NEW MUSIC/REVIEWS/REISSUE
Sharon Van Etten’s Timeless epic Turns Ten
Celebrating the anniversary are a slew of guest features to share sounds so felt that they remain both deeply personal to the artist but ubiquitous to how we all love and hurt.
Sharon Van Etten’s pithy 7-track sophomore epic sees in a decade and remains ever-poignant. Evidently an influential and beloved album, the re-issue includes covers of each song, by the likes of Fiona Apple, Shamir, and IDLES. There are old-hands like Lucinda Williams and newcomers like producer, St. Panther. It remains one of my favourite and most nostalgic albums of all time, and to hear it now celebrated through these intergenerational voices cements how universal this album’s themes are. At the crux is an intimately honest negotiation between identity, and the impact that a damaging relationship on that sense of self.
Like others, I was introduced to the Brooklyn-via-New Jersey-(via Tennessee) Sharon Van Etten, via Bon Iver. I was in high school when I first heard Justin Vernon’s minimalist, spacious cover of “Love More,” which was my gateway into Sharon Van Etten and epic. The closing track unfailingly remains a tear-jerker and utter heart-wrencher each time I hear it. On the re-issue it is Fiona Apple who adds her own rattling flavour to “Love More,” The lyrical narrative telling a suffocating cycle of abuse, and the redemptive release that “She made me love, she made me love, she made me love more” remains just as aching in every version.
This time, Justin Vernon opens the B-sides of epic Ten as Big Red Machine, his project with Aaron Dessner. In contrast to the sparseness of their treatment of “Love More,” “A Crime” brings with it the same urgency and intensity that Sharon Van Etten uses to launch into the album. The melodramatic defiance of “A Crime” and the repeated mantra that they will “Never let myself love like that again” provides the initial contrast to “Love More” and adds depth to the eventual evolution. The spectrum of feeling, through a journey into vulnerability, destruction and ultimately growth, is an incredible feat to achieve in just 33 minutes of album.
The same furious vigour develops on the second track “Peace Signs,” matched perfectly by the Brit-Punk band IDLES. The peace offering sees apparent resolve become blurry, a ceasefire still sounds combative. While walking away, Van Etten still bears an ugly mutation “Peace sign, I was already you”.
The next songs continue to be flavoured with both lashings of bitterness towards the failed abusive relationship, and the questions that it leaves behind. The unsettled dissonance of the monastic “DsharpG” encapsulates the essence of gaslit self-doubt: “Why do they want? / Who are we all? / What do we do? / Why do they mind?” There is a weariness in “Save Yourself,” and the pedal-steel twang and casual crooning of Van Etten’s original is perfectly matched by Lucinda William’s cover.
Somebody said to me recently that they thought “Don’t Do It” sounds similar to “Linger” by the Cranberries. Both that song and this album manage to communicate the tenderness of injury and betrayal in a way that is so hauntingly beautiful. On epic Ten Courtney Barnett and Vagabon team up to cover “Don’t Do It” and echo the same nonchalant, almost apathetic, vocal tone that Van Etten gives to her music while simultaneously remaining deeply earnest.
All of the above sentiments are captured on “One Day,” a series of vignettes of passing seasons from the learnt love of youth to the lived love now gone. As a pair grapple with physical and emotional distance, it seems that repetition might make things stick: “One day I’ll be fine with that” and “You don’t leave me now, do you love me back?” The passage of time leaves no final answers.
Sharon Van Etten released epic when she was 29, and sings of a love that feels worn. It is a strength that maturity has brought with it an unfussy but raw truth to her work. That these songs resonated with me from the ages of 16 to 26 show how her absolute sincerity cuts through and endures. The resilience that comes out of epic, that it makes me love more, cements its longevity.
Released 16 April 2021 on Ba Da Bing
words by Joy Qin
Personal favourites: “Love More” and “One Day”
Rating: 9/10
