Sharon Van Etten Because I Was In Love – 2009 Language of Stone

From the first track of her album Because I Was In Love, Sharon Van Etten’s voice comes on with the kind of pure tone that till then I’d only heard when someone rubbed a wet finger along the rim of a wine glass.  That pristine.  And through track after track she places this sort of forlorn and burning reaching in the chilled glass of her voice and the spare strum of a guitar. 

The first track, “I Wish I Knew,” starts with a guitar strummed almost lazily, and the voice floats in just after.  If you didn’t slow down to listen it could pass you by because, like much of the rest of the album, the energy just doesn’t jibe with the tempo of this city.  But once you hone into the emotional narrative of the song it can really be arresting. 

From the first line, “I wish I knew what to do with you,” there’s a directness that – like with the powerful simplicity of Cat Power – cuts away all the frills that can get in the way of simple sentiments, and just spits it right out, turning the song into a kind of blunt confessional.  When she gets to the last part of the song, singing “I hate to admit, but I don’t know shit, and neither do you,” she then repeats “do you, do you, do you, do you…”  And all of a sudden the line turns from an accusation to a kind of burning interrogation, one that stays with you for a while after the song is over.

On one of my favorites, track 5 titled “Have You Seen,” Sharon delivers a kind of hauntingly suggestive folk narrative with the passive lilt of someone who’s given up on their own emotions.  It starts:

Have you seen what I once called my heart? 

Have you seen my life that’s now fallen apart? 

While nothing is given about the song’s background, repeated listening can guess the details of her state when writing it, as she evokes a feeling of being wrecked by someone else in each verse, followed by a kind of caustic “whatever” in the lyric-less vocal line that floats over the chorus.   The song itself reminds me in some ways of some of the slower songs of Mia Doi Todd, or Alela Diane without the weird accent, or the strumming of little-known Canadian folk singer Ora Cogan, but her voice and ever-present self-control makes it distinctively Van Etten. 

Something I think most New Yorkers are in agreement over is the fact that at least every once in a while you need to get the hell out of the city to maintain your sanity.  Say every six months at the most, even if it’s just upstate for a weekend.  Unbelievably this is exactly what Because I Was In Love feels like – a trip out, some road trip to a cabin somewhere in the Adirondacks and a long night under the stars.  It doesn’t feel like someone could write songs like “It’s Not Like,” “Much More Than That,” and the melancholy “For You” in New York.  It feels like someone wrote them while escaping it. 

As Time Out New York commented, her music is “so slow, so spare and subtle that you might have to crane your neck to hear it.”  But that’s exactly the point.  You have to be “not in New York mode” to hear this stuff.  And by way of proof I’d just say, living with these tracks over the past few weeks I’ve found myself taking breaks from my usual nicotine- and caffeine-fueled workaholism, and actually putting down my book for once on the J train to look out at the skyline, or stopping the automatic rush in my step to slow down and look at the streets of Bushwick, the people streaming in and out of shops, the clouds, the occasional trees.  Much appreciated.   

Because I Was In Love is available on Amazon and Itunes.  

To see a list of Sharon Van Etten’s upcoming shows, visit her MySpace page.