house. “Who was Old Lady Chris?” Olsen muses, with a pressing look. “And why did she need those exact items every week?”

It’s an early August evening in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A brief thunderstorm had burst not 30 minutes before Olsen and I meet, leaving the chairs in the backyard of this bar pretty wet. Olsen, with her hair falling loose from a big, bouffant-y bun done up for a video interview recorded earlier that day, took the bottom of her striped linen dress and wiped off a seat, so my skirt wouldn’t get too damp while we discussed death, love and her striking fourth studio album, All Mirrors.

By this time, Olsen’s been in New York for almost a week, her days stacked with interviews like this one. But when she’s home in Asheville, North Carolina, where she moved about six years ago, mostly Olsen hangs out with her cat, Violet, and goes to watch her best friend DJ. Sometimes she goes on hikes, or to dinner with friends. And now that she’s just bought a house, she has a lot on her to-do list (actually, she says she has multiple, categorised to-do lists). “I gotta like, buy air filters,” she tells me. “I’m like, calling the lady who owned the house before me, ‘What air filters did you use, biatch? Those are expensive! Who do I call? You mean I gotta call somebody to have him in my house to fix it? And then hopefully it goes well? This is a lot!’”