Review: Kristina Olsen at Hybrid Warehouse

Kristina Olsen at Hybrid Warehouse
Friday, April 4, 2025

American/almost-Canadian folk singer/songwriter Kristina Olsen has been performing in Australia for more than thirty years. Had she not fallen in love with a Canadian, she may well have become an Australian. She first graced these shores in 1994 and performed here every year until COVID, when she decided to belatedly earn a degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

No stranger to WA folk circles, Olsen was a mainstay at the Fairbridge (folk and world music) Festival for most years in the event’s illustrious history. Her current national tour has been built around her headline appearance in this weekend’s Playmakers festival (April 11 to 13) back at Fairbridge Farm in Pinjarra.

After shows in Victoria and Tasmania, she arrived in WA last week. Since then she has performed far and wide—in Albany, Bridgetown, and, last Friday night, at the Hybrid Warehouse in Fremantle.

As a folk artist, Olsen is the real deal. She covers all the bases. Not only is she an accomplished guitarist with a beautiful and powerful voice but also a strong songwriter and great raconteur. Her story-song style is sophisticated, by turns comic and deep, with meanings that are both readily accessible and reflective. Songs like Solstice Eve, Prayer Flags, What if We Knew? (when we were going to die) and What is Love? are almost aching in their sensitive questioning of this mortal coil.

But then she can also be filthy, in the risqué sense. As one photographer in Friday’s audience put it, “It’s rare to hear a woman her age being so rude!” With songs like The Big O, Preheat the Oven Before You Bake the Bread, Better Than TV, and Hey Sally, you can perhaps catch the drift. But heck, her audience are all adults, and her naughtiness is good-natured, warm-hearted, and always laugh-out-loud funny.

The Hybrid Warehouse was a perfect setting for such a down-to-earth show. Granted, the acoustics were a challenge, especially for the artists, but the man on the desk rose to the occasion, and within the room the sound was great. But the ambience was something else.

A quasi-communal workspace, the Hybrid looks like it was bought with its old stock in place. Stacked behind the stage were a row of sky-blue cable wheels and a tower of milk crates. The stage itself was bedecked with a heavily cushioned 1960s couch and a pair of antique standard lamps complete with 1940s lace-frilled shades. Above it hung a maze of twinkling fairy lights and a bank of floodlight-downlights (thankfully switched off). The room itself was centred by a giant wooden workbench surrounded by high metal stools, while the remainder of the audience sat on a collection of motley mismatched chairs. The bar at the back was built into the tray of an old Kombi van. A big, warm, dishevelled room, comfortable and welcoming.

Olsen’s partner in performance was her old Australian sidekick, cellist/mandolinist/botanist (Dr.) Peter Grayling. Although it has been some eight years since the two last played together, like peas in a pod, they delivered the most extraordinarily tight show. This is all the more amazing given they didn’t have time for such trivialities as rehearsals. No sooner had they kissed hello in Melbourne than they jumped on stage for their first show.

Grayling’s cello slips smoothly into the spaces around Olsen’s complex guitar work. He usually starts off in the bass register, plucking the strings to emphasise the harmonic movement underlying her chords and licks. It is subtle, as though Olsen has a few extra strong bass strings on her guitar. But as the music builds, Grayling swaps to his bow and ultimately delivers a soaring solo that, either in contrast or alignment, captures the essence of each song.

One after another, Friday night he created a series of haunting solos that made the hairs on your arms bristle. The standouts were Hey Sally, The Big O (mimicking a very big male one), and How I Love This Tango (a jaunty sidestep of the bow that captured both his and her love of that lively South American dance). The beautiful harmonising duet of cello and guitar on The Truth of a Woman, an ode to life-drawing classes, was to die for.

On other songs, Grayling took up his gorgeous 1928 vintage mandolin to provide a tremolo melody and a set of short, sharp counter chords, while on two, I Could Fly and Solstice Eve, he sang a finely pitched harmony on the chorus.

Olsen’s main instrument is a steel-string acoustic guitar, but she also serves a slick slide on her red, custom-made resonator. For the encore, the mournful, soulful, Irishy Heart Hill, she gave up the guitar altogether for a concertina. Her squeeze box was a fitting shift to end this fine show.

Raised in the Bohemian heartland of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, in the 1960s, Olsen’s mum was a hippie and her dad a scientist. A progressive to the core (she’s dropped the capitals from the incumbent and refers to him as ‘resident rump’), she’s been performing professionally for more than fifty years. At college age she enrolled in a music course but was getting so many gigs that, to twist Timothy Leary’s timeless phrase, she had to ‘turn up, tune up, and drop out.’

With all this experience, you may wonder why she would return to university as an older artist? Good question.

As Olsen explains, she reached a point where she needed a language to help her understand and develop the music running through her head. Some ideas need an intellectual underpinning to fully come alive. Intuition and instinct—following your gut—can only take you so far, and it is sometimes easier if you know what you are doing so that, instead of working through fifty chords until you find the right one, you can follow the line and get there straight away.

Like all education, the first lesson Olsen learned in her Berklee double major (orchestration and performance guitar) was that she didn’t know very much. Over time, though, it enabled her to better understand the process of songwriting and enriched her sense of what is possible within the song form.

She is still integrating the lessons into her songwriting style. It’s a tricky line to walk: go too far and you risk losing your old audience; don’t go far enough and the ideas fall flat. But get the balance right, and you can take your audience with you as you gently expand your songwriting envelope.

The telling song the other night was one she co-wrote with Bill Koon, What Is Love, that jumps between five/four and three/four time signatures. As Olsen put it, “That averages out at four/four, so I figured I’d get away with it.” She did.

As well as her studies, another reason Olsen hasn’t come back to Australia in recent years is that she wanted to do time in Canada so she could become a dual citizen. In this age of rump, that is a handy get-out-of-America card. To qualify, she needs to live in Canada for three years in the span of five. With nine days left to go, her escape plan is nearly in place.

 Friday’s concert was presented by the children’s cancer charity Little Folk. Founded twenty years ago by the Kenny family, the charity has so far raised $300,000 for children’s cancer research. Their target is half-a-mil. As well as concerts such as this, where the artists work for a reduced fee, Little Folk also presents the annual Folk in the Forest Festival, where the performers donate their services completely.

As of May this year, they are also reviving the monthly Monday Supper Club. The brainchild of singer/songwriter Jane Cornes, the Supper Club used to be held in Maylands. The new incarnation will be held at the Hybrid Warehouse. As their contribution to Friday’s concert, the Hybrid provided the venue free of charge and covered the fee for the sound engineer.

Little Folk is also auspicing this weekend’s Playmaker’s festival, where Olsen and Grayling will be giving their next performance. Day tickets to this three-day event are still available through TryBooking. To find out more about Playmakers, see this X-Press article. Note, though, that at the time of writing, day tickets were not on offer. The organisers have since released them.

Olsen performed at one of the earlier, Albany-based incarnations of Playmakers. It was a great experience for her. As she pointed out, it gave her the opportunity to properly engage with the instrument makers, including the Victorian who custom-made her red resonator. Usually the relationship is all transactional, but Playmakers allowed them to spend time together, play music, and become friends.

Kristina Olsen’s headline performance will be one of many great presentations at Playmakers this weekend. It will be worth the trip to hear this Bohemian songstress weave her magic yet again.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Alan Holbrook