American singer-songwriter and indie favourite Sharon Van Etten just released her fifth album, Remind Me Tomorrow. She speaks to Kim Hill.
Sharon Van Etten’s new album Remind Me Tomorrow – described by Rolling Stone Magazine as a "grand, smouldering vision of pop" – is her first release in five years.
Since 2014, when her previous album, Are We There came out, the New Jersey native has been busy.
Van Etten has given birth to her first child, guest-starred in sci-fi TV series The OA, and continued to pursue a degree in psychology. She’s also performed on David Lynch's Twin Peaks re-boot and scored her first feature film, Strange Weather.
In February she embarked on a huge world tour, which comes to New Zealand in June with one show at Auckland’s Powerstation.
Van Etten joined Kim Hill to discuss leaving New York, motherhood, her psychology studies and new album Remind Me Tomorrow.
Kim Hill began by asking Van Etten about her album’s second single, ‘Seventeen’.
Van Etten: I guess ‘Seventeen’ is almost like my farewell song to New York because it really just talks about how I lived somewhere long enough to see all those changes. It's also me realising that after working so hard for 15 years to be able to afford New York, I can't afford it anymore, actually.
So where are you going to live?
I will be moving to Los Angeles next year, but we are staying a while longer 'cause it's ... We love it here, too, so it's very bittersweet.
Why Los Angeles?
Especially with having a child now, I feel like he needs more room to grow. I feel like in New York I finally was able to afford an apartment that had a single bedroom in it. Our child is sleeping in our closet.
In Los Angeles, for the same amount of money, we can have a house and a yard, and it's still a creative city, and still very open-minded and progressive. There's just not many metropolitan areas that I feel like I can afford and that have a multifaceted creative outlet.
Despite the fact that you're a movie star now, you still can't afford to bring your child out of the closet in New York?
Well, I’ve only had one real acting role. People think that people in the creative field make a lot more money than they do. I think it's striking a balance between being around other people that are doing what you're doing, and you create, and you're inspired. Or you go somewhere and you settle and find something else to do. I'm not ready to do something else yet.
I thought that you might have gone to Los Angeles 'cause of Hollywood, you might have joined the Hollywood scene now.
No, I don't think so, I don't think I really fit in.
I don't know, where do they make The OA, the Netflix series?
Actually, the first season was shot in New York out of a studio in Queens. It was a very isolated environment 'cause it was only in one set. I was the only non-actor on the show.
Well, you can call yourself an actor now.
I guess so, but I still have a lot to learn. I feel like if I'm legitimately going to call myself an actor, I’d like to take more classes, and study more, and do more improv.
What about the second series?
I can say that there is going to be one and I am in it. I can't wait to see it because I have not seen an inch of it.
Is this a choice by you? You don't watch yourself, or you just haven't had the chance to?
They actually don't tell us anything.
I case we get it out of you.
Exactly.
If you go to Los Angeles what's going to happen to the degree in psychology that you started on?
Because I'm only in my undergrad, I feel like I can find another school. Psychology is my long term. Because I'm only able to go part-time with everything else going on, I have a goal of by the time I'm 50 for that to be my next career. Because I feel like by the time I'm 50, I won't want to jump in a van anymore.
Yeah, it's the touring I suppose, is it?
That's a big part of it, but also just being home. By then my son will be a teenager. My partner's nine years older than me so we'll be starting to think about ... I mean, now we're thinking about retirement because we have creative careers and it's so unpredictable.
You're just so sensible.
I'm trying to be.
No, but seriously sensible. I mean what musician as hailed and acclaimed as you starts realising that maybe it's not going to last forever.
When I met musicians that started off before me when labels had money, they started with the bar raised pretty high, and then it all kind of bottomed out in the early 2000s. So all the artists I knew that started up there felt that drop and then … I think that hurt a lot.
I was a late bloomer and I didn't start making records until 2009. I kind of started when it had bottomed out and streaming had just begun. So I had nothing to compare it to. All those stories that I heard were like fairytales to me – that they would fly interviewers out to talk to artists, and they had lots of money to fly to shows and things like that.
I'm booking my own tours, I'm managing myself.
And I'm having to talk to you on a dodgy phone line from New Zealand.
I still feel very lucky about how I started. 'Cause if I had started in a higher place and everything fell, then I wouldn't have appreciated it as much. But I feel like, as I've slowly grown, it feels very natural and very organic. I just appreciate it all.
You're not consumed with bitterness at the way things have turned out.
No, but I think the streaming has scared me a little bit, because it's not a tangible thing. With shows, I can meet my fans and see who a lot of the fans are, but that's not everybody.
I mean that's why there's so much touring going on. That's really hard work, I think you found it hard work and could have been one of the reasons why you stopped in 2015.
Yeah, I think it had a lot to do with realising that ... I'm 37 now and that was over three years ago. I wanted to pay more attention to my relationship, and I realised it was just a cycle of being with someone and them missing me, and it being hard because I'm touring so much, I write about it and then I tour.
It's like I'm running in circles and I never stay still enough to really find my life.
It's not as if you've been sitting around meditating for the last three, four years is it? We've talked about The OA on Netflix, you were in Twin Peaks, and you wrote a movie score for Katherine Dieckmann, and you've started that degree in psychology. Oh yes, and had a baby. I can't imagine how you could have been any busier.
At least I got to be home. That was all in New York except for Twin Peaks, which I had to fly out overnight just to shoot for a day.
Where was that at?
I believe it was in Pasadena.
You believe it was in Pasadena?
It was in a suburb of LA that I've never been before and it was very mysterious. I didn't really know LA very well before the shoot ... With performing shows and things like that, you're always in West Hollywood, and it's not very pretty.
Where does your partner come from?
He’s from North Carolina, and he and I met because he played drums with me. We fell in love on a tour.
Which tour?
Opening for Nick Cave.
Oh. Gosh, Nick Cave has been quite transformative for your life then. 'Cause not only did he introduce you to your partner and now the father of your child, but didn't that also get you onto The OA because somebody had seen you on that tour?
Absolutely. There was a casting agent in the audience on that very tour. Also, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree is a huge influence on the sonics of this record.
The sonics of this record are radically different from all your other albums, which strikes me as incredibly courageous.
You know I am so proud of my last record, but as I tried to revisit older songs and sit through demos that I've written since I came off the road, I knew that if I approached those songs in the same way, they’d sound exactly like my last record.
Every time I make a new record I know deep within me that I want to do something different so I don't continue making the same thing. I don't think, up until now, I've made anything drastically different, but with this record, I definitely had hardcore folkies that were upset that drums are on it.
People get attached to the thing they know. Of course, I considered that, but for me to make something again I had to challenge myself as an artist.
Tell me a little about the album’s second single ‘Comeback Kid’.
‘Comeback Kid’ is about that feeling you get when you return home, and the conflict of always being a kid, whether it be the little sister or running into old friends and you're kind of lost in time to who you used to be.
Maybe there are things that you did that they can never get past no matter where you're at as an adult. You're constantly chasing this ... You're trying to chase that ghost away and show everybody who you are now.
I think to this day I still feel that I still want to prove to my parents where I'm at, to my brothers and sisters that I have it together now, more so than when I was a kid. Acknowledgement of who you are while trying to move on. Sleeping in your bedroom with all your memories and all those mixed emotions that come with visiting home again.
Tell me about the album’s cover, who are the children? There are two children and they're playing in an astonishingly chaotic playroom and they're surrounded by toys.
Cover of 'Remind Me Tomorrow' (Sharon Van Etten, 2019) Photo: supplied
I love this photograph so much I want to get it blown up for my home. This is a photograph of my friend, Katherine Dieckmann’s children when they were younger. They are adults now, they've approved of the photo, I've gotten a little bit of a hard time for it, but they have said okay.
Catherine is the woman that I composed the score for her film Strange Weather. In the process of making music for her, we became close friends.
Did you not know her before at all?
I knew The Adventures of Pete and Pete, which she had worked on. I hadn't seen her films before, honestly. But I met her after she reached out to my manager and we hit it off. She just was someone I wanted to get to know.
For making my first score, I knew that she was going to hold my hand through it and not judge me, just because she appreciated my work as a songwriter. Our rapport was really natural.
The score, was that hard?
I was intimidated at first because she had referenced the score for Paris, Texas by Ry Cooder, and that's not the style I naturally play guitar in. That was more of a starting point than a, “Copy this,” but there was definitely a direction to play mostly on guitar.
There would be moments where I felt I was repeating myself, especially when you're trying to stay in the background. So whenever I felt like I had writer's block I would put down the guitar and I would reach for any other instrument.
In the end that's what ended up becoming Remind Me Tomorrow, because most of the songs for that were written on any other instrument except guitar. That helped me compartmentalise the pieces in the end.
How many other instruments do you play?
I play a handful of things very minimally. Number one I'm a singer, but I started on piano when I was a kid, and clarinet, and violin, but only for a few years of each.
I kind of just learned how to start everything, but I never became really good at any of them.
I've learned basic chords and basic scales. I got really into singing, so a lot of my songs are very simple chord progressions. But they're based around the melody, so that's what makes them feel complex sometimes. When you break it down, there's not usually more than three or four chords.
Photo: Supplied
Why did you, just thinking about that photograph again, why did you put that on the cover? What does it mean to you?
The day she showed me that photograph was the day that Strange Weather premiered at Toronto International Film Festival. I had told her right before she walked on to announce the film that I was pregnant.
Up until that moment she was giving me advice as a mother and how to do it all, because she and her partner are artistic people, and they raised two kids in New York.
Right before she went on I told her I was pregnant, she started crying, and I started crying. I just said, "I don't know how I'm going to do it between living in New York and being an artist, my partner's creative. How are we going to do this?"
She started laughing at me. She pulled out her phone and she had the perfect reference, she just showed me this one photograph. She looked me square in the eye and said, "You'll figure it out."
That was really comforting to me at the time, and I pulled it out. This was way before I started ... This was a year before I started making the record. I pulled it out as comfort ever since she showed it to me.
Comfort and inspiration. Is your partner in a band with you, or does he have his own thing?
He used to play with me, but he does artist management now, 'cause he was done being on the road.
So you're both not ever going to be on the road at the same time?
I think we're done with that unless he wants to visit me.
Visit you with the baby?
Yeah, we're trying to map out next year, 'cause I think as our son gets bigger... Now that he's 11 months, he’s started daycare. He just loves it so much that it actually feels more selfish to take him on the road with me.
So I have to pick and choose when he'll come in the middle of a tour so I don't feel ... I'm going to feel guilty regardless, but, pick and choose the times that makes sense for us.
I know you've always said that music has been a form of therapy for you. At the same time, you have said that you're out of touch with yourself emotionally. Which is pretty strange because it's not what your fans would say. It's your emotional intelligence that they love most, I think. What am I missing here?
I think what I'm still learning as I get older is that ... I don't know if it's from past experiences or just how I've always been, but I remember in high school I had a hard time communicating my emotions, my mother gave me a notebook.
As soon as I started writing I felt better even though I didn't realise what was going on. Then I started writing songs, and I moved from notebooks into songs. Then as I learned the power of writing and sharing, and how it affects other people, I've tried to be more strategic about what it is that I share, because sometimes it is too personal.
I have a hard time accessing my emotions in the moment because I don't think I'm necessarily rational when I react to things. My nature is to take a breath and to think about it for a while before I express it
I'm much more articulate and much calmer when I have time. When I actually do get upset, I’m already really worked up, 'cause I hold a lot in. I'm an introvert, I guess.
By the time I can just sit and write, and sing, I get that out of me and then I'm able to express it calmly and then talk about it. But I'm still learning how to do that as an adult.
What kind of psychologist do you think you would be?
It's something I'm still figuring out. I actually just finished a class called The Fundamentals of Psychotherapy, and the different styles and the history of how it started.
I know that when I eventually do conduct sessions, I’d like them to be one-on-one because I think I want to work with kids who are at that age where they’re leaving home for the first time, and having a hard time developing themselves, or expressing themselves. They’re finding themselves in a new environment where they don't know who they are, and they're feeling very vulnerable, and they don't have a support system.
I would like to be in some kind of environment where I can help somebody learn how to express themselves in order to find themselves and find their outlet. I don't know what that is yet.
Sharon Van Etten plays four NZ shows this week. Photo: Photo by Dusdin Condren
Was that you leaving home and finding no support?
Absolutely. It was definitely a time ... No regrets. I am who I am because of my experience, but that was a really hard time for me.
Why?
I just thought I knew better. I fell in love and I made some bad decisions.
Was that the guy that told you, you were being too personal and didn't like you playing the guitar?
Yes.
Crikey, yep.
Also, you're at the age where you're leaving the nest, right, and you think you know better. I didn't see my family for years, and I thought I knew better. I wanted to support myself, and I didn't accept help from anyone. Who knows if I had come across a therapist, I don't know if I would have accepted the help. But I want to figure out a way to make that feel more accessible.
Now, as a consequence of those mistakes, here you are now. Do you ever think about that?
It blows my mind every day. I cannot believe how lucky I am.
Well, I don't know about luck. It's been good management as well, hasn't it, on your part?
Well, I think it takes a village, you know? It takes accepting help and accepting love, and knowing that you need those things.
It's been really nice talking to you. Does this mean that you are back doing music like 80% of the time, or do we have to wait another four years for you to do the next album?
I don't have a plan. I'm going to try…
Come on, I know you have a plan. You've got a plan for when you're 50.
Let's just say I have a country record that I have in my back pocket, I just didn't think it was the time to record that. One of these days I'm going to make a psychedelic country record and maybe that'll be the next one.
