We were lucky enough to see Sharon Van Etten perform live a few weeks back… okay, just Em was: We’re not literally attached at the hip, though Em is sure Lo would have loved it, too. She manages to be both warm and even slightly dorky on stage, while simultaneously oozing rock star chic (all bangs in the face, no cleavage in sight) — and then she sings a love song that wrenches your heart out.
Her new album, “Are We There” (it’s her third), comes out on May 26th, and we can’t stop listening to the song on it called, “Every Time the Sun Comes Up.” The best couplet in the entire song was apparently a joke. Here are the lyrics:
I washed your dishes,
But I shit in your bathroom
It may not look like much on paper, but listen to the song (the video is above is from a live session at N.M.E. in London), or, better yet, hear her sing it live, and you’ll get why we’re crushing. According to an article in Pitchfork: “She says this is a joke that merely stayed in place — the product of a very late and giggly night in the studio with her band — but her willingness to allow it to become permanent is telling. Van Etten isn’t particularly interested in obscuring or mediating the grand mess of being alive.”
Her earlier albums — back when she was in a shittier, emotionally abusive relationship — addressed the pure terror of being in love. But then she fell in love with a bartender who was the only one listening to her set in a New York City bar a few years back, and she got a little more optimistic about love. The new album, according to Pitchfork, is about “being unafraid in love — about seeing love as a kind of high-stakes trust-fall, and screaming at the other person to just fucking fall already; then, the concomitant feeling, the fear of falling, the way it paralyzes you.”
We’ll drink to that!
