"It Helps Me To Know That I'm Helping People"

The life of Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten has been something of a blur since she released her fourth album, Are We There, into the world in mid-2014. The relentless touring regimen and living out of a suitcase may be part and parcel of her job description, but it still takes some getting used to.

“I’m at home, just organising my apartment before I leave again forever,” she explains lightheartedly of enjoying some much-appreciated downtime. “I’ve been busy but good, and it’s nice to be back for a minute. It’s been pretty non-stop for the last year-and-a-half already, I would say. It gets a little tiring, but it’s worth it. I feel really lucky to be able to do what I do at this point – I never thought I’d ever get to where I am today, that’s for sure.”

Van Etten certainly doesn’t have too many complaints about her impending return to Australia, having made quite an impact here on her inaugural visit in early 2013.

“We had a blast, that was definitely the highlight of our year,” she continues. “Australia was incredible, and it was my first time there to boot. It was really fun, we had a great time. They’re all different shows this time around, but I’ve only heard good things [about Golden Plains and WOMADelaide].”

The big change since her first trip Down Under is the additional traction gained from the release of Are We There, which built upon the runaway success of her 2012 album, Tramp. The confessional nature of Van Etten’s narratives are as indelibly forthright and personal as ever on the most recent collection, the whole package incredibly poignant and profound as it chronicles a long-term romance that seems to be veering off the tracks. Deciding whether to dig in for the long haul or to walk away and cut one’s losses is something that we’ve all been through at one time or other in our personal affairs, but rarely has the confusion and chaos of this situation been laid bare so eloquently. Now that the dust has settled and she’s had time to get some perspective is Van Etten pleased with Are We There as an artistic statement?

“Yeah, I’m still really proud of it,” she admits. “I worked really hard on it and so did everybody else, and I did everything that I wanted to do. Sometimes the songs are hard to perform, but we still have a really good time performing the songs and playing together, and I still listen to the songs every now and then to check in with myself and I’m still proud.”

This is definitely topically the most current I’ve ever been in writing and recording a record – most of my songs I had for years before I went to the studio with them.

When describing the new songs as “hard to perform” is she referring to the arrangements or their personal nature?

“The personal side of it for sure – they’re emotional songs and, you know, it’s just hard when I’m further and further away from those moments,” she reflects. “This is definitely topically the most current I’ve ever been in writing and recording a record – most of my songs I had for years before I went to the studio with them, so these all happened within a year. They’re just heavy heartbreak songs and songs of introspection, and it’s emotional to have perspective on them and see where I am now. When I’m performing the songs, they sometimes feel so distant.”

Van Etten explains that she has to tap into those emotions when performing the songs onstage each night, which must become draining after a while, but that it all becomes worthwhile when fans tell her how much they’ve been touched by her songs and her live performances.

“Yeah, I don’t do it intentionally but whenever I perform them I just go back to that place,” she tells. “It’s not something I have to push myself to do. It would be like reading your diary in front of people; some days l laugh about it, some days I cry about it and some days it doesn’t affect me as much. But I can still perform them, and if I’m not feeling them at all I won’t play certain songs, but for the most part it still affects me.

“I think what people identify with about my songs is that they are pretty universal, and they are about things that most people experience. Everyone’s felt some kind of love – whether it be loss, heartache or lack thereof, or unrequited – and I want people to be able to talk to me about how they’re connecting with my songs, I want to know who my audience is and why they’re listening to me and how it’s helped them. It helps me to know that I’m helping people, and it makes me feel less selfish about what I do.”

I write usually because I’m going through a hard time and I need to exorcise those demons.

Is the mere act of working through problems and issues during the creative process in this way cathartic on a personal level?

“Yes,” Van Etten concedes. “I write usually because I’m going through a hard time and I need to exorcise those demons. I’ll hit record and I’ll just play and sing for five or ten minutes, but I won’t listen for a few days and then once I’ve had a little bit of perspective I’ll go back and listen and try to understand what it was that I was going through. If it’s too personal then I won’t share it with anybody, but if there’s a universal line or a really good melody somewhere in there, that’s when I start whittling it down to a song that I’ll share with people. Even then, the percentage which makes it to more people is very small.

“Some of [the stream-of-consciousness lyrics are] garbled and some of it’s pretty nonsensical, and then other times I have to make sense of the words and it’s definitely like I’m sculpting from the emotions that I’m going through. A lot of it is just the energy around it and just a few key words, but I try to sculpt it into something if it feels like there’s something buried in there.

“[From a music perspective] it usually it starts with a progression and minimal lyrics, and then when I go to the next step it’s having more of a form to it. Then when I get really excited about the form and it feels more like an idea – like a real idea – then I start hearing minimal stuff here and there, like a beat or a bassline or a harmony. Usually the harmony comes first though and then the beat – I kind of over-think that, because I’m trying to learn how to let it be open so that I can bring it to my band now that I have a band. They play those things better than me so I can let them help me flesh it out, and that’s what we did for the most part of the last record.”

It’s interesting that the harmonies – which are very prominent throughout Van Etten’s work, her voice usually meshing with that of highly attuned backup singer Heather Woods Broderick – come so early in the piece during the songwriting process, one often assuming that they’re added towards the end like icing on the cake.

“I think the chord progressions usually follow the vocal in the way that I write, and the vocal is what changes all the time and is usually the most complicated part of the song – because it’s deceptively simple and never really repeats itself for the most part – and then everything else is pretty intuitive after that,” the singer clarifies. “So I always hear harmonies to everything, and I’m trying not to do as many as I used to – I used to just bury it in vocals – but now I just hear one, and now I can think for Heather and when I leave her to her own devices she’s pretty intuitive with her harmony style and she’ll sing what I heard in my head. But I think that’s what’s the driving force between most of the songs and what really shifts them down, the vocals.

“I’m very lucky to have met Heather – she’s an amazing songwriter in her own right, and she has a very good sense of melody as well as harmony, and she knows when to give space and when to lean in.”

Having worked alongside The National’s Aaron Dessner on the production for Tramp, this time around Van Etten handled that side of the recording herself and explains that the experience came with its fair share of pros and cons.

I had to learn when to brake, and when to do it myself and when to be a little harder on somebody and push them a little more.

“It was a really mixed bag,” she chuckles. “I was up for the challenge and really wanted to do it, and I thought that at this point I’d learnt a lot from the few records I’ve done and I really wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. And I finally had a band to bring into the studio, and we’ve had a working relationship now and they get my language and weird body language and hand gestures to really get what it is that I want – because I’m not a technical person, I’m definitely more into the vibe part, and they get that. So it was hard though because when you are that involved and you’re all really close sometimes you have to make decisions and you have to be a little tough, and because I’m the only one who really understands 100% what it is that I want – even if I don’t have a reason, I just know that it doesn’t feel right sometimes – and I had to learn when to brake, and when to do it myself and when to be a little harder on somebody and push them a little more. But I think it was a good exercise, and that I grew a lot from it for sure.

“I’m sure I’ll apply it to whatever I do next, but I let things happen organically and I definitely don’t have a plan of what I’m doing next, but I’m sure I’ll be better off for having decided to do this one myself.”

Did she have a preconceived agenda for the sound and feel of Are We There when she took on the production role?

“I wanted it to feel organic and I wanted it to feel like a band record. I didn’t want it to be a folk record or an indie-rock record, I wanted it to be me and my group. I had a handful of my friends come in, but the core of it is my band and we’ve tracked a lot of the songs live. I tried to keep most of the tracking to a minimum. I didn’t want to bury it in sonics, I just wanted to let the songs be the songs and not overdo it. That was my goal, and I think we did a pretty good job of it.”

One of the most exciting aspects of the recording process for Van Etten was that she got to play on a piano that John Lennon used whilst recording his Imagine album.

“Yeah, there was two pianos; one was at Electric Lady [Studios in New York] and that was the one that was used on Patti Smith’s Horses, which is crazy – I don’t think she ever played the piano, but I really liked to imagine that she was leaning up against it or something – and that’s what’s on the ballads on the record. Originally there was an upright piano in the studio – at Stewart Lerman’s [Hobo Sound Studio in New Jersey], where we did most of the record – but because I was trying to play piano and sing at the same time for the ballads, because they really just needed that and I can’t do them separately because I felt that it lost the feel and seemed a little sterile to me, Stewart reached out to a few of his friends to see if there was a grand piano that we could use, so we could isolate the sound by putting a blanket over the grand piano and still mic my voice but have a little bit more freedom there in the mix. And the first person who wrote us back was his friend at Electric Lady, because he worked out of there all the time doing other projects and they were very kind to us and snuck us in during some off-time there.

“But then towards the end of the recording a friend of his called him to let him know that he needed a place to store this grand piano from the Record Plant and he asked if it would be okay to bring it up – at that point we had done most of the tracking, but we freaked out and said, ‘Yeah, bring it!’ It’s no easy act to bring a grand piano up two flights of stairs, but they moved it in and they tuned it and it sounded incredible – it was the piano that they used on Imagine, the album – and at that I point I was, like, ‘You know what, shit, I’m just going to try to add it to all of the songs which need a little bit of darkness added to it’, and we just started adding it to a handful of the songs that just could use a little something because we had it at that point. The one that we used it the most on was You Know Me Well – the really low, dark, weird-sounding piano on that is that piano.”

Can you feel the essence of someone who’s played on a particular instrument before?

“I was definitely emotional walking up to it – for both of them – and it took me a minute to get into it and feel worthy of being in its presence, but I think there’s something to be said for the spirit,” Van Etten muses. “There’s definitely an energy to it, and I got weepy while playing those pianos – it’s intense, an intense energy. And I’m not even an energy person… I guess I’m a hippie now, but whatever, I felt it. You can feel it in the room – you walk in that room and touch those keys and you’re a cold, cold soul if you don’t feel anything.”

Does the singer-songwriter enjoy creating her music or sharing it with her fans the most?

“It changes day to day,” she tells. “I mean, it’s important to me to be creative, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here today, but the live shows are hit and miss sometimes – sometimes it’s emotional, and sometimes it’s just bad. And I definitely have a conscience where I wonder why I’m doing what I’m doing and whether it’s completely self-absorbed, and I get in my own head and I feel like the creating it is the most important part and if people connect to it great. But I have a few minds when it comes to performing it – it’s kind of a mind-fuck, you know? Baring your soul can be intense.”

And while it may be parochial, The Music feels obliged to enquire how Van Etten enjoyed the experience of touring through North America with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds like she did last year?

“Oh my God, it was incredible!” she gushes. “I have to say that it was one of the top experiences that I’ve ever had in my whole entire life. They were great people and they treated me like royalty and looked after me, and their shows were incredible every night. I feel very lucky – that’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I just don’t know what kind of world I’m living in sometimes – I feel pretty lucky for sure.”