Sharon Van Etten Moves Forward
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
“I tend to…I have chapters,” begins Sharon Van Etten, over the phone.
The musician has a catalogue that speaks to such a process, having released six albums over the last 13 years, the most recent of which, “We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong,” arrived earlier this summer. The New Jersey native, now based in Los Angeles, where she lives with her partner and five-year-old son, has spent the summer touring, and this weekend plays SummerStage at Central Park in New York.
More from WWD
“Every album is a chapter of my life and my experiences,” Van Etten continues. “So I just write as I go. I don’t sit down and say ‘I’m writing an album.’ I have a collection of songs. When I realized that I had 20-something songs, I said, ‘OK, this is the time to slow down and look at what it is that I’m writing. What is it that I’m feeling? What is the thread here?’ Inevitably, it was about COVID[-19] and quarantine and the micro of my life and my world, looking at a microscope and the macro of what’s going on around me. I’m still processing a lot of what I was writing, but I’m also still processing things that are still happening. It’s this moment in time.”
The album title, “We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong,” is what she’s distilled from that processing thus far.
“I think on so many levels we need to look at the way we connect with each other. We need to look at the way we’ve been communicating with each other. The way we’ve been working — whether it be from home, or in groups, and how much we’ve been working. Quality of life. Our surroundings and the way we balance our lives with work. That’s a micro. What can we do better?” Van Etten asks. “What can we do better for the greater good of the world and the environment? It’s endless. I feel everything was put under a microscope as we’ve all been quarantined and in isolation. It was like the universe was telling us to take a gut check here.”
Wai Kei Fung
The title of the record also comes quite literally from the movie “The Sandlot,” which was a comfort watch for her family during quarantine; it’s been her son’s longtime favorite, and while in lockdown they’d end each week with a Friday night pizza and “Sandlot” showing.
“That has been his favorite film for the last two-and-a-half years. It was something that we would put on at the end of the night whenever he couldn’t sleep. Or we always do pizza Fridays, where we have pizza and a movie. You know the movie, right?
“You know that scene where they’re trying to get the ball over and they try all these methods to get the ball? Then the dog bites the vacuum cleaner and it blows up in the kid’s face. He looked at his friends covered in dirt, he just says to them, ‘We’ve been going about this all wrong.’ I’ve watched the movie how many times in my life, but during quarantine, clutching my son on the couch, in the midst of the apocalypse, those words made me tear up,” Van Etten says. “It was that feeling of ‘you finally get through this one hurdle and then something else happens.’ You’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I really connected with that line. I wrote it on a Post-it note. It stuck. I felt that was an overlying theme of, ‘we just have to get through right now. Move forward and make progress, hopefully, and do the best we can.’”
Van Etten has been more or less on the road since the album’s release, touring around Europe and the U.S., with Central Park in the days ahead. One of her favorite parts of performing live again is getting to be with her band for an uninterrupted time, to get to know each other again and rework songs.
“It’s been really nice to reconnect. When you look at songs in a new way after recording them on an album, and you get to reimagine them live, it’s a fun and collaborative experience, even though the songs are already written,” she says. “This is just the beginning of us into a new chapter. I can connect with the audience without feeling insecure. Well, I’m going to be insecure anyway, let’s be honest. I’m really excited just to share the songs and connect with people. To try to reset the clock and move forward.”
Best of WWD
Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
