Sharon van Etten: I’m letting people listen to something I don’t fully understand

Musician Sharon Van Etten. Photo / Supplied

It’s 7pm in Glendale, California, and Sharon van Etten is chatting, via Zoom, from her home studio. It’s a companionable downstairs space, with small touches of domesticity. A black and white diamond-patterned rug partially covers the wooden floors beneath a grand piano. On top of a swivel chair, a cream rug is casually discarded.

Her son is playing with a pal upstairs. “I’ve come down because I knew they would be rowdy,” she laughs. “We’ve ordered pizza for them, because it’s Friday, and Friday is pizza night.”

This quotidian domesticity may seem unremarkable, but it’s a notable counterpoint between Sharon then and Sharon now.

“Old Sharon” (as she refers to herself) was a chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling New Yorker. She changed her hair colour weekly, worked dead-end jobs and played night gigs at dives, growing her career. Sharon now – mother, suburb-dweller – is a different beast. “I’m a hermit,” she laughs.

A hermit, sure, but a charmingly engaged and empathetic one. Her persona is intimidating – hipster cool – but Sharon van Etten “in person” is a delight. I apologise when my cat jumps onto my desk halfway through the interview. “No don’t … Hello kitty, what a darling!”

We are chatting prior to her Darkness Fades tour of New Zealand and Australia, in support of her 2022 album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. It’s her third tour of the country, and she has a dedicated fan base here, including John Campbell, who she (famously) moved to tears on live television. In 2015, as Campbell Live was in its death throes, his team surprised him by crossing live to van Etten who was playing that night at the Kings Arms (RIP). When she was announced, he wiped away the tears, and she played “Tarifa”, a song from her 2014 album Are We There. “I would love to see him when I visit,” she says. “That would be wonderful.”

Van Etten’s pre-family career was nurtured and crafted in New York between 2005 and the mid-2010s.

Initially, she was so poor that she was forced to live on various friends’ couches. Her first CDs were self-released.

But she rose, fast. The “lugubrious beauty” of her voice (as the Guardian put it) and personal, emotive lyrics won her a passionate fanbase, including musical heavy hitters such as Nick Cave. Her third album (Tramp) was released by indie legends Jagjaguwar. Her fourth (Are We There) conquered the Billboard Top 30.

But in 2015, the trajectory changed. She fell in love with her manager and former drummer, Zeke Hutchins, and they had a baby. Their charming one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment was too small for a family. It was a molecular shift.

“I had my son at age 36, and emotionally, I was ready for the move. I had a great run with New York. We needed something different.”

The move from New York to Los Angeles was intended as a transition to space, newness and growth. She had been touring when the physical move took place: leaving one home, then landing in a new one.

“The surreal timing of it was that I [flew] to Australia out of New York, then back into LA. My partner is amazing, he did all the moving; he’s done it a few times. In some ways it was really nice, cos I like to get home and cook meals and not be accountable to anyone but my family for a few weeks.”

This was in September 2019, and her home studio was completed in January 2020. “By March we were in lockdown. It lasted nearly two years. I keep joking that the universe called my bluff on that one.”

“All the reasons we said we wanted to move to California were to have more space, more time, to diversify and be more present for my family. What better way to diversify than to collaborate long distance and be home all the time!”

We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong was created during that period. Living in the California hills, she and her family experienced the dual horrors of the pandemic and climate crisis, as wildfires razed forests in the nearby Sierra Mountains.

“The sky looked like it was on fire,” she shared in a Pitchfork interview. Her family were ordered to stay inside, cars were smothered in ash. It’s referred to in the album’s opener Darkness Fades … “been writing in the dust”.

The album is a darkly luxurious, personal, sweeping take on motherhood, love and the end of the world as we know it.

There’s a brooding hopelessness, with small pinpricks of light. Her husky contralto sweeps and soars, underpinned by epic, mountainous synths. Home is Me is a heartbreaking ode to motherhood versus work: “I need my job, please don’t hold that against me”; the wrench of touring schedules and leaving her son. Darkish is spare and sparse, you can hear birds twittering away in the background, the only accompaniment to voice and guitar.

It’s a glorious album, but deeply unsettling, given the context of both its content and creation.

The logistics of recording were fraught during lockdown. Much of it occurred via digital technology: “I would send one version to someone without their part, and they would work on it,” she explains.

Eventually, when the country was “in a safer place”, she managed to get everyone into the studio together, “except for my bass player Devin Hoff, who was in New York. I felt guilty flying him out here due to the dangers of flying during Covid, so he took place in the process from afar.”

It took van Etten and family a while to navigate their place in the new LA neighbourhood once the lockdowns were ordered. This was a new environment for them, and the rules of social engagement had been ripped up.

“Everyone was home and in their yards. But nobody knows how to interact, and we gave people way too much space. Even introducing ourselves felt like a violation.”

But as the months stretched out, connections were made. “My son started talking to our neighbour, an older woman caring for her elderly mother. He’s made so many friends that he will be tied to forever. The whole experience was eerily optimistic and sweet given the darkness of the time.”

Van Etten is celebrated for her emotional generosity as an artist; she’s an alchemist, forging the interior and personal into moments of quote transcendent beauty. She says her writing process involves a shift of energies.

“I go into the studio when I am feeling intense emotions and I sing stream of consciously; I try different instruments,” she says.

“I know when I have finished because the feeling is not inside anymore, it’s become something else. I’m not sure if that’s healthy.”

This transformation is cathartic, but she worries sometimes whether it is “fair” to her fans.

“I’m letting people listen to something I don’t fully understand.”

Such heartfelt honesty can be deeply unsettling to share, she admits. “I’m still learning how to walk the line between being honest and alienating my fans.”

Van Etten confesses to a hidden cache of material that she will never make public, given its disturbing nature.

“I have a folder of songs that I will never share. I’m glad I got all of them out [the day I wrote them] but I don’t think they should be public.”

While songwriting is personal, performance, the limelight, is the opposite. She’s an impassioned performer, van Etten can banshee wail with the best of them, or pull in the audience with intimate, brooding laments.

She admits live performance is a challenge for someone who started her career in dive bars with no lighting.

“I do find it challenging, opening my eyes and looking out to the crowd. If it gets too much, I turn my attention to the band and connect with them, to ground me. Because I do get emotional when I look out . . . it’s a strange job.”

Van Etten has also recently dabbled in performances of a different sort, in front of the camera for televisual roles. The first was in 2016 for the Netflix series The OA, in which she played Rachel “a character who had a terrible accident and then found her voice, her superpower”.

“I connected with that character [because of her experience] and I felt I could use a part of me for this role.”

She also appeared in David Lynch’s 2016 reprise of Twin Peaks. “That was a version of myself, so it wasn’t so bad. But I was so nervous and spent the whole time trying not to look at the director.”

She shares that she feels out of her depth on set.

“It’s the most nervous I’ve felt since I started [performing]. When I’m acting, I’m around people who have been acting for a long time I feel really terrible, like an imposter, but I want to learn more.”

Juggling motherhood and a music career is challenging. She says she’s still trying to figure out the balance; she used to stay up all night writing songs, but with a child she needs to cram in as much creativity in the snatches of time available around the churn of domesticity.

“I’m learning how to find those moments and make them the most productive I can. The domestic stuff is neverending, but I like it and I don’t wanna lose it.”

While lockdown is a memory, van Etten is still lying low.

“I am enjoying having the space and being present and trying to eat healthily. I do Pilates when I can and running when I have a short burst of time,” she says.

After the Antipodean tour she will be heading back home for a family Christmas – just the family, plus dog, in LA.

And in 2023 she aims to write with the band, something she has never done before. “We have gotten so close over the past few years, and they have helped me flesh out this record. It will be great to create something with them.”

Our time is up and van Etten is headed upstairs to sort out dinner for her son (whose name has always been kept out of the media). She says that he is “super-pissed” that he is not coming on tour; “but it’s his last few weeks of school, and I will be flying every other day, so it doesn’t really work.

“But we want to come back out to New Zealand on vacation at some point.”

Monday 12 December – Auckland Civic Theatre (with Nadia Reid supporting)

Tuesday 13 December – Wellington Opera House (with Anthonie Tonnon supporting)

Tickets from Ticketmaster.co.nz