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 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.
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.That album saw Van Etten pausing and taking stock. She had a successful career, was married and had become a parent.
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 . The romance had begun when she moved to Tennessee to study at Murfreesboro State University.
“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.”“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.
“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.”