“Feeling broken-hearted is a really hard lifestyle.”
Sharon Van Etten speaks to Victoria Segal.
It’s been four years since Are We There: how did Remind Me Tomorrow come together in that time? “It was definitely gradual and unintentional; it was October last year when I realised I had over 40 demos. It crept up on me without noticing, exactly. I feel like I end up demoing more than I write in a journal now because it’s so much more cathartic for me to sing than it is to write. When my son was born [in 2017] I started working on lyrics because I listened to demos on headphones while he was napping. That was my time. Then the subject matter kind of morphed into something else; they started as love songs to my partner, and then all of a sudden, I was writing to my son.”
Did you ever think there might not be another record? “Honestly, I just didn’t know. I knew I was going to write because that’s my form of therapy; that’s how I feel better and I need that as an outlet. Singing for me is like nothing else. But I didn’t know for sure. I’d been going at it pretty hard since 2009, 2010, and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have, because when you’re tired and when you’re broken-hearted, it can feel like a really hard lifestyle, health-wise. I just wanted to feel good and to be still and to have time to reflect on real-life things. And I knew I wasn’t going to make a better record if I stayed out on the road. What would I write about?”
Were there records you particularly had in mind as you made Remind Me Tomorrow? “When I brought the demos to [producer] John Congleton he asked me that question. It wasn’t until I was getting the demos together and making sense of what songs were going to be on the album that all of a sudden, I’m hearing Portishead, Suicide and Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree – all drone-based, dark, key-driven, but still the vocal is very centred. And his eyes just lit up when I mentioned these big influences; I was nervous that he would get nervous, but he actually was excited by the challenge. There’s a handful of songs that are pretty dark and aggressive, but I was still drawn to them. I played them for my partner and he really encouraged the direction I was taking. It was this side of me that people hadn’t seen. A lot of my record collection is late-’70s to early-’90s punk, electronica, minimal, new wave, no wave, trip-hop. So I was excited to let that part of me shine a little bit more.”