In the summer of 2016, Sharon Van Etten was in a happy but productive lull; touring for her roundly feted fourth album, Are We There, had finally come to a close and she was now in her studio space in Brooklyn, muddling out the beginnings of its successor and working on the score for Katherine Dieckmann’s indie film Strange Weather. She had recently made her acting debut in the Netflix series The OA, and in the autumn would begin studies to become a mental health counsellor. And then she discovered she was pregnant.
Her latest album, Remind Me Tomorrow, starts with an opening drone and a strike of slightly sour keys, a sound familiar to anyone who has followed Van Etten’s work since her 2009 debut, Because I Was in Love, and on through Epic and Tramp and Are We There. Across those albums she revealed a voice of lugubrious beauty, and made an art form of songs that were emotionally and musically raw. It was a combination that earned her a fanbase that was not just devoted but deeply and near-spiritually connected to her music. And so her fifth album is one of the year’s most ardently anticipated – her return awaited by fans and critics alike, and its teaser single, Comeback Kid, seized upon and analysed upon its release late last year.
A faster, firmer and more boisterous record, Comeback Kid confused some listeners: is this, they wondered, a new Sharon Van Etten? It’s a question also raised by the second note on the album’s opening track: bowling off toward somewhere brighter and more hopeful, a prefigurement of the songs to follow, which are punchier and more immediate.
Van Etten attributes some of this new musical vim to a reaction to writing Dieckmann’s score, a guitar-led and spacious work designed to be something akin to Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Paris, Texas. “Whenever I got to a frustrating point in the writing process where I felt like I was banging my head against the wall, I would just put down the guitar and play anything else to clear my head, like a palate cleanse,” she recalls. She found she gravitated towards unfamiliar sounds and instruments, towards synthesisers and keyboards, particularly the Jupiter-4 synth owned by her studiomate, the actor Michael Cera. “And that’s how I started a lot of these songs, with a drone and a beat and I would sing over it. Just so I could clear my head.”
However the new energy of these songs also owes much to the impact of parenthood: the structured routine of nap times and feeding, the sense of days being shorter and more precious. “Before I had so much time and I was living for myself,” she says when we meet over coffee in east London. “Everything was open-ended and there was still a lot unresolved, but now I just feel like I have to finish. And I kind of like that it’s about being an adult and making choices and being decisive.”
Since mid-2016 the wider world has also changed considerably – there was then no Trump in the White House, no talk of border walls, no walking back of legislation on abortion, climate change, healthcare. “The world didn’t seem as scary at the time,” Van Etten says. “I remember I was alone on election day when I was pregnant, and I was sitting there crying. It’s a dark time. I’m not proud of our country for all that, but he doesn’t represent me.” She gave herself a small pep talk: “I said: ‘My job right now [will be] to make my kid feel safe and to be a positive role model and to rise above that.’” She has come to feel the most valuable contribution she can make is close to home. “It’s about the micro and the day-to-day and who you are and the little small acts of kindness, and that is what my son will remember.”
Van Etten’s son is not yet two, and still learning to talk. This is her first trip away from him, and she beams as she talks about him – how the first thing he identified was a dog, how “he can say ‘cool’ and he can point to the guitar and he’ll say, ‘Guh!’” How excited he gets when she takes out records, how confusing it is for him when he hears her songs played on the radio. How on mornings at home she will start the day by asking her son if he would like to listen to some music. “And he’ll just bounce up and down,” she jiggles in her seat. “Or if it’s slow morning rising, he’ll walk over to the piano and pull himself on the bench and just start playing.”
If Van Etten’s music was marked by its vulnerability, there seems to be a new kind of candour that comes with romantic commitment, becoming a parent, a 34-hour labour. She nods. “There’s letting someone in for the first time, and acknowledging that’s the person you want to be with the rest of your life. Looking at our child every day and it’s some of our love that we’re eventually going to let roam the world. I feel like every day I’m at my most vulnerable. Even when he’s just hanging out, I swear, I sometimes just spontaneously start crying just looking at him.”
When Van Etten began these songs in the summer of 2016, she was concerned with their music rather than the lyrics. The words came later, after the birth of her son, and she noticed then how this fundamental shift in her life, in her understanding of love and commitment, had also altered the meaning of her songs. “The song Stay was talking to my man, saying ‘I know you’re gonna stay no matter what, I’m gonna stay, you’re gonna stay, we’re here for each other even when it gets hard,’” she says. Later she saw it was about more than just romantic tribute. “I put on headphones and I’m listening to the demo whilst staring at my sleeping child and I realised that it’s also about that thing now. So it’s a weird time portal.”
It was motherhood, too, that allowed her to be open to the idea of bringing in a producer rather than controlling every element of the record herself. She chose John Congleton, known for his work with St Vincent, John Grant and Angel Olsen, who lit up when she walked into his studio with a selection of influences that might seem surprising to those steeped in Van Etten’s previous work — Portishead, Suicide, Nick Cave. “I was ready to let go of these songs,” she explains. “I feel a lot of falling in love and settling down and becoming a mother, so much you can’t control, you have to let go. And I feel like the more I let go and trust other people to do the things I need to do, the better off I am and the more I progress as a human being. As soon as I let go, I just feel that I open up as a person.”
Working with a producer also allowed Van Etten to focus on her role as a singer. Though here too she recognised a shift — her vocal range had changed due to the process of giving birth. “After thirty-four hours of labour I had to have a C-section, and so I didn’t have any [abdominal] muscle,” she says. “I had to strengthen up again and I found singing more mid to low range was actually easier, the high ones are harder.”
Her life has not always been so open or so contented. In 1998, when she was 17, she became embroiled in a turbulent and deeply damaging relationship, which stifled her musical ambitions and her sense of self – an experience to which she has returned several times in her songs.
“He was an addict and abusive and so I just never knew who I would be coming home to,” she explains. A touring musician, her boyfriend would often be away for long stretches, and Van Etten used those periods of absence to work on her own songs. “I would play when he wasn’t around because he thought my songs were too personal to share,” she says. “Which, in hindsight, they were, I’m sure. I’m that kind of person and just let it out. But he asked me not to play until I could write in a way where people wouldn’t know about our life.” When her boyfriend discovered she had been secretly playing shows, he smashed up her new Gibson guitar.
But still she stayed for five years. “I was lost,” she says. Van Etten had also drifted out of contact with her family, who did not agree with her lifestyle. “And I was also really proud and I didn’t want to accept help from anybody,” she explains. “So I was self-sufficient, supporting myself, working at a venue and making it work. I was embarrassed.”
At a particularly low point, she called her old high‑school boyfriend. “I was just feeling really lost and I didn’t know who I was and I realised that because of this relationship, because I was cut off from my family, that my memory was going. I didn’t remember what I used to be like.”
The old high-school boyfriend’s phone went to voicemail. “And I just left this really long, probably crazy message saying: ‘I just don’t know who I am right now. I just want to hear a story about who I used to be so I can get back to myself again.’ And the next day his girlfriend called and she was like, ‘Honestly, he played me the message and he wants you to be well, but he doesn’t really know how to talk about that kind of stuff. But if you ever want to talk, just know that I’m here. I know you don’t know me very well, but call me.’”
For a while Van Etten and her ex’s girlfriend had a friendship she kept secret from her current boyfriend. “I would go for these walks and I would just chainsmoke and we would talk on the phone and she would recommend me writers. She encouraged me to write more and read more and to reach out to my sister. She was just like: ‘Get the fuck out of there.’”
Van Etten called her sister. “And no questions asked, she said: ‘I’ll book the first flight I can afford.’ On the day that her boyfriend was next heading off on tour, Van Etten put all of her clothes into a duffel bag and pretended she was going to the laundromat. Instead, a friend drove her to the airport and she caught a plane to her sister in Vermont.
I wonder how that first taste of freedom felt. “Oh my God,” she says gently, “I was going through so many things that I didn’t realise what it was, but I felt excited, nervous, it felt like such an unknown. The whole time I’m thinking, ‘Can I do this? What’s it going to feel like? How are they going to judge me?’ But I also realised I had such post-traumatic stress that I was on autopilot for a year before I identified what it was.”
Van Etten grew up in New Jersey, one of five children. “I’m the middle child. The boys are the bookends and the girls are in the middle and I’m the middle of the middle.” She was, she says, “a wacky kid. I was open to anything. I was very outward. Very opinionated. Very into comedy and romance and Woody Allen.” But she was also “just such an angsty kid, and I felt misunderstood and I wanted to do music but I didn’t know how,” she says. “I knew that I was more creative than smart. I wasn’t an intellectual. I didn’t absorb information very well. Tests gave me anxiety, and I just couldn’t find myself. I wasn’t great at anything and the only thing I was really good at I didn’t know how to do. So it was a frustrating time and I would just slam doors and say things under my breath and my mom would always say, ‘You know what? We fight the most because you’re the most like me.’” Eventually her mother gave her a notebook and told her to write. And so she wrote. “I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, they weren’t songs that I was writing, but I learned how to have this outlet.”
These days she doesn’t pick up her notebook as often, but songwriting has come to offer a similar emotional outlet. “When I go sit down and write music, I set up an instrument, and I develop a chord progression and I sing it, and I just hit record and I let it go.” Those early incarnations are often “10-minute meanderings”, which she will set aside to see if they can later be edited down into a song. “And then I’ll put on headphones and I’ll listen to what I was going through,” she says.
It is perhaps this confessional openness to Van Etten’s work, its sense of being an outlet, that have led many to feel such deep connection with her music. Even on her first tour, in 2009, she realised the weight of fans’ emotional investment in her songs, of “how your music affects people, and the stories that come out of that”.
They would come and speak to her after the show and she would want to keep in touch with all of them, would worry about them after they had left. She would find herself sitting at the merch table sometimes feeling: “Everybody in line wants to tell me something intense that happened in their lives and how they connected to my music.” And she wanted to hear. “But emotionally, sometimes, it’s so much to take after a show,” she says. “I started to struggle with energy and starting to feel like I wasn’t certified [to advise people on their mental health issues].”
After a while she began to realise that as much as it was a source of concern it was also a subject of interest to her: “Why is it that people connect so deeply? And what is it about music? And what is it about communicating that they don’t have it in their lives, but for some reason they can talk to me? Or a song says something that they can’t? It made me realise it’s something I want to figure out, to help people learn how to communicate. So that’s why I took off time to pursue it.”
She has started training as a counsellor at entry level, exploring different kinds of therapy, working out which style suits her best. “I think a big issue for me is whether or not talking about the past is important,” she says. “Because there are different methods where it’s only about the now and only about the future, but I think the past is influential.”
She knows she wants to focus on helping young people just leaving home, those who might benefit from therapy – as she did after her parents made it a stipulation of her returning home after her time in Tennessee. “I needed to learn how to communicate what I had been through, and what I was going through, so that could help me navigate what the hell was next. Because I didn’t want medicine, I just wanted to understand. I was getting panic attacks and I was embarrassed about my life.”
She is interested, she says, in the point in a young person’s life when “they’re leaving, and they don’t have anyone. They think they know who they are but they have no idea. Then they go to a strange new place to define themselves around people that don’t know themselves either.” It is such a strange time in a person’s life, she says. “And it’s so easy to see once you’ve been through it. That’s the age when, if I had had someone that I could talk to, maybe [I would] not have gone through what I did.” She smiles. “But no regrets,” she says, and for a moment she sits at the cafe table, a ball of wisdom and contentment and openness, aware that all that she went through has led her to here.
Remind Me Tomorrow is released via Jagjaguwar on 18 January
