Apocalyptic Mom

When we meet for breakfast one morning in early January, Sharon Van Etten’s dusky hair is cascading well past her shoulders—a good sign. “My friends and I joke that you can tell how stressed out I am by how short my hair is,” the 37-year-old musician tells me. “Whenever I get stressed out, I’ll cut my hair. So people are like, you must be in a really good place right now, your hair’s pretty long.”

Still, follicles don’t always tell the full story. Van Etten’s already had an emotional morning, caused by the premiere of the music video for her evocative and highly personal new single “Seventeen.” (“I know what you’re gonna be,” she taunts her younger self, repeating the line a few times before wailing it at the top of her lungs.) Though Van Etten is no stranger to airing private feelings in public, the knowledge that “Seventeen” was finally out in the world had, just before we met up, brought her to tears. The video serves as a kind of scrapbook of the places from Van Etten’s past, some of it set in the house she grew up in, the state park where she worked as a teenager, and, after a turbulent early adulthood and an eventual move to New York, the rock clubs she’d haunt on the Lower East Side. All the while, an actress playing a younger version of herself follows Van Etten around like a sneering but sympathetic shadow. “I found while revisiting these places how they’ve changed, how they haven’t changed, how some are built up, some are run down,” she says. “Seventeen” was also her way of saying goodbye to New York, the city she’s called home for the past 15 years: The lifetime East Coast resident is plotting a move to Los Angeles this fall.

It’s the perfect time for a change of scenery, as Van Etten’s career, too, is in the process of metamorphosis. Since her last record, 2014’s Are We There, she has gone from indie-rock singer/songwriter to all-around Renaissance woman, stumbling into an acting career that found her not only making an appearance on David Lynch’s hallowed Twin Peaks: The Return but also scoring a recurring role on the sci-fi Netflix series The OA. (She’ll be back for Season 2, which is likely to drop sometime this year.) In the meantime, she also became a mother (her son turns 2 in March: “He’s pretty new,” Van Etten says) and went back to school to begin her journey toward becoming a certified therapist. “If you’re open to opportunities, then I feel like more things end up coming up, because you’re not just looking for one particular thing and you can see everything in the periphery too,” she says of this freewheeling phase in her life. “I just want to make things, I want to work, I want to try new things, meet people. I’m just wide open.”

Van Etten’s never been an early riser, so the decision to meet for breakfast heralds a change in her circadian clock. “Back in the day, I would have met for a cocktail and said a lot of things I would have regretted,” she says with a laugh, sipping her first of two cups of coffee. But these days her son is her alarm, waking her each morning around 7: “It adds more structure to my life.”

They’ve settled into a morning routine. “The first thing that we say when we wake up is, ‘Do you wanna listen to music?’” Usually, he will nod, and Van Etten will switch on WFMU; mother and son are particularly fond of the station’s morning music-and-humor show Wake and Bake with Clay Pigeon. (If there were any doubt, Sharon Van Etten’s child will have no trouble being cool.) “I know when he likes stuff, because he’ll tap his foot,” she says, clearly proud that Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” recently earned the boy’s stomp of approval. He also has a ukulele that he’s learned to hold like a tiny guitar, although Van Etten laughs, “The main thing is he likes detuning it. I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to be more avant-garde than I am.”

Her son has also been a significant, if indirect, thematic influence on her new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, which finds Van Etten looking back on her sometimes reckless past through her present perspective. “Having a child makes you think about being a kid, makes you think about yourself being older, your parents getting older—all of a sudden it’s like your life flashing before your eyes, looking at this child,” she says. “I think about how innocent and helpless he is right now, but also all the things he’s gonna do down the road.” She clutches her hand to her chest, as though seeing in front of her a prismatic blur of their two lives: her past filtered through her son’s future. “My heart breaks for him already!”

That overlap comes to life on “Comeback Kid,” the album’s dark, driving lead-off single. The idea of it struck her one night when she was exhausted, up breastfeeding in the wee hours, so tired she started hallucinating that she was seeing home movies projected on the wall. “I had imagery, in my mind when I wrote that—images of myself as a kid and my son as a kid, older than he is now,” Van Etten recalls. This experience informed the Jonathan William Turner–directed clip, which Van Etten (hair teased high and sporting her goth-iest makeup) affectionately calls her “Siouxsie video.” For the droning “Jupiter 4” (named in honor of the synthesizer on which she wrote some of the record), she called upon former collaborator Katherine Dieckmann (Van Etten scored her 2016 Holly Hunter–starring film Strange Weather). They met up to discuss the video treatment while her son was running around a playground. “She was like, ‘What are you thinking for this video?’” Van Etten recalls. “And I was like, ‘Apocalyptic Mom.’ That’s all I said, and she was like, ‘I know what you want! I got this!’”

Influenced by the likes of Suicide and Nick Cave, Remind Me Tomorrow is Van Etten’s edgiest album, which in itself is a refreshing provocation: When many people think about art informed by motherhood, they tend to stick to soft, comforting clichés (and not, say, eerie hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation). But the phrase that keeps cropping up in our conversation about the record is “left-of-center.” She sees the stark soundscape of Remind Me Tomorrow as a way of “introducing people to this part of my record collection that they don’t really [know],” she says. “I like Bauhaus. I like Faust. I like X. I like a lot of weird stuff.” To capture the record’s pummeling, synth-driven sound, she brought on the acclaimed producer John Congleton, who’s worked with the likes of St. Vincent and David Byrne. Though she has taken pride in coproducing some of her previous music, she says bringing Congleton in was an exercise in letting go of control and forging ahead for a new sound. Says Van Etten, triumphantly, “He helped me raise the freak flag higher.”

Remind Me Tomorrow begins with a few lyrics that halt your breath, so arresting is their simplicity:

Sitting at the bar I told you everything
You said, “holy shit”
You almost died

After spending a morning with Van Etten, though, it’s easy to imagine this scene in her real life. From the moment we sit down she is at ease. Not an hour into our conversation, she has established with me such a casual intimacy that I know the exact moment she believed she was in love with her current partner: Their knees knocked together when they were riding in the back seat of a car that had just taken a hard left, and when they looked at each other afterward they were both blushing. She is also frank about the pros and cons of taking her son on tour (as it stands now, he’ll probably come along for only a few dates, although she admits she’s still figuring it all out because, she says, “Most of my friends who have kids and tour are dudes and, like, they leave”). By the end of our chat, I am fluent in the language of her son’s burgeoning vocabulary (his favorite word is “basketball” or, as per Van Etten’s impression, since he can’t quite say his s’s yet: bathetball). When we first sat down, she realized with embarrassment that she forgot her wallet (“Mom brain!”) and although I stress that I would be more than happy to cover her egg-and-toast breakfast, Van Etten insists we just take a walk afterward to her place so she can grab her other tote bag and pay me back. And so, just like that, the tail end of our interview takes place at Van Etten’s Brooklyn apartment, to the inside front door of which there is taped, about three feet off the ground, a little bathetball hoop.

Van Etten grew up the middle child of five in the suburbs of Nutley, New Jersey. Some of her earliest memories involve her fiddling with her Fisher-Price record player, flipping a Michael Jackson single from “Beat It” to “Bad”; her father once caught a young Van Etten in the basement “blasting ‘Born in the USA’ super loud, just fist-pumping, rocking out.” She starts to tell me that her brother gave her her first guitar, but then corrects herself, “He allowed me to play his guitar, but not until I was in high school.” Her brothers would sometimes jam together, but playing with other people intimidated the self-taught Van Etten, so she mostly kept her strumming to herself. “I wrote a lot of funny songs, because I was listening to Ween a lot,” she says. “But the funny songs weren’t very good.”

She moved to Tennessee for college, intending to study recording and production, but she dropped out after a year when she realized playing music “wasn’t something I needed a degree for.” She got a job at a venue, fell in love with a guy in a band, wrote some songs. But she was young and insecure, and it certainly didn’t help that her boyfriend didn’t care for her music. “He would tell me, ‘You’re better than that. You could be a better writer. Your songs are too personal. There’s no art to your writing,’” she recalled in a 2014 interview with Spin. “It got to me. It stuck with me. I know he felt bad about it, but it still fucks with me. I still write from a personal place. I don’t mean to, it’s just what I do. It’s how I work things out.” At the time, though, she took that boyfriend at his word, even as their relationship grew more and more troubled.

Then one autumn day in her early 20s, she packed a bag of clothes, grabbed her guitar, and secretly left Tennessee for good, returning to the New Jersey home of her parents, from whom she’d become estranged. They took her back in, but under three conditions: “They said, if you move back in with us, you have to go to school, get a job, and see a therapist,” she says, looking back on this tough love with newfound gratitude. “That was great parenting right there, because I needed all three.”

The songs on her first record, the hushed, aching Because I Was in Love, came out of her in a deluge. They weren’t songs of self so much as songs of self-doubt, though delivered with the kind of plainspoken honesty that acts as a magnet for likeminded listeners. Van Etten’s voice was, and still is, like a secret family barbeque sauce recipe: A mysterious and wholly personal combination of smoky and sweet. (“I hate to admit, but I don’t know shit,” she confesses atop a croaking acoustic guitar. “And neither do you, do you.”) After she moved to New York and started playing live, she says, “I’d meet fans after the shows and they would tell me their own stories about what they had been through and how my music had helped them. I found my communication through music, and that helped me learn how to get through whatever I was going through.”

When I ask about her relationship to those early songs now, her answer shows she’s come a long way (and done a lot of work in therapy) since internalizing her ex’s criticisms. “I still think, even then, my writing was there, my singing was there. Sometimes [when I listen] I can hear when I was chain-smoking, I can hear the lumps in my throat. But I’m still proud of all of those moments. I get nostalgic sometimes, and worry about her.” She pauses, then breaks into a sweetly sad smile. “You just wanna give yourself a hug, you know?”

In 2013, Van Etten embarked on a particularly fateful tour, opening for one of her musical heroes, Nick Cave. She went without her usual backing band for those shows, opting for more stripped down arrangements featuring just Van Etten and her manager/drummer Zeke Hutchins. Remember those aforementioned knees knocking in the back seat of a car? One belonged to him. The trouble was they were both in other relationships at the time; the one Van Etten was in she describes as “unhealthy.” “When we realized we had feelings for each other, we talked it out—it was so adult,” she says. They decided to go home to their respective lives, mull things over, and then reconnect to see how they felt. “But,” Van Etten says with a laugh, “we still had to make a record together.”

That record turned out to be 2014’s Are We There, a candid and accomplished collection of folk-rock songs that take on added resonance when you know the backstory. It’s a record about the difficulty of extricating oneself from the comfortable rhythms of a long-term relationship (see: the six-minute gut punch that is “Your Love Is Killing Me”) and the blind faith that must be summoned before leaping into another one (“Even I’ve taken my chances on you,” she sings on a hypnotic single). “Taking Chances” served as an apt theme song for this era of Van Etten’s life—this record kicked off what in retrospect looks like an era of openness, serendipity, the sort of happy accidents that occur when you stop clinging so tightly to your past and just let yourself go.

The success of Are We There brought her a whole new audience—one member of which was David Lynch, who recruited her and her band to perform the song “Tarifa” on an episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. “My heart exploded,” Van Etten says, remembering when she got the call. The shoot was a surreal Lynchian experience itself: Van Etten and her band were whisked away to an unidentified location somewhere near Pasadena and, when they walked inside, found themselves transported into the fabled Bang Bang Bar. Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor were waiting in the wings. “Lynch was dressed to a T, chain-smoking, holding a megaphone,” she says. “Watching him take it in and give direction was amazing, even the small moves were so intentional. You’re just like, ‘You changed that light from red to blue … wow … I wonder why!’”

An even more challenging opportunity presented itself at that time: A casting director had caught her set on that Nick Cave tour and had recommended her to Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who were prepping their brooding sci-fi Netflix series The OA. Although Van Etten had never acted professionally, she was cast as Rachel, one of the troubled prisoners held captive with Marling’s character. Van Etten returned last year to shoot the second season, although she’s not at risk of divulging any spoilers before it returns. “I’m dying to know what happens!” she says. “I actually have no idea.”

When The OA and Twin Peaks were filming, Van Etten was consciously taking a break from touring and recording. “I knew at some point I’d do music again, but I wasn’t in a rush,” she says. “I didn’t have a plan, and I also didn’t care: I was at this point where I was like, I’m fine with whatever. But it was comforting to know that there still was a drive in me to make music, to write, without it being for anything specific. So suddenly in 2017 I look at a folder and there’s 40 demos in there. My partner was just like, ‘I think you need to make a record now.’”

But one question is plaguing Van Etten as she considers her upcoming tour: “What am I gonna do with my hands?” These songs are some of the first on which she doesn’t play guitar. But she’d also like the tone of these shows to be different from her previous tours—if only for her mental well-being. “Part of what made me go to a dark place on the last tour, and one of the things that made me want to take a break from the road, is that I was singing all these really dark, intense songs about relationships I was in, and I was reliving a lot of the pain, constantly,” she says. “I mean, I got out of those situations and I’m in a better place now, but that’s not the message of the songs, when I’m really analyzing them.”

Along with “Your Love Is Killing Me,” one song she finds difficult to play is also one of her most popular, “Serpents,” a fuming slow-burner from her 2012 record Tramp, which describes an abusive relationship in vivid detail (“Close in on my black eye / I feel safe at times”). “It’s cathartic to play, and people like it, but I also want to challenge people on why they like it, and how it makes me feel,” she says. “Some musicians can distance themselves and perform it, but like, I can’t. My only way of distancing is actually … distancing. Maybe down the road I’ll figure out how to play it, but I also don’t feel like I need to. There are plenty of other songs people like.”

Somewhere in the middle of the maelstrom of the past few years, Van Etten decided she’d like to go back to college—to become a therapist. Although acting, music, and motherhood are making the progress toward her certification slower than she’d like, she has been chipping away at an undergraduate psychology degree from Brooklyn College: She proudly reports to me that she’s now officially a sophomore. “My path keeps going like this,” she says, zig-zagging a hand in the air, “but my goal is by the time I’m 50 to have certification of some kind.” It’s more proof of her unconventional outlook on life: Society too often instructs women to consider the act of growing older a reason to eliminate possibilities. Van Etten is exposing that lie.

“I think I’d like to have an eclectic approach, pulling ideas from different therapies,” she says, when I ask what kind of therapist she’d like to be. “My mom was like, ‘Oh, so you would want to do music therapy?’ But I think that’s too specific. Because music is the language I found, but I just want to help the person I’m working with find their language, whatever it is. I want to help someone find their thing.”

An earlier version incorrectly stated that John Congleton worked with Lana Del Rey.