Sharon Van Etten is concerned that people will make fun of her next career move: fronting a goth rock band. “Maybe it’s my insecurity that people will see, ‘Oh, someone in their forties decided to have a band – whatever, who cares,’” she says, looking to the floor and imagining the sarcastic jab to follow: “No one’s ever heard of that.” I’m not sure how she turned up to interviews before, but today every indie rock musician’s favourite musician looks the part in a black hoodie, surrounded by instruments, sitting in her home studio in Los Angeles.
Most fortysomethings suspected of having a midlife crisis, though, are not Grammy-nominated artists who made a male newscaster cry with a simple on-air live performance. Nor do they have their own heroes, Nick Cave and The National, offering up praise. This is a woman who has managed to bottle her very own bittersweet flavour of nostalgia; just thinking about her duet with Angel Olsen “Like I Used To” reminds me of a summer I spent feeling yearningly, tragically hopeful. I’m not the first critic to suggest that the current generation of women in indie rock – boygenius, Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy included – wouldn’t have created work as textured and well-received without the influence of Van Etten’s emotional complexity on albums such as Are We There and Remind Me Tomorrow. At first glance, her gothic turn feels like a rogue decision, yet her music can often linger hauntingly in gloom. Just listen to her voice descend in Siouxsie Sioux swoops on the chorus of the single “Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)”. It’s a match made in some dark heaven.
The name of this band – Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory – is something of a nod to one of her many side-projects: the long and winding road to becoming a therapist. “My goal for myself was having a degree by the time I hit 50 and I’ll be 44 in February,” she says wistfully, over a video call. Initially, Van Etten was inspired by a period of therapy she undertook to process an abusive relationship she had in her twenties. Once she was ready to retire from being a musician, she’d thought she might work with vulnerable women who had been traumatised or abused. Her interests have evolved, she says: “As I get older and my parents are aging, I’m considering elderly therapy and grief counselling.”
It would be the perfect final act to her career, I think. We have such comfortable silences that I don’t get to the questions I’d planned. It’s down to Van Etten being one hypnotic half of the conversation: her dark hair is pulled back from her elvish face and her almond-shaped brown eyes hold you with a steady presence. It’s calming to sit with her, and much like a therapist, she’s difficult to read. Her expressions hide most signs of tension or conflict – she’s gentle, almost neutral, but thorough and contemplative in her replies. Even, apparently, when well-meaning people keep asking her about her new band. She lists out their questions: “What made you want to do this now? Why were you solo for so long?” And then, when it’s clear how weighty this transition is for her, “Why is being in a band such a big deal?”
For Van Etten, the answer is simple – she didn’t feel emotionally safe enough before, now she does. “When I started writing music I was in that very controlling and abusive relationship; I had to hide the fact that I played from him,” she says. “So, from my late teens through my early twenties, my roots in music were it being my survival and just what I did for myself.” Once she was out of the relationship, friends encouraged her to perform at open mic nights and she started to share “very fragile songs” she was protecting like they were baby birds. “I was still solo for four years before I even let people just play with me in a live setting,” she explains.
Only after surrounding herself with trusted people did she begin to accept small forms of help. A little aid with touring plans, then some colluding over musical arrangements for the creation of Remind Me Tomorrow and her most recent album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. A major step in letting go of control was the creation of her most beloved song, the wistful “Seventeen”, with co-writer Kate Davis. That track’s articulation of faded heartbreak by way of an ever-changing city has given psychological depth to pivotal scenes in hit TV shows such as Sex Education, Big Mouth and The Bear. “It’s my song but when I hear it now, I still tear up,” she says. “I cry because it’s about how looking back, you learn way more than when you were in that moment. Just be easy on yourself and live more in the moment because you won’t understand until later.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic, she had the fortitude to ask her touring bandmates – who now make up the Attachment Theory – to collaborate in a formal sense. “I make a joke about our band being like a sonic trust fall but it’s deeper than that,” she says (referring to when someone leans back and allows themselves to fall, knowing that others will catch them). “I wanted to challenge myself, but also show the band how invested I am with them as not just musicians, but friends.” She generously implies that they had some shared ownership over her solo songs anyway, by putting their own DNA into them night after night on tour; “they add so much, interpreting my music and instilling their voice into it.”
When I went to watch the band’s recording sessions at the Church Studios in north London a few months ago, Van Etten struck an understated figure, no more a main player than drummer Jorge Balbi, bassist Devra Hoff and Teeny Lieberson on synths, piano, guitar and backing vocals. I wondered if she felt the pressure to hold back, be overly deferential. She says not. “I was still directing to some degree but there wasn’t anything combative,” she says. “There were a couple of tense moments in the studio when just our gear wasn’t working or when someone didn’t feel heard.” She smiles at the memory of trying to over-direct Lieberson’s vocals, only for her bandmate to kindly but firmly reject her suggestion: that she try a melody that to Lieberson’s ears sounded like a classic “Sharon Van Etten” tune rather than a Teeny Lieberson one.
We’re all late thirties into early fifties and in that time of our lives that a person learns how to talk about death
After writing the songs out in the Californian desert, Van Etten decided they would record in London because it was clear their shared influences were English post-punk bands of the late 1970s and Eighties: Joy Division, The Cure, and for Van Etten, vocally and dramatically, Kate Bush and PJ Harvey. Conveniently, given those macabre musical references, death and the destructive passing of time had been very much on Van Etten’s mind. “We’re all late thirties into early fifties and in that time of our lives that a person learns how to talk about death,” she says. Her father-in-law had dementia and she was watching him fold into that process; sometimes witnessing the man she knew and other times not recognising him.
One day, Van Etten and Hoff had a conversation about an article on an elixir that reverses aging in mice. It’s possible, the article said, that it could be used on people – if the person was older than 50, they’d likely become younger. “We got into this philosophical, really dark conversation of: if you could live forever, would you? And why would you?” she remembers. This discussion inspired the sombre, mystical opening song, “Live Forever”. The music that followed blended angular post-punk with lush reverb, creating an ethereal atmosphere ideal for exploring the fragile boundary between life and death. Van Etten fans will be grateful that multiple tracks have the driving instrumental build and poignant Springsteen-like euphoria she’s known for.
During the writing process, philosophical discussions became practical. Van Etten’s father-in-law died. Hoff lost a close friend, Ariel, someone they considered their chosen family. “I found myself in the most intense grief of my life, a grief that consumed me almost entirely for months,” Hoff recalls. “Songs that we had written or begun writing took on an intensity for me that made it literally hard to play. I had to duck out of the recording room crying on more than one occasion. These songs and Sharon’s words were and are direct reflections of my feelings and what I wanted to communicate to Ariel.” Those losses cemented the themes of the self-titled record: mortality, what we leave behind, and questioning if we ever go anywhere (“All of that fun stuff,” Van Etten says).
Music has been my superpower throughout my life as I’ve learned how to hone it and control it
Her interest in the afterlife reminds me of her role as Rachel in The OA, a prisoner who, after a near-death experience, develops an angelic singing voice. “That role spoke to me because music has been my superpower throughout my life as I’ve learned how to hone it and control it and turn it into a career that has helped other people,” she says. Her other prominent TV appearance involved a “very psychedelic experience” filming for Twin Peaks: The Return, the cult show created by fellow Los Angelino David Lynch, who passed away a few days before we spoke. “He lived his life fully and he lived it the way he wanted to,” she says of Lynch. “I don’t know him enough to speak to every part about his life, but he seemed like a very enlightened person. And left a lot of beauty and mystery behind. Thank you for that, David Lynch.”
A different side-project has recently taken precedence: being a mother to her seven-year-old son, Jack. On election day in 2016, pregnant and alone, she cried at the thought of bringing a child into a world that felt increasingly scary with Trump as president. Now, with Trump beginning a second term, she struggles to balance being honest with Jack while protecting his childlike innocence. The day before our conversation, which fell on both inauguration day and Martin Luther King Jr Day, her husband (and ex-bandmate-turned-manager) Zeke Hutchins wanted to watch the inauguration, but Van Etten chose to focus on MLK Day instead. She watched footage of the 1963 March on Washington and talked to Jack about why she struggles with Trump’s presidency: “I told him how I wish things were different. But that you have to find ways to be a good person even when you don’t think other people are.”
She simplifies politics for him by comparing differing allegiances to how not everyone likes the same movies. “We have family and friends in the South who are Trump supporters, so we’ve had hard conversations,” she says. “I’m talking a lot about the idea of coexistence.”
Meanwhile their hometown has been on fire; the Van Etten residence is just three miles from Pasadena and a block from the Glendale border. Both Pasadena and Glendale were evacuated during the recent forest fires in LA but the Van Ettens tentatively decided to stick around. Not everyone on her team was so lucky: Josh Block, who engineered the band’s demo sessions in the desert, lost his house to the fires. Her guitar tech lives four blocks from the fires and has to water his house every day to clear it from the airborne soot and pieces of debris that land on its walls. The band’s drummer Balbi has been displaced and is staying with friends.
We live in a society where everyone’s afraid of ageing. We’re supposed to age. It’s OK
Van Etten is wary of a global conversation that assumes only rich people were badly affected by the fires because of publicised celebrity house losses. “Yes, the Pacific Palisades [fire] is awful, but a lot of the creative community – and a very diverse community – has been displaced,” she says, suddenly stern for the first and only time in our conversation. “People are returning to their neighbourhoods being the only house standing.”
Now that she is surrounded by such chaos, does that change her answer to the album’s central question: would she want to live forever? She gives a restrained sigh at the state of things, a “to be determined”. “I wanna see my kid get older, to see how he makes himself in this world. And my partner, who I love – I don’t ever want to think about losing each other, he’s the love of my life,” she says and then laughs shyly at what she’s said. “But I’m not interested in seeing what happens to the world, with where things stand. I don’t think I want to live on Mars. I don’t want to escape the planet that we’ve destroyed and live in another area that is just going to be wrecked.”
The strange promise of living through our uncertain future ultimately can’t compare to the natural order for Van Etten. “We live in a society where everyone’s afraid of ageing. We’re supposed to age. It’s OK,” she says. “I think, at this moment, I just want to get old and eventually die.”
‘Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory’ is out now
