#15, “Like I Used To,” Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten (2021)

150 Favorite Songs: #15, “Like I Used To,” Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten (2021)

A few months ago, I was talking to a musician about an album she’d released a little over a decade ago that her label had recently rereleased a deluxe, extended edition of. That album was a departure for her, a devastating breakup album that she’d written in response to, well, a devastating breakup. Her records since then didn’t aim to hit the same emotional beats, which makes sense. (Also, this was Norah Jones and the album was Little Broken Hearts, I don’t know why I was being vague about it except that starting one of these with a name-drop makes me embarrassed.)

Anyway, I was trying to get at something that I think about a lot, which is that the depth of feeling you have access to tends to change as you get older. When you’re young and having your heart broken every few days/weeks/months, depending how much of a romantic you are, every song on the radio can speak to you. As you get older—or at least as I have, I don’t know your life—it’s hard to trigger, say, the heartbreak emotion. And that was a big, powerful emotion that felt meaningful to me during the time in my life when it was present. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it was important to me, and I miss it sometimes. So I asked my very close personal friend Norah Jones*, in a somewhat clumsy way, about revisiting an album that has so much emotion behind it, and how it felt revisiting the depth of feeling that the younger versions of ourselves experienced. Or, at least, that’s what I meant to ask, I was definitely more awkward than that, because I remember her kind of staring at me through the Zoom screen and saying, “I mean, I guess? But I still have feelings.” Either I didn’t get my point across, or the point was not one that she related to, so I dropped it and went to the next question.

I still have feelings, too, but they’re generally more complex and layered than they were when I was a raw, open-wound of a human being in my teens and early twenties. Accordingly, it’s hard to find things that connect in the way that, say, “Black Tornado” hit when I was in my twenties, or “Burn” did in my teens. Who is singing songs that express complex feelings that acknowledge that their place in the world is good and they’re very privileged to enjoy it, but also there is still a strain of pensiveness and yearning in there, caused not by a deficit of anything specific, but something in their constitution that makes them feel that way? Who is singing about not ever wanting to go back because if you did, if such a thing were even possible, it’s hard to imagine you’d end up in a spot as good as the one you have now, but also trying to find ways to connect with the parts of themselves that were on the forefront there?

Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten are.

“Like I Used To” is a non-album single they recorded together in 2022. It opens with a few chords that sound like someone maybe leaned on the keyboard, and then goes into a big explosion of drums and joyful noise, with a minor-key guitar riff lending the whole thing an air of melancholy. Then Sharon Van Etten sings the first verse, Angel Olsen’s distinctive vocals adding harmonies but not really showing themselves just yet. Sharon maintains the lead on the first chorus, which is bright and sparkly and triumphant. Then Olsen comes in with her own verse, singing lyrics that mirror Sharon’s but are also very much her own. Sharon joins her low in the mix on the pre-chorus and then adds backing vocals through the chorus until it repeats, and then they’re both in it together, these two voices expressing this sentiment that felt very relevant to me, personally, especially in 2021, built around the frame of “like I used to.” The chorus is deceptively simple: They just list things they used to do, that they’ll do again, with their voices and the melody somehow conveying that the time between when they used to do those things and when they’re about to do them again contained some difficult moments.

I think reconnecting with a part of yourself that’s no longer central to who you are is a common human experience. I don’t know if that’s true, but I suspect so. It doesn’t seem like something I’m alone in. Especially because “Like I Used To” was a hit, more or less, which means other people heard something they connected with in it, too.

Maybe that’s context dependent. “Like I Used To” was released in May 2021. The fourteen months preceding its release were, for many of us, very very different from any we’d previously experienced. I had never spent an entire year avoiding anyone I didn’t live with on purpose before that, had never been that isolated and aware that, for once, I wasn’t missing out on anything because of that isolation, because most everyone I would have been around was doing the same thing. That moment in the spring of 2021, when the Covid vaccine was still something you had to endlessly refresh half-functioning websites to try to get and not something huge chunks of the country rejected because their leaders are a death cult, was also unlike anything I’d previously experienced. That stretch—when Covid** went from making being around other people a game of russian to something more normal, that we had more experience with—came with a sense of renewal that I really had never felt before.

And then right at that moment, here came this really beautiful song, a sad-but-triumphant marker of the moment, specific but also universal, sung by these two women whose music has meant a lot to me, released as a special one-off collaboration. “Like I Used To” burrowed its way into me in 2021 the same way that “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” did in 1994, that  “Climbing to the Moon” had in 2001, that “On the Radio” did in 2006.

And that, as I tried and failed to discuss with Norah Jones, is a real magic. Taking a feeling that lies unexpressed in another person entirely, one you don’t even know, and using strings and drums and breath and voices to make it manifest in a way that allows it to be fully felt? What a gift. We’re so lucky to live in a world where people can do that. And finding that at this point in life, when most of the feelings have been felt and the ones that haven’t are often too complex and idiosyncratic to be summed up in four minutes and a key change, is uniquely special.

I don’t know how many more times I will hear a song that addresses something inside of me that I couldn’t get at on my own, that nothing else had made accessible. It doesn’t happen very often. But Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen found it at a moment in my life when I needed to feel sad, triumphant, renewed, and a little bit broken by what had come before. I still live in a world where that magic is real.

*Okay, not really, it was an interview for work, though Kat did go to high school with her.

**There’s a lot more to say about Covid and how it “ended,” or didn’t, but I’m not gonna get into all of that here. Let’s just say that, like most things, it’s not as straight a line as we’d like.