You're coming here to Grand Rapids on Feb. 15 now after your tour stop at the Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky for the same night got canceled. How did you end up being able to come back here to Grand Rapids? Sharon Van Etten: I’m so psyched. I love Grand Rapids. I’ve had a really good time there. My friend George, he did my first house show there years ago. It’s probably been two years since I’ve been. I love it though.
Last year you toured more than you ever had before. What was it like for you to get out there and just play that much with your band? Do you feel like a tour veteran now? I feel like I’m still learning how to do it, because part of it is still actually the drives and playing, but one thing that I’m realizing is that you have to take real good care of yourself if you’re going to last for a long time. That’s been the new for me, is how do I take care of myself for doing this kind of hardcore touring.
When you first started out, like you said doing house shows, did you ever think you'd be touring this much, or playing some of the shows you've gotten to play? Oh no way! I’m like pinching myself every day. I can’t believe that I’m actually able to do this. I feel really lucky. It’s insane. [Laughs]
You were working on your new album, Tramp, last year around all your touring. Just how split up was the time spent on recording the album? It was a really intense time, because all my time off I’d spend working on that, and now what I thought was going to be downtime now is actually working with the band and teaching them the new songs. But you kind of just run on adrenaline. Like, ‘I want to get this done. I have to get this done.’ And because it’s something you enjoy doing, you make it work.
How much do you feel like all the touring you did influenced the songs that you were working on for the new album? Well it’s funny because some of those were actually written… Like the song “Kevin’s” I actually wrote while I was subletting an apartment, and the guy’s name was Kevin, and it was very much like I was all over the place. I was travelling a lot. Like the song “Warsaw” I wrote in Poland, and it was a little more industrial and more wintry. And “Kevin’s” was towards the end of the New Year, and a lot of that song is about making decisions. A lot of times it was very in the moment.
That leads into something I read about you, is that during the recording of the album you didn’t have anywhere that you really called home. Was that just a side effect of touring so much? Yeah that was it. If I wanted to afford to keep my band for the whole time… and New York rent is just so ridiculous. It is kind of like the musician cliché, ‘Oh I’m broke,’ but you make the choice to travel around and play shows all over the world, it’s almost irresponsible to have an apartment in New York, because one month’s rent is somebody’s salary.
Do you feel that all came out through the songs? Definitely. I was really nervous when I started working with [producer] Aaron [Dessner, from Brooklyn indie rock band The National] because I was so kind of schizophrenic from how everything was in storage, and my bare necessities were in my car, and I was literally going place to place on my off days, or off nights. I was afraid that that would come across as schizophrenic on the record, but it ended up helping because it was so stop and go, and I was so spazzy, that I feel like every song sounds different because they were very different sounds at the time, but all together I feel like it makes sense as a record, because of me and Aaron, both, because Aaron was travelling a lot, too.
You recorded Tramp at Aaron’s studio in his garage. How did you come to get to know and work with him? It was just a funny series of events, because they all have nothing to do with each other, but they came to come full circle in the end. I was on tour with Megafaun – they’re my friends from North Carolina that are really great –and they woke me up to show me a live video of Justin Vernon [of Bon Iver] and Aaron and Bryce Dessner [of The National] covering my song “Love More” at a music festival in Cincinnati. And I just woke up crying, like ‘How the hell do they know who I am?’ These are people that I buy their records, and I’m their fan, and they’re covering me? It kind of blew my mind a little bit to see how far my music had reached. And at the end of that tour I was getting ready to go into the studio to work on Epic, my last record, and my friends encouraged me to write them to see if they would want to collaborate on that record. But they were in the middle of touring like nuts, but they wrote me back, and they said, ‘Oh, we’d love to but things are insane right now.’ And Aaron wrote me directly and just said, ‘We’re really busy, but if you ever want to demo songs and work stuff out, I’ve got a studio in my garage. I’d love to meet up sometime and just talk about what you’re looking for exactly.’ And he’s so down to earth and really disarming. I met up for a cup of coffee in his neighborhood, and we talked for a couple hours, and he was so sweet and so excited that I wanted to even test out some songs with him. He was really busy, and I was set to go on tour, but by the end of the year, I was ready to work on the songs, and I sent him and bunch of demos, and said, ‘What do you think of these?’ And he said, ‘You know what, you have enough songs for a record. Let’s just record your record.’ And we started recording at the end of 2010, beginning of 2011. No, it was before that. We started recording by the end of summer 2010. It was over a course of a little more than a year, just touch and go recording. But also, randomly, his older sister used to book at this venue, and she booked my first show there, this place called Sycamore, which was really, really great. But I met her separately. It’s funny like that.
It’s a very circular connection. Yeah, like Megafaun was like Justin’s original band, like they were all in a band together [DeYarmond Edison]. They all grew up together. So it’s like this really funny case of randomness.
You’ve had a lot of opportunities to collaborate with other people that you were first fans of, and that were fans of yours. Did that make those collaborations more like friends just playing together, more so than strict sort of collaborating? Yeah, it’s definitely just friends working together, and the longer you work on something, you develop this really insane relationship with each other, because you spend a really long time together, and especially with something as emotional as working on a record, you see a lot of different sides of people and the kind of pressure that they can take, and how they deal with things. To really do something honest and let your guard down and be around somebody when you’re in that vulnerable state says a lot about your bond. We got along from the start, but I feel like we’re going to be friends forever. I only work with people that I feel are really good people, and I believe in what they do, so that when you work together, you can enjoy it, because it’s kind of work, but you enjoy doing it.
I read somewhere that it was actually Kyp Malone from TV on the Radio that encouraged you early on to pursue a career in music. Is that story true, or is that just one of things that’s gotten misread online? Yeah. That actually happened. [Laughs] This world is so funny. You know you grow up idolizing musicians and bands and stuff, and they become stars in your eyes, and you forget that they’re normal people, and they are music fans, too, and they get star struck, too, and it’s really refreshing to see that. I went to see a show at Bowery Ballroom in New York about six or seven years ago and [psychedelic-soul band] Celebration was playing. And I went to go see them, and then I saw the poster for the show, and the opener was Kyp Malone. And I look at the photo and realize, Holy shit, this is my friend’s brother. My friend from high school. And I didn’t know Kyp’s band or anything. I saw his solo set, and it blew my mind, and after he sang, he just walked offstage and was in the audience, and I introduced myself. I said, ‘I just moved back to the East Coast, I know you don’t know me, but I went to high school with your brother,’ and we just chatted for a little bit, and I left him alone, because I didn’t want to bug him. But then I went to the bar, and he saw me at the bar after the show, and we talked a little more, and he still has family where my parents live, where I was living at the time, and we just started hanging out after that. It was like, ‘Whenever I’m visiting my family, we’re cool to hang out sometime.’ So we built it on that, and he was really encouraging of my music. He brought me to places in New York that he hung out at, places that he went to see shows, took me to see bands. Like I didn’t know much about the Brooklyn music scene, but he brought me into it. So I’ll never be able to properly thank him for it.
Yeah, that was right around the same time that you had moved back after you had moved from New Jersey, where you grew up, to Tennessee for college, and then dropped out, and then a few years later came back to New York. How influential were those few years on you as far as developing you as a musician? Well I ended up getting a job at this café [in Tennessee] called The Red Rose, and it started out just being this café with open mics, and then all the staff had decided, ‘We should just putting on shows.’ And then we started putting on rock shows, like indie shows, and we were the only all-ages venue in a college town, and a lot of bands that couldn’t get shows in Nashville would end up playing in this town, in Murfreesboro. So I got to see a lot of music I didn’t know, in a genre I didn’t know existed. From An Albatross, to The Faint, to Against Me!, to Azure Ray and Cursive, to Richard Buckner. And this is me coming out of a hardcore phase of my life. So just seeing people working together in that way because they actually really believed in something, and that became my family for a really long time. We just listened to music all the time, and that was my life for about five years.
Speaking of people who care about music almost like a family, Tramp will be your first album on Jagjaguwar. How did you end up signing with them? It was another kind of roundabout way. I used to work at Ba Da Bing Records and Ben Goldberg who owns Ba Da Bing works directly with [Jagjaguwar founder/owner] Darius Van Arman on co-releases. They reissued The Dead C, and whenever Darius came into town on business he’d crash at Ben’s place, and I’d come into work and he’d just be hanging out. They work really closely together. And also I really respected the bands that he puts out, and I’ve been lucky enough to get to play with some of the bands, and they’re the sweetest, most genuine people I know. There is just no question in my mind. My last record I put out on Ba Da Bing, and [Ben] became my manager and my label, and I got to a point where I knew I needed separation between the two. And Ben has known me for such a long time that I wanted to develop with him, and I know he has my best interest at heart, so I knew in my heart that management would be what he was going to be strongest at. So I thought the best thing to do would be to take a label that I really respected and knew already had a really good working relationship with him.
I've read that on your previous albums when you'd write you'd just start with a melody, or a lyric, and just record a really rough demo of yourself playing around with that idea, and then listen to yourself and try to find where you wanted the song to go. Was that the case with Tramp, or did you have more ideas for arrangements and stuff in mind when you were writing? Well, I guess this time the demos were very time and place, and it was mostly being able to edit the songs in the studio while having more perspective on them. The demos were vocals and guitar, mostly, but on some of them I started doing midi arrangements, like very simple basslines, and drums, so I could play them for Aaron so he would get the vibe of the song, but then we would collaborate together on instrumentation. Lyrically I ended up editing some of the songs later, because a couple of the songs were pretty old, and I couldn’t really relate to them anymore, and I felt like it wasn’t honest to record the songs and release them when I didn’t really feel that way anyway. That’s the funny thing about holding onto songs for too long is that some can maybe feel timeless, and others can feel very specific, and it can work, or it can’t. So there are a couple that I ended up editing the lyrics even more just so I had more perspective on them.
Leading into your last album, epic, I've read that you felt the demos you'd done for those songs were more confident than what you had done up to that. What were your feelings about this batch of songs? Umm, I do feel like these are my most confident songs. [Laughs]
Is that something you’ve been striving for the whole time, trying to be more confident in what you’re doing? More confident in what I’m doing, but also more confident in who I am, as a musician, and as a human being. It’s really being at peace with things that happened in my life, and being able to move on and have perspective, and being able to emit emotions that I have without demeaning anybody. Even in the midst of feeling something really intense, to not blame somebody, or point fingers, when it’s really just a matter of you trying to figure how you can deal with it personally. Just that struggle. But sonically, taking chances instrumentation-wise, I’ve been the most confident, the most chances I’ve taken with collaborating, and I think that goes into the whole confidence thing as well.
My favorite song on the new album is "All I Can" and how the arrangement just accentuates the emotional build of the lyrics and your vocal. What was the first draft of that song like? That’s funny because it really was only guitar and vocals. I wrote that song when I was in Japan on tour by myself, in my hotel room, and my sleep schedule’s totally screwed, and I was trying to be really quiet, but I couldn’t sleep. You don’t have Internet; you can’t talk to anybody, you can’t call anybody, and I record this demo just looking out onto Tokyo, just delirious and thinking about where I was in my life, but I had to do it really subdued. Because it was like five in the morning, and I was in Japan where everyone is super polite and quiet and I’m in this shoebox of a hotel room, and just trying to like whisper and be restrained. So on this demo I start like in a whisper and hardly singing. So it’s funny you can still hear vocally like this climax, but it’s like this subdued climax. And it’s only guitar and vocals, but I brought it in because I was really proud of the melody. And the first thing that was added was drums, and it just really transformed the song. And we realized that this song, was the one song on the record… there’s maybe like two songs on the record where we were like, ‘Let’s just build this out. This song just keeps growing. Let’s just let that happen.’ So we did, and we just kept building it because it is a very climatic song. I don’t know. That’s the story. [Laughs]
You made your television debut on on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon [last month]. What was that experience like? I was freaking out! It was totally weird. [Laughs] It was really fun, though. It was a nice way to introduce the band and show people, how in just a very short period of time how my music has changed since the last record, kind of like a summary. But I was so embarrassed because I had to do it a second time because I got totally stage fright and I forgot the whole first line, and then you see me mouth the f-word, and then I hit my head on the microphone at the very end of the song, and I was like, ‘Oh man, I totally have to redo this.’ But everyone at the show was very nice, and Jimmy was very adamant, like, ‘Take as much time as you need. This is your debut on television. We want you to feel confident in the performance, so just let us know when you want to continue to redo it and get it right and feel good about it.’ They wanted us to walk away feeling like we did a really good job. And he was the same way when he did his acts and his jokes. If he didn’t get the delivery right, he would redo it, too. He’s a perfectionist. So it was fun, but intense. My parents were there and I could just feel their attention across the room.
For this upcoming tour, are you touring with the same band that you've been playing with? The band that I play with on Fallon is the band that I’ll be travelling with, minus Aaron, of course. But yeah, this is my band for this tour. They’re all songwriters, so hopefully I can hold onto them, but they’ll be working on their own stuff, too.
What else do you have planned for later this year? Well we’ll be doing a European tour after this U.S. tour, and we have plans to hopefully go to New Zealand and Australia, and playing festivals. We’re just going to be doing as much as possible. We’re going to be nonstop for a long time, I think.