Sharon Van Etten is driving through the mountains right now and warns me that we might get disconnected. After a short but intimate phone conversation as she heads towards Columbus, Ohio, I wonder if that’s even possible — the 29-year-old Brooklyn singer/songwriter, currently on the road promoting her third album Tramp, is a forthright, emotional interview who can’t help but tell you how she feels.
“I write whenever I go through something intense,” says Etten.
“I’m really not good at talking about my emotions. So whenever I start to feel something really intense, whatever it is on the emotional scale, I’ll get in my car and start singing. When I listen back to it later, I try to understand what the problem was and why I was feeling what I was feeling.”
Produced with help from the National’s Aaron Dessner, Tramp is a sonic recovery record built from strong vocal crescendos and swelling guitar work. Though Etten’s fragile waxed-paper voice, a cousin of Cat Power’s honeyed blues, is the centerpiece, unique instrumental and vocal touches from Wye Oak, Juliana Barwick, the Walkmen and Beirut’s Zach Condon (who duets with Etten on the self-actualized ukulele jam “We Are Fine”) keep Tramp feeling fresh, even when songs like the gut-wrenching “Ask” maintain “it hurts too much to laugh about it.”
There are lots of female singers who write their own lovestruck material, but Etten is a direct songwriter who doesn’t hide behind flowery metaphors or breathy sensuality to make her point. Though Tramp was released on the same day as Lana Del Rey’s proverbial Born to Die, her treatment of heartbreak is rendered in devastating plainspeak. (Sings Etten on the haunting lullabye “Give Out”: “You’re the reason why I’ll move to the city, you’re why I’ll need to leave.”) The love songs on Tramp access a colour wheel of emotions, where being in love can mean hating someone’s guts.
“What I like about this record is that it’s not all just sad songs,” says Etten.
“I’m also letting myself be angry, and okay, there’s one song that’s kind of happy. It’s all so obviously about my life, and that does make me feel really vulnerable. I know that I want as many people as possible to feel connected to me. It’s really important to me not that have people feel alone.”
Etten’s material comes from a very real place. She got her start in the music industry as a publicist for a record label during a period when she was too scared to perform her songs live. Interviews often concentrate on her history of panic attacks and social anxieties. The musician was finally convinced to play by TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, the brother of a friend from high school. (The fluke success of her 2010 song “Love More” got her on Grey’s Anatomy, and it was covered by the National and Bon Iver.) Still, you can hear Etten sorting through psychosis on her 2009 debut Because I Was In Love, recorded during a period where she was recovering from an abusive relationship.
“I spent that first record really depressed,” admits Etten.
“I was living in my parent’s basement after a really hard time, and I wrote this song that was actually about living in your parent’s basement in your 20s and trying to be okay with it. When you’re an adult and you live in your parent’s basement, you’re so embarrassed about it. I had come back with my tail between my legs and my parents were so sweet and caring, but I was so depressed at the time I couldn’t see what that song was about.”
When you’re mining your life for material, it’s hard to see the good parts. Etten credits her parents with getting her back on her feet.
“Living in my parents’ basement was actually like what I wish high school was,” she admits.
“They let me use the ping-pong table so I could make my CD cases. They let me have friends over, and my dad would listen to records with us and drink wine. I worked at a liquor store at the time, and had a really simple existence for a while, which of course I didn’t appreciate at the time. They really nursed me back to health.”
I tell her this theory I have, that sometimes when you finally get over a rough patch — like heartbreak, or extreme depression, or that time you spent stuffing your own jewel cases in your parent’s basement — there will be a point where you actually get nostalgic for the low points, because sometimes it’s better to feel really messed up than just kind of numb.
“That’s kind of like when people talk about the scars that they have,” says Etten.
“I remember when I was really young I fell out of a tree, and now I have this huge scar. It’s like the scars become the stories you’ll tell for the rest of your life.”
Sharon Van Etten plays tonight (February 21st) at Lee’s Palace.
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Chandler Levack writes and writes and writes. Follow her on Twitter at @clevack.
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