COVER STORY | Sharon Van Etten Strikes Up the Band

There are three guarantees in this life: death, taxes and Sharon Van Etten remaking herself on an album every three to five years. And that’s when she’s not doing a side-quest like acting in The OA, getting a psychology degree or showing up at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return to play a deep cut from Are We There. She’s been on indie rock’s mantle for some time now, having collaborations with the National, Angel Olsen and Bon Iver in her back-pocket. She’s loved by Obama and Fiona Apple, and her music spans so many genres that it’s become its own. There are few modern-day vanguards, but Van Etten is certainly one of them. Years ago, a college crush made me a Spotify playlist and put the demo of “Serpents” on it, and now I can’t imagine a world without her music playing nearby. Her writing is an omen for heartache; she’s a lullaby huckster, a lupine wailing in-between decrees of drunk hope and sincere grace.

But Sharon Van Etten is a long way from her old self, from her, as Cokemachineglow put it 13 years ago, “soul music for collegiate white people.” True in that sense, Van Etten has all but abandoned the Cat Power adjacencies she chewed on when she first entered the business, as an expat publicist from Ba Da Bing Records. Her days of selling hand-made CDs are firmly past-tense. She’s 10 years removed from the anti-romantics of Are We There, nearly six from the powerful, unresolved acts of memory and restoration found on Remind Me Tomorrow. In 2022, Van Etten eulogized her near-two-decade career on the Sandlot-summoning We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, putting together a collage of acoustic ballads, synthy bastions and orchestral feats both starry and brightened. The sprawling opera of “Born,” the sensual, brash touches of “Headspace,” the career-defining, hook-in-mouth catchiness of “Mistakes”—it was all very piecemeal, written alone and then fleshed out in sections in the off-season of mandated separation.

Touring for Remind Me Tomorrow got cut short because of COVID-19, and Van Etten didn’t want to play We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong live, because it was an album about quarantine, about nobody telling us the world was ending. But she eventually gave in to the industry-driven demands of cyclical creativity, joining the Wild Hearts Tour with Julien Baker and Angel Olsen in the summer of 2022. And it paid off. “There was a sense of camaraderie that, I think, everyone had been missing at that point,” Van Etten says. “Sonically, it’s the most exciting place I’ve been in in the live world. I feel like we’re digging into some darkness that I’ve been alluding to for a long time.” That excitement came thanks to the team she assembled: percussionist Jorge Balbi, bassist Devra Hoff and pianist/guitarist Teeny Lieberson. For show rehearsals, they rented a house with a studio in the California desert so they could have their very own “band camp” together. “We could all connect as people and play music,” Van Etten says. “And we could also talk about how we wanted the songs from the album to be translated live.” Every day, they’d meet for breakfast, lunch and dinner, rehearsing and writing in-between, strengthening the instrumentation of old material while soaking up new creative whims.

“On the last day,” Van Etten continues, “we got through all the songs and we still had a couple hours left, so I asked the band if they’d be willing to take a break and, when we returned, we could just jam. The joke is that I hate that word. It has all these negative connotations to it, but there is no better word for it when you’re starting songs from the ground up and you’re playing with no sense of what will reveal itself.” But the work was, as Sharon puts it, “wildly effortless” and the Attachment Theory wrote two songs in an hour, “Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)” and “I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way).”

More rock musicians are allergic to “jamming” than you think, be it because they don’t have the talent or because the term has been engendered into a stereotype for a certain kind of listener. Van Etten just never wanted to be “that person noodling in the corner, not listening to anybody else.” Despite her music having the reputation of being a one-woman show, she’s always been malleable to outside forces. But, over the years, she’s especially learned that, in a real, collaborative setting—where you understand and respect your collaborators and you’re listening to each other—jamming can become a conversation back-and-forth between instruments, not an act of falling into just one idea. “Everyone in the band but me has jazz experience,” Van Etten explains, “and in that way where someone can call out a key and be able to change it on the fly. I’m much more by ear and feel and, over the years, I’ve realized that you need both in the room, because, sometimes, it’s fun to talk about where the songs could go.” She prides herself on not caring about keys or inversions, or diagramming her music. “I just find where my melody wants to go.” Given how isolationist her songwriting can be, communication became ground zero for the band. “As people, my bandmates are really great people,” Van Etten says. “I’m learning a lot from their different perspectives. That’s why I came up with the idea of Attachment Theory, because I felt like, with all of our different backgrounds, we still come to find each other and we’re each other’s chosen family in this very weird climate. I want this band to be my band for as long as they want to be my band.”

And Sharon Van Etten has always wanted to be in a band. It was her teenage dream, in fact. But she always wrote alone and then brought her songs to “people that play better.” Now she’s grateful that people can be together again, and it’s why her new album with the Attachment Theory is not an act of defiance, but her acting on optimism and “being in the moment and trying to do the opposite” of what she’s always done, surrounding herself with people. Van Etten knew Teeny Lieberson from the keyboardist’s old band, Here We Go Magic. They’d played shows together and were friendly, but hadn’t yet collaborated. When it came time to tour We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, Van Etten figured out that she can’t play and perform like she once could. “I can’t multitask like I used to if I’m going to engage with the audience in a live setting,” she says. “So I knew I had to be someone that could sing, because these songs are very intense vocally.”

She needed a bandmate, too, who understood how familial the touring dynamic gets, and Lieberson had an extensive history of being in bands with her sisters. It was a natural fit. Meanwhile, Devra Hoff and Jorge Balbi had already worked with Van Etten during the making of We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. She found herself in a “haven of people that understand [her].” Their rehearsals became safe places for ideas and stream-of-conscious singing, turning melodic structures into phrases, allowing “thoughts to come and then make sense of them.” “I’d never done that before,” Van Etten tells me. “I was singing complete gibberish. But I didn’t have to make sense of it alone. I would write down all these ideas and then we’d sit around and talk about them.”

Dan Knowles, Van Etten’s engineer at the time, recorded the final Wild Hearts rehearsal session just to document it. When Van Etten went home and listened to his rough mixes, she became overwhelmed by how inspired they were. “I knew deep down that was what I wanted to do next,” she says, explaining how her recent fixation on IDLES’ frontman Joe Talbot’s immersive performance style really crystallized, for her, the true power of someone totally in lock-step with their bandmates: “I love how much fun they have and how wild and free it feels, so when I started singing to the music we were playing, it was the first time in the writing process I only had a mic and there were players in the room. I would guide people and be like, ‘Yes, that bass part is the thing!’ And then, ‘Yes, come in with that drum beat.’ I was signing as I was singing and finding my melody, and everyone was falling in in this really exciting way.”

But Van Etten decided that she and the Attachment Theory needed a week of writing to see where the project could go. So they did that, coming up with 12 songs in five days in the Yucca Valley and 64 Sound in Highland Park. Van Etten plays minimal guitar on the record, showing up “as a singer” just like she did for Remind Me Tomorrow, when producer John Congleton picked all of the musicians performing around her. “I just got to be a singer for my songs,” she says. “I had written the songs and I had the basic instrumentation, but John obviously took it to this new level that was very inspiring to me at that juncture, where I could show up and he took my influences and he brought in the players that he knew to play that.”

This time, however, the songs weren’t written but the band knew Van Etten’s influences. She could, again, be a singer without having to think about playing. But Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory had a true, collaborative demoing process full of broad sketches that freed Van Etten up to “have conversations about where the songs went” with her bandmates rather than the inverse. “When I’m by myself doing that, I think I second-guess myself more,” she continues. “And when you’re in a room with people and having discourse, you have more conviction.” Because the Attachment Theory listened to each other and kept moving, everything got done quicker. Hoff helped Van Etten figure out the chorus of “Something Ain’t Right”; concepts were pulled apart and sewn back together so people could still connect with them; loose ends were championed, not tied up, and making the album became a workshop; the Attachment Theory became a writing collective. There was no overthinking, just form and melody: “Part of my process was, ‘As soon as we get from beginning to end, let’s be done and move on, so that when we take that demo to the studio, we still have more to discover.’”

There was a point where Van Etten stopped a session. “I was like, ‘Okay, I have to go get groceries and I have a couple phone calls to make and, when I come back, I will sing to whatever you’ve written,’” she says. “And I came back to the this fucking crazy song. I just had to come up with a melody on the spot for this very fast, very short chord change at every part of the song. So I just threw down a vocal. I did a few vocal takes to try to get the timing right, without having any real lyrics, but I wrote the melody and the only word that came out as ‘Indio.’” Van Etten didn’t finish the lyrics until she got to the studio, but she’d been going back-and-forth on substance. “Indio” was going to be a song about festivals harming the environment, then it was going to be a song about the desert. But then she wrote the words “In knowing, there, they wait for you, you let them stand by your side, to hear the words of what’s been done. You skipped the ominous route, the test is you must try.” The song became Van Etten’s most earnest, a true-to-herself anthem about “letting go and trusting the people that I’m playing with and walking in a room and working together very candidly.”

Van Etten met her producer, Marta Salogni, at a mutual friend’s wedding, where they were seated together at the same table. “I didn’t realize the breadth of her work until afterwards,” she says. “And, as I explored more of her work, it was just funny. I was like, ‘The universe is revealing itself to me.’ As soon as something happens, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is someone I need to work with.’” In Van Etten’s mind, it takes a group of people to stay the course and keep returning to the goal of a “band record.” It’s about talking, and it’s about no one person holding the reins. So, she told Salogni she wanted to make a record with the Attachment Theory just how they wrote it: together. “I wanted that feeling,” she says. “I wanted us to be in the round, I wanted us to be communicating together. I wanted that live feel.” The producer knew a place where the sound board sits in the room with the band and it’s this big, open space.

In Crouch End, there is a church that looks as spectacular as any other nearby old London building. Built in the 1850s for a local Agapemonite sect, the church split into two halves—part worship center, part creative space—once animators and puppeteers Bob Bura and John Hardwick purchased it in the late 20th century. In 1982, the Eurythmics rented out a room upstairs, turning a storage closet into a recording studio where they’d make Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). Once Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart’s band got big enough, they became owners of the building, capitalized the “c” and further nurtured it into the UK’s musical lineage. Depeche Mode recorded part of Violator there. It was one of the three studios Radiohead used to finish OK Computer. 25 years later, Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory spent three weeks there and left with their self-titled album.

There’s magic alive in the light pouring through the Church’s massive windows. A warmth, too, noticeable even as you’re looking in the storage closet where Stewart and Lennox made their first #1 hit, a storage closet still patterned by wallpaper that hung above where they slept 40 years ago. “I get goosebumps even just talking about it,” Van Etten admits. “You feel the energy of space and the openness. Some studios can feel sterile, or [filled with] way too much equipment, or not inviting at all. This was the opposite. There were plenty of choices of instruments, but it also felt very inviting. It felt like you were going to discover something in every corner.” The Church was decidedly her style, aka “immediately nostalgic.” She says that being in a place like that helped her and her bandmates draw upon the influences that surrounded them, like Brian Eno, Joy Division, ESG and Portishead.

So, when the band spelunks through splashes of Mazzy Star, Kate Bush and New Order on songs like “Idiot Box” and “Afterlife,” it makes sense—just as it makes sense that Van Etten would bring her “synth-pop” album to life in a studio well-known for hosting some of the sub-genre’s strongest titles. And in London, no less—a mecca then, and now, for the kind of outlier rock ‘n’ roll that comes with a “post-” label stitched into it, and a place that is as gloomy as it is funny and tongue-in-cheek. Van Etten was reading Lol Tolhurst’s Goth right before she and the Attachment Theory entered the Church with producer Marta Salogni, a James Ford acolyte who’s worked with the likes of Porridge Radio, Animal Collective, Circuit des Yeux and Björk. The concert that set her and the Attachment Theory “on the course” was watching the Cure ache through the drama at the Hollywood Bowl in May 2023. One of Van Etten’s biggest inspirations is, now and always, Nick Cave. During COVID, she got obsessed with synths and bands like Pylon. “I want you here, even when I feel like a curse,” she sings during “I Want You Here.” You could say that Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is her goth album and you’d be mostly right.

But, if anything, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is a good documentation of how intense it is to be alive. “The faded beauty of life, we all face it” straightens a lot of the spirituality, death and insecurity; Van Etten interrogates whether we can have compassion for hateful people; the rage in these songs become an umbrella for the world that we’re living in. “Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)” is a good example of that, of co-existing beliefs that are very disparate from one another. “And the older I get, I see them doing this in the world and it’s frightening,” Van Etten contends. “I’ve lived in the North, I’ve lived in the West, I’ve lived in the South, I’ve traveled the world—I think home is everywhere, learn how to co-exist. Try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes whenever you don’t agree on something and just be good people. Just be a good person. I feel like that message is so hard for people to receive. Obviously, I see the results of the election and I see what’s happening around the world, and I just don’t understand. As a mother, as a woman, as a parent—I have a bandmate that’s trans, I have friends that are LGBTQ. It’s terrifying. And all I want to do is hug everybody that I come in contact with and just tell them that they’re in a safe place.”

Van Etten tells me that, when she started playing music 20 years ago, she “didn’t understand the weight” of what she was singing about on Because I Was in Love and Epic. “I was just writing and singing, and it was very stream-of-consciousness, and it was very much about my abusive relationships. I had to learn how to talk about them with people, it’s a forced reflection as everybody analyzes and wants to know the stories behind them,” she says. Then came albums like Tramp and Are We There, and Van Etten began feeling a responsibility to turn her stories outward so that, out of her personal experience, she could make something general enough for other people to connect with without feeling sorry for her. But doing that was never because of any pressure she may have felt from audiences or press. “It’s been questions I’ve asked myself about what it is I choose to share and what my role is as a writer and as a performer,” she continues. “What do I want to accomplish with this? I think, as I’ve learned to write in different ways over the years, my vocabulary is growing from reading more, writing more and meeting more people, having more conversations, and being interested in different things.” “Live Forever” was inspired by an article Van Etten read about anti-aging technology and regenerative cell experiments being done on mice; now, the song is a question of mortality and misunderstanding.

Van Etten, now 43, considers herself a part of the “sandwich generation,” as she takes care of her young son and her aging parents. “It’s overwhelming,” she says. Her music has always been personal, but the anxiety and angst becomes more balanced as you get older. Her world is micro and macro now, or, as she puts it, “there’s the bigger world and there’s my little world.” There’s a line in “Southern Life” that has stuck with me. “My hands are shaking as a mother trying to raise her son right,” Van Etten sings. I think, especially post-pandemic, musicians are considering the responsibility of parenting in a profession with zero stability more than ever. A friend of mine, who is in a famous-enough rock band for it to be a full-time gig, went back to school during COVID and got a master’s degree, in case he was never going to be able to tour again and provide for his family.

“How do you manage the expectations of motherhood with the expectations of being a recording artist?” I ask Van Etten. “Does it get harder as your son gets older to find the right balance?” “It’s perpetual,” she replies. “He’s only seven right now, but I have conversations with him about it.” He came to London for the band’s last week of recording; Van Etten calls it “an adventure” and “camp.” “At the end of the day,” she says, “he would come and check in and see what we’d been working on. My band is like his family. But I’m like, ‘You know what happens when Mom makes a record? You know what I have to do when I do that?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you have to tour.’ I was like, ‘Yes.’ He’s like, ‘Can I come visit?’ ‘Of course.’” Van Etten shows me a note her son wrote last Mother’s Day, which she keeps taped to her office door. It says: “Dear Mom, I love these songs so much. I don’t think you should stop singing. Please don’t stop.’”

She chokes up a little as she reads it back to me. “I need music for my well-being, I need that creative outlet,” she says. “And, even if I didn’t do music as a career, I would keep writing, because it’s just something I do. It’s something that’s an extension of who I am. And it’s my form of therapy at the end of the day. I’m still chipping away at a psychology degree. My goal was 50. I still have time to do that. But music is still my #1. Whether or not I get a day job, music is still this passion. It’s a struggle, but it’s still something I feel like I need to do for me first. Thank goodness other people like it, but I know that I’m lucky, and I know that it’s not forever. As I get older, I know it’s just gonna get harder and harder, but I’m gonna do it as long as I can.”

Van Etten’s discography is a collection of graduations, and she likens her career now to an independent study. “There’s no more classes,” she says. “I know I want to keep doing music and keep trying to create these pathways for me to learn more and to connect with people. Every time I make a record, I try to present a new variable for myself, but also for other people. I don’t want to make the same record ever again. I’m proud of what I’ve done, but I want to keep challenging myself and, so, making a record like [The Attachment Theory], you’re very much confronted by your own ego.”

She’s figuring out how to relinquish control in her art, even if that means walking out of a session so her bandmates can come up with something totally on their own. But, mostly, she is getting better at being closer with the people she makes music with. “I’m learning how to share more of myself, apart from my songs,” Van Etten says. It’s how you make the push-and-pull of grief and joy on an album like Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory work. Lieberson’s synth playing provides an emotive focus, and then there are the dark, damp thumps from Balbi, and then Hoff’s balmy bass rolls fill the shelf. Here and there, a twinkle of Van Etten’s guitar shows face, as the album expands into dapples of shoegaze, electronica and grunge.

It’s all sensitive, congruous, expressive and cosmically rich with perspective. Van Etten’s songwriting can be so wounded yet so holistic and full of clarity, even when the questions in her songs go unanswered. The music is well-worn in; a nice life, full of melody and truth. There’s an urge in this music: an urge to try, whether it’s to be better or to be present. Or both. It’s why “Someone inside me saved me, made me see the light” becomes “I want you here, even when it hurts.” For 20 years, we grew into ourselves in the shelter of Van Etten’s language. Now, she’s chosen to join us.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.