Sharon Van Etten
SHARON VAN ETTEN ANSWERS THE PHONE FROM HER HOME IN BROOKLYN, NY, and quickly apologizes. Music is playing loudly in the background. She was rocking out to the radio while cleaning up from breakfast, she explains. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Despite her bustling morning, Van Etten is attentive, offering a glimpse of how she stays in control when life becomes busy. Her fifth record, Remind Me Tomorrow, a frenzied synthheavy album that sidesteps Van Etten’s previous guitar-centric work, developed from an unexpected whirlwind where balancing became a necessity.
When Van Etten finished touring her 2014 record, Are We There, she was unsure if she would return to music and decided to take time to regroup. With the goal of becoming a therapist, she went back to school in pursuit of a degree in psychology. But then she got a call from a casting director asking her to audition for a role, which she ultimately landed, in the Netflix series The OA. Director Katherine Dieckmann asked Van Etten to write the score for her film Strange Weather. And then Van Etten found out that she was pregnant.
Despite trying, Van Etten admits that she has “never been a very organized person,” but is learning how to keep everything under control. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that setting more longterm goals has been more realistic for me and attainable,” she says.
“Like for school, I’m giving myself to the age of 50 to get my master’s [degree] and become a therapist, so that’s 13 years from now. I feel like as I have become a mother, you just learn how to prioritize things and you’re like, okay, this is the number one thing right now and let’s see what we can fit around it.” She adds, with a laugh, “and also Google Calendar.
“I’m lucky that all of these things didn’t happen simultaneously,” Van Etten says, when asked how she managed to stay creative with a hectic schedule. “I just kind of let the universe speak to me, and I would walk through the doors as they were being opened.”
While writing the score for Strange Weather, Van Etten shared a studio space with musician and actor Michael Cera. To clear her head, she turned to synths and the drum kit Cera had in the space, recording lengthy stream-of-consciousness pieces before returning to her score work. Later, when she listened back to these, she picked out moments to explore further. Eventually she amassed about 40 tracks and, with encouragement from her partner, decided to make a record.
Van Etten connected with Remind Me Tomorrow producer John Congleton while in Los Angeles filming The OA. She went into the studio with only rough versions of her tracks, and felt completely open to let the songs unfold. “I let John bring in all of his musicians and Heather [ Woods Broderick], my singer, is the only person that I brought in from my crew. Everybody else was on John’s team, so it’s kind of fun to not really know what’s going to happen,” Van Etten explains. “[Congleton] knew my influences and I gave him some guiding points for the sounds that I wanted from records past and stuff, but you never know, when you get people into a room, what’s going to happen, because chemistry is a real thing.”
Amidst a gloomy and textured soundscape, time is at the centre of Remind Me Tomorrow. The album’s title is a reference to the software update prompt that Van Etten, like many of us, continually pushed to the next day. Throughout her ten songs, Van Etten is reflective, and occasionally strains to see the future. When she looks at herself and her family, it’s like an infinity mirror where endless versions appear. In the shadowy track “Memorial Day,” Van Etten’s hushed voice is multiplied as she sees her son in the future and sings, “Standing, I can see. You will learn. You will run.”
In many hands, this multi-layered introspection would be dizzyingly chaotic, but Van Etten navigates her emotions with precision. Remind Me Tomorrow is about the complexity of rela- tionships and the struggles that come with time’s relentless pull, but Van Etten is reconciling with it all.
“I started thinking from so many different perspectives and I feel like that opened up a lot of different ways of writing for me,” Van Etten says. “I was pregnant when Trump got elected and I remember I started to cry, and then I got all self-conscious because I’m like, ‘I don’t want [my son] to absorb any of these feelings right now.’ I remember thinking, ‘No, my job is to make sure he feels safe and protected and I can be a guiding force and I can protect him from this negativity as much as I can. He’s going to find it eventually but it’s my job to protect him.’
“So thinking about all of these different perspectives, it’s like, yeah, I look at my son, I see me and my partner but I also see the teenager he’s going to become inevitably, that’s going to act like he doesn’t need us at all. I think about my parents, I’m one of five kids, and how much they gave up for us, how much they sacrificed and compromised to give us the best lives that they could. Bestcase scenario is that we leave and have our own lives and don’t get to see them enough and we’re supposed to be okay with that?
“I called my mom crying on Mother’s Day and I told her everything I just told you and she just started laughing at me,” Van Etten says, laughing herself. “She’s like, ‘It’s just a rite of passage and you’ll see yourself in him as he gets older.’ And it’s true, and he’s not even two!”