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…smearing lipstick across a heated cheek before those lips have had a chance to say how they felt, really. A blue-black polaroid, held in a pocket, barely makes shapes of its faces before someone takes another photo. Songwriter Al Olender tries to grasp these brief moments in slow-motion, to live in them for just a little while, but finds that the tighter she holds on, the more these frames fall into a soupy blur. Change is our only constant, but what if we wanted to steep in the now? What if we could stay right here? Olender captures the anxieties of an ever-moving world on her second full-length album The Worrier, where all are invited to mourn the fleeting nature of our experiences and yell into the ether. 

She has never shied away from the goopy mess that comes with laying your heart on the line. On her 2022 debut album, Easy Crier, Olender stared the truth right in the face and got to know the all-encompassing shadow of grief. She learned to stop lying and to really live in deep sincerity, no matter how shaky or silly it could feel. By stepping into this boundless reality, Olender connected with herself and those closest to her more than she ever had. Now, after a few years on the road touring solo in her beloved Mazda, opening for the likes of Bonny Light Horseman, Langhorne Slim, Rayland Baxter, John Moreland, Shovels & Rope, Deer Tick and Lucius, she finds herself aching for those connections to stay still, to be just the same as when she left them. To chase your dream, to make art and see the world, often means loosening your grip on the very things that allowed you to do that in the first place. For Olender, that’s a tough one to swallow.

“It’s a new season of my life but how do I hold on to everything I love?” she asks. “Is change almost worse than the loss I've experienced?” After the sudden death of her older brother Keith, Olender found reprieve in her songwriting and built a beautiful community in her home of Kingston, NY. Now older than Keith was when he passed, Olender finds that as she enters new phases of her life––ones that Keith never got to experience––new forms of grief and worry bubble to the surface. “Every year is a little further from him and that’s the sad hard truth. He is never far from any of these songs.” As she has grown, Olender has come to realize that she now loves people in different ways, never holding back from discovering every aspect of herself: anxiety, sexuality and anarchy, both in herself and in her relationships. Although she’s in an almost constant state of worry, she can also hold the beauty and luck that her life beholds. The Worrier nourishes these contradictions.

Olender wrote these songs in motion while trying to hold still: highway scenes speeding past a driver side window; quick-scrolling through phone photo albums; running through the airport to say goodbye; kissing a stranger in a new town; calling a friend out of the blue. It felt necessary that these kaleidoscopes of swirling memory be captured in an instant, much like the moments that are gone too fast. Olender recorded them in just under a week with producer Nick Kinsey (Waxahatchee, Kevin Morby, Scott McMicken, Elvis Perkins) at Chicken Shack Recording. She wanted the album to feel human, to hear each crackle, strum or phone alarm and so, they recorded live to tape, just Olender and her friends in one room, one take at a time. 

The Worrier feels like a montage in a beloved rom-com, capturing both Olender’s messiest and most beautiful moments. The rootsy belly of “The Cyclone,” points to the butterflies of first crushes, while spotlighting the gut-punching reality that it might not work out the way you want it to. “I wanna text you but it’s desperate, I’ll pretend I don’t care,” she spits over bluesy strums. It’s that universal urge to be a cool girl but deep down, we all just want to be noticed and loved. “Spring Fever” sprints through a street-lit city, trying to make it to the person you’ve been dreaming about. It’s a coming-of-age chapter, embracing sexuality and lust in all its delicious glory as its urgent percussion mimics the cravings that come with a connection. It begs the question: what if we didn’t think about what could go wrong and instead, dive right in? The sweet, star-drenched “Matter of the Heart” tries to tighten the grip on adult friendships, aching about the ever-evolving responsibilities and choices that can get in the way of true tenderness.  Olender laments: “We’re not enemies / We’re just strangers / I don’t know which one / Is more dangerous,” highlighting how friend break-ups carve deeper scars than romantic ones. 

Olender has crafted an album that captures our most important moments but doesn’t try to create meaning or resolution. These are brief, beautiful glimpses into the characters that adorn our stories, nourishing the person we become or hope to be. “I've been so good at pushing things away and not confronting them and then losing people,” Olender explains. “In this season of life, the best part is that I can talk; even in the hard moments, even crying on FaceTime, even being away. I've been lucky to have such incredible women that have given me chances and let me fail and let me disappear, and still, they have not abandoned me.” The Worrier is the chance to be a better version of ourselves. It says: we’re still here and we’re trying our best.

- Sammy Maine