Two years ago the apocalypse came to Sharon Van Etten’s backyard. “When there were fires I couldn’t even leave the house. There were ashes on my car,” the singer-songwriter (41) says from her home in suburban Los Angeles as she marks the recent release of her extraordinary sixth album, We’ve Been Going about This All Wrong. “The few times I had to leave my house to go to grab things, it felt like I had smoked a packet of cigarettes.”
Wildfire season in Southern California had arrived on the heels of rolling Covid lockdowns. And all against the chaotic backdrop of the dog days of the presidency of Donald Trump. The centre wasn’t holding. It wasn’t even the centre any more.
“It was a heavy time,” says Van Etten over video link from a phone perched against a kitchen countertop (her laptop is on the blink). “I was pregnant when Trump was elected. I don’t like saying his name any more. And there were earthquakes. It really did feel like it was the end of the world – but nobody was telling us.”
Van Etten cuts a dramatically different figure from when we last spoke three years ago. She has a stark new haircut – a sort of cyberpunk mullet that accentuates the sharpness of her features. That angular quality is reflected in her new songs, which are front-loaded with a razor-blade ferocity absent from her previous album, 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow.
It is a record that contains troubled multitudes, as is obvious just by looking at it
That album saw Van Etten pausing and taking stock. She had a successful career, was married and had become a parent. The feeling was that – so much as any of us can – she had figured out her life. On the single Seventeen she even sang to her younger self, dispensing wisdom accumulated with the decades.
Then came the move to LA, the pandemic and the sense of being plunged into psychodrama without end. From that dislocation she distilled We’ve Been Going about This All Wrong. It is a record that contains troubled multitudes, as is obvious just by looking at it. The cover features Van Etten framed by a sky of evil tangerine, a nod towards the wildfires raging outside as, stuck indoors, she burned up with pandemic trauma.
“I realised I haven’t figured out anything at all,” she says. “And that’s okay. We all realised that in some ways. [The album] is about reflecting on our lives before all this [Covid]. And how we can be better – not only to ourselves and to our loved ones, but in the greater world. The micro and the macro. Okay, how do we move on from this? I want to be sure that I say that I don’t have the answers. And that I just think it’s good to ask the question, and to acknowledge the time we’re living in without making any grand statements. Just analysing what I’m feeling on so many levels.”
Not cuddly
Van Etten’s songs are rarely cuddly and typically skimp on feel-good moments. Yet even by her standards, the new project is unflinching, as Irish fans will discover when she performs at Vicar Street in Dublin on June 22nd and at Cork Opera House the next day. With her storm-wracked voice, on tracks such as Darkness Fades and Home to Me she doesn’t so much sing as excavate her soul’s darkest recesses and give expression to what she finds there. “All the clouds are wrapped around your brain,” she croons on Headspace, a ballad that throws off sparks of menace and vapour trails of despair. “Don’t turn your back on me.”
She could spend forever unpacking the LP. One of the threads upon which she pulls is an early love affair that happened when Van Etten was 17 and left her feeling controlled and gaslit. She was born in New Jersey to an Irish-American family (her people hail originally from Achill island). The romance had begun when she moved to Tennessee to study at Murfreesboro State University.
It should have been the best time of her life. She was young and free. And between classes she was able to pursue her love of music by working part-time as a booker at a local venue. She also wrote songs. But the person in her life didn’t want her singing in public, feeling her lyrics too intimate. A musician himself, he would smash her guitars if she stood up to him. “I was manipulated and easily controlled,” she told a UK newspaper recently. “And I’m very embarrassed I went through that.”
Breaking out of the vice-like grip of that relationship, Van Etten went to New York, where she became a sommelier. That day job fell by the wayside as her music career flourished, beginning with her 2007 debut Untitled. Fast-forward 15 years and she is married to her drummer-turned-manager Zeke Hutchins, with a five-year-old son (whose name she’d rather stayed out of the press).
Cooped up together through lockdown, she and Hutchins obviously had their ups and downs. Inevitably, those Covid tensions percolated into the material. Which is why so many of her new songs have a push-and-pull dynamic. Van Etten in places seethes with frustration at the cramped textures of lockdown life and yet recognises the only way to make it through is by reaching a place of generosity and understanding.
“It was mostly just about learning how to coexist. You get lost in domesticity,” she says. “It wasn’t necessarily bouncing off the walls. It was mostly trying to check in with each other.”
This meant taking small but considered steps.
“You know, like tap someone’s shoulder if they’re on their laptop too long,” she says. “Or on their phone during dinner. Myself included. And being able to connect to people after we’ve been connected to our devices all day long. Those types of things – even if you’re in a good relationship – still require work. And mindfulness. And connection. After living in this bubble, and working our asses off … It’s like, ‘Okay I’m here too – and we need to work on this’.”
Working parent
Van Etten also found herself reflecting on the responsibilities that accumulate about us through life, like layers of moss on a tree. As a working parent, for example, she of course wonders occasionally whether she is striking the best balance between family and career.
“You look at your kids and you’re like, ‘I love you so much – I want to give you everything’. And it becomes like… ‘How much do I have to give?’ You’re like: Am I giving enough. Am I too tired? Am I appreciating this moment?”
I'm going to be on the road when he starts kindergarten and my heart is broken
These are thoughts with which many parents have wrestled. Especially as the pandemic drew to a close and, with the new normal reverting to the old normal, we all prepared to go back to those weird lives we used to lead a billion years ago.
“There are times where I’m like, ‘Maybe I do need to take a break from music so I can be way more present’, and that he remembers me being there. I’m going to be on the road when he starts kindergarten and my heart is broken. Will he remember that? I’ll remember. I’m anticipating being gone this summer. And then taking it easy for a minute so I can be around for his school year. I want to be present. I want him to know I’m here for him through the dramatic school years.”
She pauses, as if the magnitude of it all has only just hit her. “Oh my God.”
We’ve Been Going about This All Wrong has had an unusual media campaign in that Van Etten insisted the project be kept entirely under wraps until the day of release. There were no early singles for streaming playlists; no teasers for uber-fans. She was eager for the LP to be consumed fresh, in its entirety and in the “correct” order.
“I’m not anti-single-driven artists or whatever. I just think there are certain kinds of artists that thrive in different ways. I’m a demographic of consumption just like anyone else. I’m a victim to the playlist. And have been turned on to new artists from those playlists. So I don’t want to hate on it.”
Instead of hate there is frustration over the manner in which music is too often experienced nowadays. “This is how I wanted the album to be engaged in [all the way through]. Without spoon-feeding anything that other people are calling singles. And to let the listener themselves decide what their favourite songs are. Also to say: I don’t want to waste anybody’s time. How many times did you see a trailer for a movie and you felt like the film was given away? And you didn’t want to see the movie?”
She approves entirely of Adele’s recent insistence that Spotify remove the shuffle option from streams of her newest blockbuster, 30. For Adele the record was intended to be listened from beginning to end. Van Etten feels the same about We’ve Been Going about This All Wrong. This isn’t an LP to be sliced and diced so that you can gulp it down as you’re scrolling Twitter or playing Elden Ring.
“Going through the album – it’s a journey. The transitions are important: the roller-coaster ride of emotions from one to the other. The juxtapositions of sonics are intentional. And anyone that still likes that, I want [them] to hear it. And so I applaud Adele when she did that.”
Sharon Van Etten plays Vicar Street Dublin, June 22, Cork Opera House June 23. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is out now
