SHARON VAN ETTEN: A JOURNEY OF LOVE AND SELF-ACCEPTANCE
“It’s real love…real pain, you know?” - Sharon van Etten
Words by Jasper Willems
Video + Images by Margarita Kouvatsou
Wherever Sharon van Etten sets foot, she always keeps things light and fun. She does so inconspicuously, never trying to be the center of attention. During an obligatory press day in Amsterdam, we find her skipping vivaciously across the lobby of Hotel Vondel. In between interviews and shoots, she poses stone-faced with a scruffy old dog for a picture (like some kind of C.M. Coolidge outtake), makes fun of her non-matching socks with band member Heather Broderick and tends to the publicists, photographers and journalists to see how they’re holding up. Indeed, Sharon van Etten is a compassionate, self-effacing and outright charming human being. However, there is always a downcast, world-weary aura surrounding her. It’s almost as if she’s constantly encumbered by her emotional baggage.
Sharon van Etten was born February 26, 1981 in Clinton, New Jersey, ultimately spending most of her childhood in Nutley and Clinton. She is the middle child of a big household, with two brothers and two sisters. Her parents are big music heads, playing records around the house and taking Sharon and her siblings to many live shows. Sharon once described herself as an introverted child who had trouble communicating and expressing her feelings. One day, her mother gave her a notebook to help harness her thoughts, feelings and dreams. While Van Etten sang choir and studied clarinet, violin and piano at an early age, she only started avidly writing music after teaching herself to play guitar during high school. She later attended Middle Tennessee State University to study music recording, only to drop out after her freshman year. Her first recordings were all hand-made and self-released; she connected to her audience by sending a personal note of gratitude with each record she sold.
Van Etten, now in her early thirties, calls herself a late bloomer: she has started to get a grasp on what she demanded out of herself in her twenties. Sharon: “When you first leave high school and you’re going to college, you feel like you’re making a good decision in life. But then at school you’re out, you left your family. You start this whole other life. But it’s the same thing when you’re in your thirties. You’re supposed to have this career, make money. Or whether or not you want to start a family at a certain age. There’s a lot of dark stuff that you have to decide, especially for a woman, in that small amount of time. So you have to ask yourself these questions…or else you’re going to have regrets.”
Her first album, Because I Was In Love (2009), was released on Language of Stone and distributed by Drag City. The album documented a tumultuous long-term relationship; then-boyfriend wasn’t supportive of her dreams of pursuing a career in music, diverting her to perform open mics and shows in secret. Most people would be discouraged after such an ordeal: the dream becomes a tainted, foolish endeavor. Thankfully, Sharon van Etten sits here today, with her fourth studio LP Are We There slated for release, with no regrets.
“Everything is going to be okay”, she diligently answers, when asked what she would tell her five-year-younger self. “In these moments, where you feel like there is nobody…to have one person just be there. I wouldn’t change anything I have done, because I wouldn’t be who I am today. And I’ve come a long way. I’ve been doing some crazy things! Though I wish certain things wouldn’t have happened, if I had a time travel machine, I wouldn’t change them.”
We’ve come to know Sharon van Etten as a confessional songwriter, whose otherworldly Elysian outcries triumphantly mediate the earthly human struggles from within. Over the past ten years, the sleepy-eyed songstress has refined her craft: 2010’s epic introduced a wider audience to her music. Purposely spelling its gaudy title without a capital E was a self-deprecating, yet powerful statement: it aptly summarized Van Etten’s knee-jerk sense of humor as well as her forceful MO as a recording artist.
Piecemealing her way to notoriety, Sharon found many friends and collaborators within Brooklyn’s vibrant alternative music scene along the way. People like The Antlers’s Peter Silberman, who she met via MySpace, or TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone, who booked Van Etten’s first shows when Sharon handed him one of her homemade cd’s after a show.
For several years now, Van Etten has been part of a tight-knit community of artists avidly collaborating with one another, almost like a set of cogwheels spinning together. Before mapping out her music career, Sharon began working as a publicist and tour manager. Jobs that require some hefty people skills and taking the crux of responsibility for a group of musicians. Her friend Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater once said, “You know Sharon will take care of you, no matter what.”
Many of Sharon’s befriended peers now collaborate and/or perform with her. Meiburg appears on the new album, as well as Adam Granduciel (The War On Drugs), Jana Hunter (Lower Dens), Mackenzie Scott (Torres) and Heather’s equally prodigal sibling, Peter Broderick. Joining her live band is Brad Cook (Megafaun) on bass and Darren Jessee (Ben Folds Five, Hotel Lights) on drums, with Doug Keith (guitar) and Heather Broderick (keys) returning. “It’s going to be a new energy…that’ll be fun!” she rejoices. “I have never toured as a five-piece before and I don’t play a lot of guitar on this record.”
Van Etten deeply values the collaborative aspect, bringing other musicians with different mentalities and skill sets into play. “Especially nowadays in New York, because it’s getting harder and harder for people to live there. So you have to work more and more. And with our line of work, we’re not home most of the time. So we find an excuse to hang out by working together. I call it ‘highway hi-fiving!” says Sharon, laughing. “You see most of your friends in another country as opposed to your own home! I think the scene is constantly changing; if you don’t keep nurturing it, it’s going to go away. People are going to stop caring.”
There could be a flipside to these prolific creative endeavors. A constant impetus to stay productive and creative - whether you are up to it or not - may not be healthy in the long term. “Right, I know…that’s the question, right? At what point in your life do you say, ‘I’m at a good place to stop?’ But your contract says you have to come up with a record every two years. It says you should tour a record for a year and a half if you want to hit all these regions. There are all these unspoken rules in order to have a presence: to get your name out, to have people see you perform and buy your record. You have to nurture that as well. I wouldn’t be happy if I wasn’t working, because it’s also my therapy. It makes me feel better. If I wasn’t singing, I wouldn’t be a happy person. I need that outlet.”
2012’s Tramp, her first release on Bloomington, Indiana’s renowned Jagjaguwar-label, featured many guest musicians, including The National’s Aaron Dessner, Beirut’s Zach Condon and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner. Once again, the album’s succinct, dubious title hit a nerve. To a touring musician the word “tramp” sounds kind of romantic; yet to a female living in New York it comes off as rather disparaging. The album felt like a slap of reality in the face - as well as yet another acerbic point-and-laugh to herself, drawing inspiration from the silent films of Charlie Chaplin. Foolhardily juggling both her career as touring musician and her inner circle spawned tenuous, complicated situations, leaving Van Etten with some inner turmoil to address. She confesses that ‘Give Out’ was written about the first person that did listen to her.
“That was when I just decided to move to New York to pursue music. I had a job working at a wine store called Astor Wines in Manhattan. I went through playing open mics to playing small bars. Playing for a crowd of about five people…or a bar filled with drunk people that didn’t even know I was playing! I played all these kinds of places, all while I was still figuring things out. But I knew I wanted to do this…I just didn’t know how yet. So that’s how we met: I played at a bar where he used to work. It was one of my first shows in New York. He was the only one in the room listening. I was pretty young, around twenty-three, twenty-four. I never lived in a big city before at that point.”
Moving from Tennessee’s pastoral terra firma to buzzing upstate New York left Sharon disillusioned, yet determined to find her vernacular as an artist. “I had severe social anxiety at the time. I couldn’t look people in the eye. I was having panic attacks…freak outs! I’d get so nervous. I didn’t know how to meet people…when I first moved there I was just a kid.” She underlines that she can still recall what she specifically felt at the time by listening to her old recordings. “I had an apartment on Broadway and Marcy, there was an above ground train right by my window. You can hear that train in a lot of my recordings. When I hear the early stuff, when I hear that train…I think about the time ten years ago…you know, just making computer recordings in my bedroom! You could just hear the screech of the train every fifteen minutes.”
She tells a story about a show at a Brooklyn venue called Zebulon, one that marked a turning point for her as a performing musician. “It was owned by two amazing French guys, Joce and Jef. They were the first to take me under their wing. They let me curate my own night once a month. When I first started out my friends came, and they had regulars come in. It was just one of those things where more and more people started coming. I was still playing solo shows and one day, I remember I got really teary-eyed mid-song. I suddenly noticed how quiet everyone was. A whole room full of people..even the bartenders stopped working as I was playing. When I noticed no one did anything…it had an effect on me. People were listening. After five years of doing acoustic shows…I never had that moment. When I felt that..it was kind of intense!”
As she gradually embraced playing electric guitar, Sharon moved into a cheap apartment in Bushwick, which conveniently had an underground basement for her to practice in. “I remember that feeling of finally being able to play loud.”, she adds. “Then I moved out further south of Brooklyn, because even Bushwick got too dicey. I mean, someone got shot in front of my building. I was like, this is not worth it anymore. It’s affordable, cool…but I don’t wanna be in danger, you know? As a young female, you don’t want to walk around there alone at night. With what I do, I’d often come home really late.”
Between recording sessions for Tramp with Aaron Dessner, Van Etten found herself essentially homeless, forced to scatter her belongings and crash with friends, family and acquaintances. Eventually she moved in with her boyfriend. “That’s when I started writing all these songs on the Omnichord, so when I’d hear those demo’s again, I remember Heather (Broderick) giving that to me to learn ‘Magic Chords’ live. When I learned how to play that song live, I brought it home with me, and it became a new writing tool.”
The omnichord (a handheld synthesizer designed by Suzuki in 1981 as an electronic counterpart to the autoharp) is featured in various songs on Are We There, including the brooding lead single ‘Taking Chances' (featured in session below) and the incredibly moving, candid guilt trip 'Our Love.' On the latter, Sharon’s faux-wistful, analgesic falsetto halfheartedly spitshines a falling out between two lovers. It’s a song exemplary of how far Sharon has come along as a songsmith, boldly threading the needle between hope and hopelessness within the most concise of moments.
Instead of falling back towards ambiguity, Sharon has shed yet another layer. “It’s the least censored I’ve been with myself, without saying names, telling when I wrote it, why I wrote it and where I was. But it’s still very open and vulnerable.” ‘Break Me’ and ‘I Know’ even shatter the fourth wall, Mark Kozelek-style. “I sing about my love and fear and what it brings,” she pronounces in the latter.
Are We There…it’s a title that lingers. It’s as if Van Etten merely has a slim read on the cards she’s holding. “The theme of this recording is about balancing a relationship with trying to have a career. Some people think it’s just love songs. Are We There is about something that’s very current, about the last year or two of my life. My previous records had me looking back and reflecting on it.” Even after Tramp garnered her definitive acclaim from fans and press alike, Sharon still struggles to maintain her amazing balancing act. Unlike her previous albums, Are We There isn’t a reconciliation with her past: she is still living the album as we speak.
“This is still happening,” she exclaims, visibly sullen.
“That’s one of the worst you know, you’re losing your boyfriend after ten years because you’re touring nine months a year? Is it worth it? I don’t know.” Suddenly, the usual chirpy, affable Van Etten withers into doldrums. “I’m still learning how to talk about this, because it’s still fresh.” She stops and pauses. “It’s real love…real pain, you know?”
Despite the conundrum she found herself in, she calls Are We There the record she’s most proud of. It’s a brave, no frills document that, much like her first album, Because I Was In Love, feels like the listener is right there looking over the singer’s shoulder - relating to her words like the tiny angels and devils you see in cartoons - as she stands in the crossfire between unconditional love and self-acceptance. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m scared to play these songs live,” Sharon laughs. “I’m probably going to be crying in the room with some of these songs, being super emo! But really, I’m proud of these songs, but they’ll be so hard to do!”
It’s a textbook example of the candor Brene Brown expressed in her well-known TED Talk on the power of vulnerability; briefly, that the thing that underpins our personal shame is excruciating vulnerability and that, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow our true selves to be seen.
After bringing it up, Van Etten acknowledges watching it: “That one made me cry!” She definitely makes her own pledge with the ascending ‘Afraid Of Nothing,’ only to turn over the remaining stones with roll-of-the-credits tearjerker Every Time The Sun Comes Up. Lyrics like ‘I washed your dishes but I shit in your bathroom’ epitomize the empowering ability of being vulnerable, especially for a woman—seeing that women are generally subjected to more scrutiny concerning image and archetypes than men.
Van Etten rightfully calls ‘Your Love Is Killing Me’ ‘the Beast,’ its languid semi-heroic organ motif marching straight into a barrage of poison arrows. “That was a scratch vocal too,” she recalls. “I tried redoing it, properly. I tried re-tracking and isolating it, but it didn’t move me. So I used this one where you kind of hear it clipping a bit. It was the best take.”
Van Etten fulfills her penchant for penning songs with exotic backdrops: in this case Tarifa, a densely populated village at the utmost edge of Spanish region Gilbraltar - the most southern point of Europe. “My boyfriend flew over to Barcelona after we finished playing Primavera. We rented a car and drove down the coast, and stayed in Tarifa for ten days.” A fond ten days, as she reminisces: “It was the most at peace I have ever seen him, I think. I had never seen him this happy.”
While the words Are We There might still linger, hopefully Sharon van Etten takes comfort in knowing that anyone can capture a powerful image at any moment, ignorant of its eventual meaning or destination. Nothing encapsulates this more than a picture she took right before embarking on her musical journey, which would eventually find its way on the album cover.
“It’s my friend Rebecca, who did the artwork for the first two records. I took this picture when I moved back to New Jersey with my parents, where I was taking photography classes. I went back to visit her in Tennessee to tie up some loose ends. She was about to move to Indiana with her family and I was about to move to New York. It was the last time we got to hang out before she moved. She has two kids and got married. It used to be our tradition when we worked at a bookstore together, we’d get off work and get a couple of coca cola’s, a pack of cigarettes and just play music while driving across the Tennessee countryside. We’d sing a lot… and take turns screaming out the window. It’s a picture of Rebecca screaming out of the window on that last day…
But also, it was the first photograph I gave my boyfriend, ten years ago. We were on-and-off during those ten years. Whenever I went over to his house over the years I never saw it again. So I assumed that during an ‘off-time’ he threw it away or something. When I moved in with him last year, during the recording of Are We There, I caught him cleaning out the apartment, purging to make space for me. He pulls this pile up from under his bed with everything I have ever given him. Postcards, letters, photographs, cds, early demos. But also this photograph…covered in dust. It summed up exactly where we were in our relationship at the time.”
When asked if this was the only picture, Sharon responds, “At the time it was just so emotive, (Rebecca) was my best friend. I gave my boyfriend two pictures: one was of a pile of trash against a brick wall with graffiti that said ‘profound.’ She snickers. “So…I gave him something beautiful and something silly.”
Sharon firmly nods. “It kind of sums me up. I’m heavy…but I’m also a total joker.”
Are We There is slated for release May 26 on Jagjaguwar.
