Last year Sharon Van Etten crossed the ocean searching for ghosts. Her destination was London and a recording studio that was once a church and had, in another life, belonged to Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics. The American indie superstar planned to soak up the funereal atmosphere and make an album as glamorously grey as England in the rain. There was only one problem.
“We actually had sunny weather in London,” she says, laughing as she adds that she made the best of these challenging circumstances as she set up shop at the Church Studios, in Crouch End, with all “the light coming in. We were trying to conjure as many ghosts as we could.”
Van Etten reduces other songwriters to giddy superlatives. Her fans include The National, Fiona Apple and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, all of whom have collaborated with her or covered her work. (She also has a side gig as an actor, appearing in the cult Netflix show The OA, as well as making a musical cameo in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.) Fans will be out in force when she tours Ireland this month with her new project, Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory.
As Van Etten dials in by video link, it’s clear she has chosen the perfect setting for her conversation with The Irish Times: the basement of her parents’ house, in suburban New Jersey, from where she talks about the bands she listened to as an angst-ridden adolescent: dandies of doom such as The Cure, Joy Division and Nine Inch Nails.
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“I remember closing my door and upsetting my mother, being very introspective – in some ways gloomy for no reason,” she says.” I was definitely an angsty teenager.”
She has held on tightly to her love of those artists, but it has taken until now for her to directly reference them in her songwriting. Written and recorded with her touring bandmates, and steeped in the drizzle of the 1980s, the London-made LP – also called Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory – is a stately synth-pop odyssey that gives off a cool glow of mannered melancholia.
It’s a brilliantly bleak ghost-train ride, ripe with secrets that reveal more of themselves with each repeated listen. There is also a wonderful tension between the textures of the album – those vintage synths and ever-collapsing Cure-style guitars – and lyrics that are very much rooted in Van Etten’s experience as a millennial woman with a family and ageing parents.
It’s the perfect blend of teenage nostalgia and the dull ache of growing older and realising the things you took for granted about life, and your place in it, won’t be around forever. Your kids will grow up, your parents will get old and you, too, will finally reach the end of the line.
She gets right to the point on Live Forever, the album’s New Order-playing-at-your-wake opening track, on which she wonders about immortality and if it would be worth the price. “Who wants to live forever?” she howls. “It doesn’t matter.” The song is about having the courage to accept that all things will pass.
“I had read this article about a medical study being done in the UK where they were doing these experiments on mice. They were injecting them with the serum that reversed the ageing process by replicating the cells that normally die, causing ageing,” she says.
“And so we got into this philosophical conversation: if you could live forever, would you? And why? What would the world look like? It would be overpopulated with people. Why would you want to live that long? The whole purpose of life is death and coming to terms with that.”
Van Etten had to build her career the hard way. Born in New Jersey, she started writing songs in earnest while studying at college in Tennessee and working as a music booker on the side. Her boyfriend at the time disapproved: he would break her instruments and tell her she didn’t have the talent to make it.
The trauma of the relationship and of the break-up fuelled her early albums. “Never let myself love like that again,” she sang on her second LP, Epic, from 2010, a record that showcased both her darkly expressive voice and her ability to craft songs that build and build, like a dam forever threatening to burst.
Returning to New York, she then worked with Aaron Dessner of The National on Tramp, her widely lauded breakout album.
A decade later, music continues to be an outlet for Van Etten’s hopes and fears. So much else has changed. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Zeke Hutchins – once her drummer, now her manager – and their eight-year-old son.
With its political tensions and apocalyptic wildfires, the city has its challenges, she acknowledges, but she wonders if it’s all that different from anywhere else nowadays.
“It’s spreading across the whole world. I feel we have these environmental catastrophes everywhere now – fires, tornadoes. When you think of the war that’s going on, the famine that’s going on. Even if you’re living on the east coast [of the US] you have hurricanes, woods over-run with ticks. Nature is pissed off right now. And it’s coming in at all sides.”
She tries to look at the positives. Life is hard, but in LA she has found a group of like-minded souls. “Los Angeles has had a horrific year – couple of years. Especially now, in the political climate, it’s pretty intense.
“What I’ve been seeing is communities showing up and being strong and resilient in the face of disaster. There is that to be hopeful about. I love LA. I have a beautiful community and support network of musicians and friends. There’s this dark undertone, but it’s such a beautiful place.”
Last November Van Etten and her fellow singer Ezra Furman covered a Sinéad O’Connor song, Feel So Different, the first track from the late artist’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, as part of the Transa project celebrating the trans community.
It’s largely faithful to O’Connor’s original: Van Etten says her goal was to honour the song rather than to reinvent it. She also wanted to express her admiration for O’Connor, an artist who spoke up when others remained silent, whether about clerical abuse or misogyny in the music industry.
“People didn’t know how to deal with mental health, and they also took advantage of her,” Van Etten says. “She always spoke up and represented the underdog, and was always a political activist, from my understanding of her beliefs.
“And she suffered quite a lot as a child. She went through a lot, she lived through a lot, and was able to make beautiful music out of it, and also speak her mind about what she believed in.”
Van Etten, who is in her mid-40s, recently said she worried that Attachment Theory might be regarded as a middle-aged folly. But this isn’t the first time she has had to grapple with her place in the music industry and whether it has room for her.
“I remember when I was first looking for a label. I was in my late 20s, early 30s. And [record companies] were, like, ‘I don’t know if anyone wants to sign a 30-year-old.’ What year is this? You don’t want to sign a 30-year-old? Because, I guess, the older you get the more thoughtful you get in your touring choices.”
The industry wants young artists not simply because they’re fresh-faced and full of energy. They are also more malleable and prepared to work to the bone, unlike someone with more life experience. “You say yes to everything in your 20s, which I did,” Van Etten says.
She adds that her label, Jagjaguwar, is artist-driven and artist-led. “Also, my manager is my husband. We’ve all grown together in this industry that is constantly changing. It is harder, the industry, outside of who I work with. That is what I observe.
“I feel older. It doesn’t affect what I want to make and how I want to work or how I want people to experience our music. It’s just a fact of life. I’m a mom and I’m a musician, and I’m figuring out the balance of how I want to live my life.”
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is released by Jagjaguwar. The band play Cork Opera House on Tuesday, August 19th; Mandela Hall, Belfast, on Wednesday, August 20th; and Collins Barracks, Dublin, on Thursday, August 21st, as part of the Wider Than Pictures series
