SHARON VAN ETTEN
traces the roots of her growing acclaim to the journals she kept as a girl.
Many of us still have our teenage journals buried away somewhere – pages full of anger, hurt feelings, betrayal and the arcs of youthful romance.
For singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten, keeping such emotional records was the first step in a process that has led the indie rocker to record three albums, each surrounded by increasing buzz. Her latest, the recently-released Tramp, has heightened her profile to the extent that the music-industry bible Billboard Magazine placed her among its 40 Best Bets – a list that includes artists, executives and trends – for 2012. The publication followed that January accolade with an interview in its most recent issue. How much longer Van Etten will be playing small-capacity venues like Il Motore (where she performs Wednesday night) is the question of the week.
The road to acclaim started with the aforementioned journals, kept at her mother’s behest. “As a kid, I had a hard time expressing myself,” Van Etten said during a recent telephone interview. “I think my mother was concerned about me, so she constantly gave me notebooks to learn how to explain what I was feeling – whether I was happy, sad or angry.”
Over time, she said, writing things down evolved into singing her feelings, stream-ofconsciousness style. “I’d play for the catharsis of it. I’d hit ‘record’ and maybe record for 10 or 20 minutes. Then I’d put on my headphones and listen back and try to understand what I was going through.”
Van Etten was also encouraged by her mother and her sisters to sing along with pop classics by Del Shannon, the Mamas & the Papas, Lesley Gore and the Everly Brothers (listen to All I Can from Tramp and you’ll hear the Everlys, clear as a bell.)
“This is when I started harmonizing without realizing it,” Van Etten said.
Then came choir, another building block that surfaces today in the layers of overdubbed voices that often transform Van Etten’s songs. The New Jersey native joined her first choir at 11 while attending Yantacaw school and continued choral singing in North Hunterdon High School, where she also performed in such musicals as West Side Story, Hello Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof.
“I’ve never been good at the technical side of music,” Van Etten said. “But I have a pretty good ear and singing in choir helped me hear (keys and time signatures) without really knowing what I was doing. So I constantly hear harmonies over everything. And now I feel like I write for two or three voices.”
By 1999, her music collection included the decade’s standards – Liz Phair, Nirvana, Pavement, Lemonheads and Juliana Hatfield. That year, she enrolled in a production technology program at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
She lasted a year. “I wasn’t focused enough, and I was also afraid of the commercial aspect of education and music,” she said. “I didn’t want to get jaded about writing and recording. I wanted it to be more organic.”
Ven Etten moved back to her parents’ house in New Jersey to do some soul-searching. One night, at a Celebration concert at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City, she met opening act Kyp Malone – now best known as a member of TV on the Radio. The two struck up a friendship and Malone introduced her to new artists and venues.
By 2005, Van Etten was playing her own shows, launching her career at the Sin-é Bar in New York, playing mostly original material and selling handmade CDS with hand-painted cover art. “I’d do a cover song every once in a while, but I was a little self-conscious about doing them because I was afraid I’d offend people,” she said.
Her first official album, Because I Was In Love, was released in 2009. It was, she said, about recording nicer versions of her demos – “very, very simple solo stuff,” she said. Epic followed in 2010. “That was me learning how to have a band and how to arrange in a very basic band format,” she said.
Which brings us to Tramp, with its building vocal crescendos and unsettling guitar adornments, courtesy of the National’s Aaron Dessner, who produced the disc. Dessner, Van Etten said, acted as an interpreter of her musical ideas. “I’m not good at talking about technical things,” she said.
Hearing the rough version of album opener Warsaw, for example, Dessner asked Van Etten to describe a record or a vibe she had in mind. Van Etten came up with a couple of favourite albums by John Cale. Different guitar effects, tones and pedals were tried on for size, and when it was all over, a small wall of sound – Velvet Underground style – had been born.
“Tramp is me taking it a step farther, if you’re thinking instrumentation-wise,” Van Etten said. “But also, on the first record, I was in a really, really broken place. And on the second record, I was coming out of that broken place, finally. And on this one, I’m actually looking back on it, and I’m a lot more confident. I’m moving on and allowing myself to have a life again.”
The emotionally upbeat We Are Fine proves her point. Van Etten said she’s not a believer in the idea that contentment is the enemy of great art. “We make jokes about it all the time, because all our favourite songs are about being heartbroken,” she said. “But there are some really great happy songs out there, and I don’t think it’ll ruin someone’s career if they’re not depressed.”
Van Etten said she had about 30 songs ready when she went into Dessner’s garage studio in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, (where, incidentally, she recently rented a place on the top floor of a house.) Of those 30 songs, 18 didn’t make the cut. They remain on her hard drive, possibly to be exhumed later. Some will never see the light of day.
“I only share my writing when I feel like it will help people – or people can learn from it or relate to it or connect with it,” she said. “If I can’t take it from this really personal place – when it’s so specific that it might alienate people – it’s selfish or useless to share it. The world doesn’t need to be reminded of a really bad day I had if it doesn’t have a positive message in the end.”
Van Etten said she would like to develop the possibility of writing outside of a first-person point of view, like Nick Cave. “He’s a really incredible storyteller,” she said. “He can disguise religion in a love story or in a murder ballad. That’s something I want to learn how to do better, because I do write from a very personal place. I try and do exercises where I don’t say ‘you’ or ‘I’ or ‘me,’ so it’s more of a story with a little bit of distance, which, hopefully, more people will be able to relate to. That’s something I want to learn how to do better.” Like Eleanor Rigby? “Kind of, yeah,” Van Etten said, chuckling.
Sharon Van Etten performs Wednesday at Il Motore, 179 Jean Talon St. W. Advance tickets cost $13. Go to blueskiesturnblack.com