Sharon Van Etten: Growing Up
“I like pushing myself,” says Sharon Van Etten, in the midst of a conversation characterized by the grace you would expect based on the songwriter’s music. “Otherwise why are you going to keep doing this? It’s fun to try new things, especially when you are around people that encourage you to do that. I mean, you gotta grow…right?”
Van Etten’s “right” at the end is as much directed at herself as it is at me. And the idea seems so simple. Of course everyone wants to get better, to improve upon themselves. Right? Well, no, they don’t. Plenty of people actually don’t think in these terms. They are fine the way they are and don’t think there is any growing to do. They would hear a question like the one posed in the title of Van Etten’s fourth full-length release, Are We There, and answer with a straight-faced affirmative. But not Van Etten.
“Up until a few years ago, I never had a permanent band,” she says, which makes sense considering her first two albums were very stripped down and her previous release, 2012’s Tramp, saw Van Etten completely transform into an all-in rock band, thanks to the production of The National’s Aaron Dessner. “I like working with friends because you feel more confident working with people that you know. After touring a lot the last couple years, I became really close to my band and really wanted me to make this a band-centric record from the very beginning until the end, from when I was writing the songs in soundchecks to sending demos to them on the road, to see how the songs grew through the whole process. This is just really nice to be playing with the people I’m playing with. My first real band. I’m in my 30s and I finally have a band. I’m a late bloomer there.”
Besides never playing in a regular band until relatively recently, Van Etten also never recorded her own music. So it is no small feat that Van Etten self-produced Are We There and wound up with a record that in no way sounds like corners were cut in terms of arrangements or complexity.
“I learned a lot making those first records because I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “As I said, I was a pretty late bloomer as far as really pursuing music seriously. The first one was just working with one other person. I just wanted him to help me figure things out and record the record as minimally as possible. Every step of the way, I feel like it’s really been a learning process, a natural progression for me to take over. Even working with one other person, you’re still collaborating. There is compromise involved in the back-and-forth between two people, and somebody else has been there to be the translator because I’m not really a technical person. I work from the heart and try to find the vibe of the song, and I can motion with my hands or play them just minimally what I want, but time signatures and keys, I have no idea.”
“To spend time with my band and train with them,” she continues, “they can understand how I can communicate it now. That part is easier than I thought it would be since they got it. But the workload and the schedule has been really intense and really testing my organizational skills. I have multiple notebooks with notes and lyrics. There is even a table of contents in one of the books. I was getting in office mode most of the time, which was actually pretty fun. It was a lot of work, but I’m really proud of what we did. Everything was my decision as opposed in the past when everything was somewhat compromised.”
“I’m still finding my sound,” Van Etten says later about her music, and Are We There is not meant to be a definitive statement on her direction or intentions. Van Etten stayed away from recording studios and producers to develop her own sound, which she sees as a continual process.
“I loved working with Aaron [Dessner] and I wouldn’t take it back for the world,” she says, “but I felt that working with him buried the songs in these intense sonics, a wall of sound. It was really fun hearing my songs in that way and learning how to play them live with my band. I really learned a lot from Aaron that way, but what I do is the melody and songs, and I don’t want to bury the songs. I still wanted to maintain the band-oriented album, and I learned that from Aaron.”