Sharon Van Etten: ‘I hadn’t heard a melody that complex before’I was a late bloomer when it came to hearing Kate’s music. As a teenager I had moved to Tennessee and tried to do college but ended up coming back home to my parents with my tail between my legs. The first adult friend I made after moving back was a painter’s assistant named Alison, and she played me Wuthering Heights on a car ride through New Jersey.
Kate created her own emotional universe. I’m nostalgic for that period in music because I think we’re given too much information today, so there’s less capacity for us to create those personal universes through somebody else’s work. There needs to be enough ambiguity there for it to become very personal to each listener. Kate’s music meant I could leave the drudgery of my everyday life and my family situation and escape into my imagination – that’s still what I look for today in music.
Her music is all about combining small details with spiritual, otherworldly, wider cinemascape stuff: a really grand, imaginative to-the-moon-and-back scale, but also the sound of the blood running through your veins. As a teenager I felt like her voice was my inner voice. I also love that she is an aspirational goddess and at the same time a family woman who lives on a farm; it’s a perfect balance of being out of reach but also warm.
Working so intensely with her music made me gain enormous respect for her work. I feel as if she is completely unique in her ability to research other people’s stories and retell them. So many of her songs are directly about a book, a film, or an image. And instead of the familiar “if I could turn back time” nostalgic pop music storyteller, the emotional density of those stories is always completely intact, through her voice, production twists and magnificent melodic themes.