Sharon Van Etten

Sharon Van Etten has been releasing albums since 2010 and has made a habit of evolving her sound in ways that keep her existing audience while reaching new ones. The New Jersey-born singer and multi-instrumentalist started with bare acoustic recordings and has moved, incrementally, toward more produced and sonically expansive work without losing the emotional directness that made her early work worth attention.

Because I Was in Love in 2010 and Epic in 2012 established her as a songwriter of unusual precision. The songs were quiet and often painful in ways that felt personal without being confessional in the way that term is sometimes used dismissively. Tramp, produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, was the first record that brought her significant wider attention.

Are We There in 2014 is probably her best album and the one where the combination of songwriting and production found its most coherent balance. Remind Me Tomorrow in 2019 pushed into synthesizer-heavy territory that divided some of her earlier listeners and attracted new ones. It is the record where she stopped sounding like what the music press wanted her to sound like and started sounding like what she wanted to sound like, and it is better for it.

We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong in 2022 continued in that direction. Van Etten has spent her career being underrated relative to the quality of what she produces, which is a common fate for artists working in the space between indie rock and singer-songwriter traditions. The work accumulates, and its cumulative weight is significant.