The way songwriter, singer, and cellist Ollella describes the flux of daily events on her latest album, Antifragile, humanizes the randomness of the events that shape the world. The record’s title comes from writer and teacher Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s influential 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, which continues the Lebanese-born thinker’s theories on how humans can flourish in times of extreme volatility.
Taleb made his fortune as a derivatives trader and hedge-fund manager, and he currently teaches at New York University. The antifragile concept describes methods for staying flexible and light on our feet even when the forces arrayed against us are heavier than ever. These useful practices of dealing with an often hostile world inform Antifragile. In accordance with her lyrics, the music on Ollella’s second album has a post-rock sheen that turns her classical-folk-rock compositions into kinetic tracks you could dance to if you feel like it.
Ollella is the stage name of Ellie Barber, who was born in Seattle in 1990. She began playing piano at five and got into cello lessons a few years later. Antifragile isn’t defined by her cello lines, and the songs on her latest album sound substantially hookier than the music she created for her 2023 debut full-length Back Back Back. As she says from her home in Seattle, Ollella naturally came by her classical leanings through her family’s influence.
“I was raised in a very classical music-centric household, so I didn’t actually go to any concerts outside of the symphony until I was probably in high school,” she says. “I was infatuated with the alternative music scene, but as a cellist trying to penetrate it, I didn’t know what to do. There were no cellos in the music.” She went to school at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, and moved to Colorado in 2012, after she graduated.
During her four years living in western Colorado, the classically trained musician got into another form of North American classical music, bluegrass. “Living there helped bring me out of the classical mindset and into more of an improvisatory mindset,” she says. “When I moved to Colorado and started playing in these more fiddle-centric musical zones, I changed my relationship with the instrument. I had to learn to improvise and learn chords on the cello. It helped me a lot.”
You don’t hear much bluegrass influence on Back Back Back or Antifragile. Ollella’s songwriting derives from the work of electronica-influenced folk-rock artists like Jesca Hoop, whose 2022 album Order of Romance plays with complex time signatures and structures that hark back to 1960s innovators like Margo Guryan on tracks like “I Was Just 14”.
Similarly, Antifragile moves in a way that is more like the work of post-rockers the Sea and Cake than anything you might call folk or bluegrass. On “Mothers and Colors”, a lyric about how colors can describe the various moods of mothers who deal with problems in a challenging world flows over a slinky pattern alternating between 7/8 and 6/8 time. Whereas Ollella’s early work, like the 2020 track “Walking on Fire”, was a form of minimalism, and Back Back Back flirted with rock on “Don’t Lie” and blues on “Night”, Antifragile sounds jazzier and more pop.
“If I had to characterize [Antifragile], I would say I am more of an innovator in the music sphere, rather than a pop sensation,” she says. “I like the experimental term better because it retains the craft in a certain way.” Ollella’s ear for melody and arresting chord changes make Antifragile an album that sounds completely accessible to folk and pop fans, minus any contrivance.
Antifragile reads like a political album, which means the artist released it during an epochal reshaping of the global order under the presidency of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. “Optimist” is about having a relationship with a pragmatist—a person who is nothing like the optimist narrating the song, with whom you’d nonetheless like to share dinner and a drink. The song advocates keeping an open mind and respecting your fellow citizens’ points of view.
As usual with electronica-folk-rock records, production values make a big difference on Antifragile. Ollella wrote some songs on guitar and others on cello, and she worked on the album with producer-guitarist Jordan Cunningham at Sage Arts Recording in Arlington, Washington. Willem de Koch played trombone and arranged horn parts that perfectly match the contours of Ollella’s songs.
“We had a lot more tools at our disposal this time,” she says. “We allowed ourselves to really dive into added sound that we would have never added to the first album. I was looking at all the songs I had written and found what they were about. I thought of it as how I was approaching artistry. Because I’m a cellist, there was a ton of trial-and-error in what we were doing.”
However, she and her production team arrived at Antifragile’s sound, the result is a fresh take on a hybrid form of popular music, with a political-meets-the-personal edge. Taken as a whole, the album plays out seamlessly, and Ollella’s clear, precise voice rings out over the changes. She says she’s gearing up for touring the Pacific Northwest in summer 2025. The songs are strong enough to work in a live show, and Antifragile has enough beauty to remind us of how fragile and liberating that concept can be in these troubled times.