Photo by Jess Luther.

It was a cool, stormy Sunday when Angel Olsen again descended upon a St. Louis audience, sweeping her sly gaze across a packed house at Off Broadway. The sound at the back of the room was better, and the crowd thinner and more mobile. When the patio door was opened the rain blew in.

The last time she played O.B., Olsen supported Oxford, MS’s Water Liars, another band with a leader who carries around a St. Louis story that’s more past than present. She played solo then, and no less than three people I spoke to on Sunday mentioned this performance with some measure of longing or nostalgia. (More likely, they were missing the smaller crowd and a lower relative humidity percentage.) While the accounts of her solo performance included lots of adjectives like, ‘arresting’ and ‘transfixing’, I, for one, am slow to lament a lady singer-songwriter building herself a backing band.

Why does it matter that Olsen returned to St. Louis to play the same stage she played less than a year ago, to a much larger audience and with three more musicians? Because homegirl is making it happen for herself, and I’ll keep cheering for female musicians who command audiences by employing chops over charm. Not that she wasn’t charming; not that she wasn’t arresting. But damn, can Olsen play and sing.

Olsen’s inspiring performance — with that intrepid, Those Darlins-esque audience eye contact throughout; with the elderly man leaning on his cane side stage; with ecstatic minors in the front row shaking their heads in disbelief; with a cousin (or something) of Olsen’s outside smoking and joking about requesting a ‘family discount’ at the bar — was at once introduction and homecoming. As of late, much has been written about the burgeoning musician’s St. Louis roots. It’s an intriguing story, and one that might be considered shared history among a small subset of the local community whose members were coming of age in tandem with Olsen.

But she moved to Chicago, and she made and continues to make music there and in other places.

Good for her. Go be fierce and light and young. Go be those things anywhere.

Maybe Angel Olsen was never really ours, but at Off Broadway on Sunday…St. Louis was very much hers.

P.S. Nashville’s Promised Land Sound opened the show with a ton of impressive guitar work and several memorable, catchy tunes, though the crowd seemed more pleased to be hearing the performance than the band seemed to be with playing the performance, but hey, it was Olsen’s night. I get it. My friend Janet wrote more on PLS for KDHX.

A complete set of photos is available here.