Uncommon harmonies

By Hazel Sheffield

Confessional songwriters are seldom in short supply, but Sharon Van Etten rings out louder than most. She began by writing about a boyfriend in Tennessee who not only told her she was no good but held her prisoner, turning the experience into songs that were burnished in the light of the outside world. It was a world that only opened up to her when she made an escape to Brooklyn in 2005 and started to commit her Tennessee love songs to tape. After two albums, her talent attracted famous fans in Bon Iver, who covered the glorious “Love More”, and Aaron Dessner of The National, who gave her studio space to make her third album “Tramp”.

Her fourth, “Are We There”, is still confessional, but shows a new focus on texture. The surfaces of its songs shift from the swollen romance of strings in “Afraid of Nothing” to silvery minimalism in “Our Love” and dark atmospherics in “You Know Me Well”. Each shift is shaped by Van Etten’s voice, a rich soprano backed by uncommon harmonies (she says she hears two melodies), which can turn from a whisper to a howl in the space of a verse.~ Hazel Sheffield