You fall together, fall apart

Angel Olsen gives “Sister” almost eight minutes, and it needs every one of them. The song is patient the way real change is patient: a quiet strum, a voice testing the air, and then — so gradually you can’t mark the moment — a full rock band burning around her.

It arrived as the third single from My Woman (2016), the album where Olsen let her songs sprawl, and it carries the record’s two sharpest lines. First the one this title comes from: “you fall together, fall apart.” Then the one the song spends its whole length walking toward — “all my life I thought I’d change” — repeated over the closing crescendo until it stops being regret and becomes something closer to release. Stay for that final stretch; the song only tells you what it’s about once it’s nearly over.