Angel Olsen Quotes

I studied other singers, so I would learn how to phrase, and learn how to breathe. And the main thing was, I learned how to inhabit my song.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

There's art in rhythm playing. Just find it. Make your own art. Find your place, and when it's your time to solo, it's your time to shine.

When I started acting, it was really the way for me to be able to communicate.

Acting and making music are quite complementary. Acting relies on someone else's writing and direction; writing music or lyrics doesn't. But they are both creative and personal in completely different ways.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

Each song, you're telling a story and acting.

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

To me, a song is new every time I sing it.

Ballet, there's a right way to do things, and it's black and white, and it's all striving for perfection. Acting is not that way. It's very gray, and the messier you can be, the better. The mistakes that you make are the gold and the beautiful stuff.

I was always interested in choreography - in making people think and feel something.

The basis of everything I do is down to the song. If I don't have the song I don't sing, and if I don't sing I don't perform.

I like to let the songs speak so that they can go through some kind of rebirth as you play them.

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener.

Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life.

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

I've definitely always had a passion for entertaining.

You know, when I did 'American Idol' the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.

It's a blessing as an artist to express myself - whether that be via dance, via song or via speech - in so many different ways.