The Attachment Theory

MUSIC

Feb 7

Sharon Van Etten is just as enigmatic and ethereal as I anticipated, dimly lit and softly spoken when we link up over video call for our interview. She answers my questions slowly and thoughtfully, but animatedly, too. We’re talking about her new album, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, which was written with her band (Jorge Balbi, Devra Hoff and Teeny Lieberson). Alongside huge, sweeping sonic arcs, it’s lyrically bold and strong, warm and open. Songs you find yourself singing along to – even if it’s your first listen. It’s a beautiful, honest record. Van Etten and her band are in their element, taking up space, welcoming the listener in with wide open arms.

Van Etten is dialing in from New York, but these days she’s based in LA.

As I write this introduction, LA is burning, lit up by terrifyingly fast and fierce wildfires; from the Pacific Palisades to Altadena. I think it’s worth noting this even though Van Etten and I spoke before the fires, as she spoke so fondly of finding her place in LA, the community she has there, and what the Los Angeles landscape offers, creatively speaking. These ‘natural’ disasters (see: the horrifying impact of climate change) affect us all – whether directly or indirectly – and our support and awareness must continue long after the fires are put out and the social media call-outs and infographics stop flooding our feeds.

You can support Los Angeles based musicians by donating to MusiCares, (who have pledged $1 million dollars to kick off their fundraising effort) or to the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund – a non-profit who assist musicians and music industry workers in need.

But for now, here’s our chat with the inimitable Sharon Van Etten:

Where in the world are you right now?

I'm in New York right now, actually. I just spent the last week in North Carolina beginning a record with my friend's band; She Keeps Bees, in the producer chair for the first time.

Now I'm shaking the studio off and trying to learn how to talk about myself, so forgive me for my gear switching.

You’re based in Los Angeles though?

Yeah.

Speaking as an Australian, it appears to me that New York and LA have such specific and unique ways of impacting someone’s artistic practice. I was wondering if maybe you could speak to that – if you think being in LA has had a direct impact on this new album.

New York and LA are definitely very different from each other, and I think New York was very formative for me. I'd been there almost 15 years, but it was a constant hustle and in some ways I feel like that's why I was solo for so long, because having a band didn't feel possible. And then when I was starting to settle down and have a family, and trying to figure out how I could diversify my career – by not just touring and being gone all the time, and doing more score work, possibly acting [ed’s note: you may have recognised Van Etten as Rachel in The OA] – LA made more sense for what both my partner and I wanted to pursue.

So I was nervous when I went to LA, but I ended up finding so many creative people. If you're creative, you still have to hustle, but there was something more humane to the hustle. You had a home – you had a house instead of an apartment in most cases. You had a place and a separate space from your living area to work, and you could be outside a lot more, and people would have home hangs as opposed to avoiding your apartment to go outside. I just feel like there was constant exchange and collaboration and conversations and discourse in a very different way than you would in New York where it feels like there were time constraints and space constraints and that kind of frenetic energy. Where I felt like I could take a deep breath in LA. The irony also being that I moved there September of 2019, just before the doors closed – but it also made for a much more collaborative experience for creatives, I think around the globe, not just in Los Angeles. I met a lot of musicians and creatives that I feel like really informed the work I wrote moving forward.

I think the collaborative element is also important. I've had a couple of listens through [the record] and it definitely feels like there is a lot of depth; it feels like there's a lot of people bringing something to the table. How was the production of this album different for you?

Well, when I write, I tend to write alone. I don't write with people in the room for my own work. I've worked with other artists to write songs for whatever other project we might be working on, but I tend to be very insular when I write and there's no way of predicting what it is I'm going to write about. I'll build upon my demos and I'll put in instrumentation – when the drums, bass, guitars come in – and then I'll share it with musicians who can play it way better than me, and that's how we start the studio conversation.

From a solo perspective, I'm a loner [laughs] I'm a loner, daddy, I'm a rebel.

But as I've gotten older, for every album I try to do something different – to challenge myself creatively so that I grow to some degree, to not feel like I'm writing the same album over and over again. Because I think that's what I would do if I didn't reach out, branch out … and so these songs stemmed from a week of rehearsing We've Been Going About This All Wrong. We all hadn't been in the same room together for a couple years at that point, and I wanted to have it feel like a literal band camp where we all reconnected in the same space. We lived in a house; there was a separate studio, and we worked on the instrumentation on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, to talk about how we were going to recreate the album version in a live setting. We got to be in the room together; we would do breakfast, play, have lunch, play, have dinner, and then watch Yellow Jackets, and it was amazing.

But, I think, at the end of the week, I got a bit tired of hearing myself – my songs and my voice, it all just felt very me-me-me and I was very inspired by the palette that we had just created sonically, and asked if we could take a break when we came back [from the tour], we could just jam. Which – I hate that word, it has all these negative connotations to it – and I've never really done it before, but it felt like the time to do it, and I just wanted to let it go.

We ended up writing two songs in an hour, and it was Southern Life and I Can't Imagine, and I remember walking away from that rehearsal week very like, ‘I’m on fire’, and I talked to my partner, and I was just like, 'I think that this next record needs to be a band record. I feel very inspired by what we just did,’ and it was just a little spark, but I knew that once we toured this record, that I would want to do that.

And we went right into writing after that tour in '22. We did two weeks, one week back at the same spot, we wrote like 12 songs in a week, and then another week at the studio called 64 Sound, we wrote almost 20 songs in two weeks, just by starting songs from the ground up, listening to each other, honing, and sculpting in the room. And I was like, 'Why did I wait so long to do this?'

Well, everything has to come together all at the same time perfectly, and it sounds like it did, in perfect alignment.

I didn't even want to stop, I was like, I feel like if we kept going, we would, you know, we wouldn't stop, but I have to give myself deadlines to finish something.

Creativity also requires boundaries, as much as we might prefer not to have them. Obviously all of those songs haven't made it onto the album, are you gonna keep a few?

I think we might, there's some lyrics that I still have to fine tune, and I think by the time we go back to a studio to try to finish them they'll probably turn into something else. You know, when you sit on something that long. But there's some really exciting palettes like beyond what's on the record that I want to, you know, a very kind of … Brian Eno kind of stuff.

I see you have some gear back there, did you just get back? From a tour or something?

No, uh, that is my boyfriend's collection of guitars, he just got three back … he can't stop tinkering with them. They've all been rewired in one way or another and then the bass is mine. I'm not very good but it's nice to have them around. We do tinker around on them together sometimes which is nice, but neither of us are musicians.

Tinker, I like that word, that's what we were doing.

So Indio really stood out for me. I think vocally you sound so strong on this album. How expansive your vocal range is here, it's really beautiful. Did you feel like you had … I mean it sounds like there was a lot of ‘play’ – do you think working all together, did it make you a little less insular, vocally?

Definitely. I mean, I feel like I finally found a group of people – and not that I didn't have … I’ve played with a lot of different band members along the way, and I love them all. It's kind of like siblings – we all have different dynamics, you know, we all have our hiccups and our speed bumps or whatever. But I've gained something from everyone I've ever worked with in different ways. And prior to wanting to make music from the ground up with my current band, I was learning how to play live with a band, and to learn how to delegate, and let things go, and learn how to be an artist, and let people support me … because I had been solo up until 2010 and I was really nervous to play in a band on stage. So, all the growing pains over the years – now I can be in a room with people that I know are not going to laugh at my process.

I know that I'm singing jibba jabba – but they turn into words and then they turn into phrases and then ideas and concepts, and once I have the colours from each song, I can see collectively how they make sense together. But you know, it takes me a minute to figure out what I want to say. It comes from a feeling first, and my band really set the stage for me in these sonic arcs which I feel like carried my melodies to heights I've never gotten to before, but they just knew where intuitively I would want to go. And because I normally write by myself and I'm just playing guitar and exploring melodies. I don't have the backing of a band in the writing process to push myself even more. And so yes, when you have a badass bass player like, playing a counter melody to a super syncopated drum beat and electronics with wild synthesizers behind you in the writing process … and I've sung differently than I ever have. But I'm also like, shit, like am I gonna be able to sing these every day? Why did I do this to myself? … I have to start; I have to start training. But they're really fun to sing. I think if you like to sing, they're just really fun to sing along with – harmonies, melodies, whatever, and that's the part I'm excited about. Well, more than that, but you know.

Giving away your ego and your power to be supported as a creative person is so hard, but I think we make it so much harder on ourselves by not relinquishing that power because obviously when you do, it pays dividends.

Holding on is definitely much harder than letting go when.

You actually do it and it's way more fulfilling when you do, but it takes a second.

Well, I mean, you've gotten there with bells on.

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is out now via Jagjaguwar.

[this interview has been edited for length & clarity]

Words by Isabelle Webster / listen here.