The Wild Hearts Tour ought to go down in history as one of the most impressive lineups ever assembled on the basis of a single song. In the late spring of 2021, Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten teamed up to release ‘Like I Used To’ – an instant hit perfectly appropriate for a time when the world was on the cusp of opening back up in the wake of a disruption the likes of which most people have never seen. It’s a swelling rock song, its four-part guitar stinger evoking Springsteen at his most anthemic, and the collaboration of Van Etten and Olsen – the first of its kind – was a union of two of the most distinct and powerful voices in modern music. Now, a year later, Boston’s seaport district plays host to one of the final stops on the expansive tour they dubbed “Wild Hearts”. A tour boasting both Olsen and Van Etten would turn heads on its own, but added to the mix are Julien Baker and Quinn Christopherson, for a night made start-to-finish of some of the best songwriting in recent memory.
Christopherson starts the night off with what he calls his “saddest song”, a long narrative named for his sister Raedeen. While the lyrics flip around between tenses, it’s clear his sister was lost, at the very least metaphorically, to the grip of addiction; the final lines are an offer to follow her, the person who raised him, into that bleakness – if only so she wouldn’t have to go it alone. But with that song finished, he smiles and jokes that “if we can get through that, we can get through anything”, handing off his guitar to bandmate Gracie Gray and picking up the mic for a remainder of a set that sees him animated and often airborne. The Alaskan artist is slated to release his debut, Write Your Name in Pink, later this year, and it will represent the culmination of nearly five years of releasing singles.
He closes his set with the joyous ‘Celine,’ dedicated to his mother and her love of karaoke, and the recently-released music video features her onstage right alongside him in his home of Anchorage. Christopherson’s career is undeniably one to watch even in this early stage; anyone who can arguably play the saddest song of an evening spent sharing a bill with three artists who have so ably and often explored life’s tragedies, most certainly deserves immediate recognition.
While Julien Baker’s early albums were notably sparse instrumentally, and she has often toured solo, seeing her with a full band makes the word “transformative” almost fail to encapsulate the experience. Even songs like ‘Tokyo’ whose recorded versions culminate in huge crescendos grow to many times their original size, Baker whirling around, guitar pointed directly up to the ceiling, and when she’s still at the mic stand she has a piercing gaze fixed somewhere in the distance. The focus of the night is her 2021 record Little Oblivions, a phrase extracted from one of the most emotionally distressing tracks on the record, ‘Bloodshot’. It refers to little pockets of time detached from feeling, something she obtains in the costly relief of substances – “split[ting] the difference between medicine and poison,” as she calls it elsewhere on the album.
Across all of Baker’s work, she splices together scenes from relationships, private moments, and snippets of talks to God with catastrophic imagery, like the plane crash and car wreck of ‘Tokyo’ or the ‘Ringside’ seat where the world can watch her wage war against herself. Ever since she introduced herself in music through the guise of a runner with sprained ankles back in 2015, Baker’s work has seen her chronicling a struggle epitomized in that image, one that often finds her heartbreakingly questioning if she deserves mercy, from those here on earth or from above.
Third up for the night, Sharon Van Etten takes the stage as the band plays the opening drone of ‘Headspace’. It’s a track from We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, an album she released in May that was preceded by an announcement but no singles or music videos, a rarity in the playlist-driven landscape of album promotion that often has each record cycle planned down to an algorithmic science. ‘Headspace’ is scored by harrowing synths, an airy verse crashing down into a pounding chorus whose refrain she repeats with more force each time. She’s an animated performer, falling to the floor during one of these repetitions as the plea of “don’t turn your back to me” reaches its desperate pinnacle. Van Etten has explored this kind of arrangement before in songs like ‘Jupiter 4’ from Remind Me Tomorrow, but ‘Headspace’ might be the toothiest individual piece she’s ever created. She draws heavily from her latest record for the setlist, including the yearning ‘Come Back’, another of the album’s finest moments. The titular call is delivered in a chorus of voices, but at the end of the song, she finds herself alone under a spotlight.
“With all these new ones, I feel I should play an old one,” she states in the next break. Prefacing ‘Tarifa’, she says it was written in a happy time, as opposed to many of her songs that by her own admission find her brokenhearted. “I was fucking in love! I was fucking, and in love, and I was happy, and I was sad… all of those things.” The song’s pacing from Are We There remains relatively unchanged, though later in the set she plays what is essentially an alternate version of ‘Every Time the Sun Comes Up’ from the same album, which moves much faster propelled by a forceful drum beat as Van Etten fills the gaps between each line of the chorus with little guitar solos.
At the tail end of her set, she revisits Remind Me Tomorrow again with ‘Seventeen’, which along with ‘Comeback Kid’ formed a pair of instant classics from that sea change of a record, both dealing with the uncomfortable tug between youth and the changed perspective of having aged a bit. The song is written as an address to someone just beginning to gain agency in their own life, and she ponders in the final chorus with a lyrical change: “halfway through this life – I used to feel free, or was it just a dream?” She goes all the way to stage-right and kneels down, reaching out to the audience for the song’s impassioned conclusion, though that closing question doesn’t get a conclusive answer – at least not within the lyrics of the song.
Angel Olsen has also released a new record since ‘Like I Used To’, and that project, Big Time, finds her in a much different stylistic place than she’s been before. Beginning, like every other artist on the bill in fact, with records like Strange Cacti that reflected a solitary recording practice, often just a voice and one or two instruments, she ventured from folk into folk-rock on Burn Your Fire for No Witness, and when she appeared in a silver tinsel wig on the synth-led single for MY WOMAN, it was the start of a transition into a more maximalist sound that peaked with All Mirrors.
Big Time though sees her depart more or less into the realm of country music, a new sound embraced in a period of personal transition for Olsen. Speaking to Pitchfork, she revealed that this latest LP was made in the wake of great tumult, centered around her revealing her identity as queer to friends and family, only to lose both of her parents in a short span of time afterward. When she says between songs that, as far as this tour, they’re “trying to keep it light… in this world of darkness,” there’s an undertone of sincerity in the humorous delivery that hints at the personal losses that have been piled on top of the overarching state of the world over the past years. Twice during the first fifteen minutes, she’s mentioned her mom in stage banter, including a charming recounting of how she’d randomly talk to strangers in the grocery store.
But on the subject of keeping it light, Big Time more or less succeeds. It’s an album very much awash in the glow of love, and the presence of others can be felt in a positive sense as opposed to the solitude or estrangement that characterized much of her earlier records, or songs like ‘Acrobat’ where Olsen imagined herself in a diminutive role compared to another, rather than an equal. The title track, which she plays early in the night after asking the audience, “Y’all ever been in love?” finds her at peace with all those past losses: “guess I had to be losin’ to get here on time.”
During another break, Olsen – like every other act has throughout the night – stops to thank not only her band and the other performers, but all the people doing sound and light, and even more beyond that. She says that the encroaching conclusion of the run has “end of summer camp vibes,” and on the nature of youth she reflects, “I never wanna grow up. Anyone who thinks they’re a grownup? I don’t trust ‘em”. The next song, ‘Go Home’, also speaks to that kind of inner child that people retain well into the fourth decade of their lives, its passionate chorus longing to return to the past, safe in the metaphorical womb, even though she knows it’s impossible to forestall the passage of time. It’s one of the most uncertain moments on Big Time, though elsewhere she states firmly what’s non-negotiable: “I need to be myself / I won’t live another lie,” she declares in ‘Right Now’, one of the core theses of the album that comes to a head in a self-assured, mantric coda, which fits thematically with the very next song, ‘Lark’, a repudiation of a relationship she seemingly allowed to steal her energy for too long.
After departing the stage following All Mirrors closer ‘Chance’, Olsen returns to the stage with her band. She speaks for a bit of how much love she has for Sharon Van Etten, and tells the tale of Van Etten sending her an early version of the song that would become ‘Like I Used To’. Van Etten returns from backstage and the cornerstone moment of the night has arrived, performing the song that more or less brought everyone here today, Van Etten on acoustic guitar, both all smiles as they sing their collaborative triumph together.
It’s a glorious moment, a song that embodies a reclamation of one’s life in the face of circumstances global or deeply personal, a return to a kind of openness – and vulnerability – that is essential for love and life at large. In the wake of that, as the lights shine on the audience whose hands are all raised in applause, they reveal they have one more surprise for the evening, a cover of Badfinger’s ‘Without You’ – although the sustained notes in the chorus more resemble Harry Nilsson’s cover which has set the tone for the scores of artists who’ve since adapted it to their own style. It’s a ubiquitous, singalong moment that serves simultaneously as a cheeky cover from a pair of artists nearing the end of their joint tour but is also genuinely a fantastic song sung here by two uniquely excellent voices. As conclusions go – who could ask for more?
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
