Sharon Van Etten
We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong
Jagjaguwar
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The time spent in our own heads, not to mention our homes, over the past two years has been both transformative and traumatic, and we’ve really only just begun unpacking what the hell happened during all that time alone. The artist’s instinct is, of course, to document, as well as to try to create some sort of beautiful order from the chaos.
“If anyone says they’re not putting out a COVID record, they’re fucking lying to you,” Sharon Van Etten recently told W magazine. Her management team, when discussing the packaging of her new album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, asked her if she wanted to “go there,” meaning refer to the record specifically as a product of the pandemic. She did.
During the lockdown, Van Etten had watched the movie The Sandlot over and over with her young son, as one does when you have kids and you’re stuck at home. There’s a scene in which the kids try to retrieve a lost baseball and things run terribly amok. “We’ve been going about this all wrong,” one kid says. Van Etten simultaneously chuckled and teared up at the line. “You feel you get over these humps, and you feel you’re almost there, and then something happens,” she told the fashion magazine.
The fictional Sandlot scenario encapsulates not only the very real adult frustration of thinking it all might be over soon—only for yet another COVID wave to hit—but it also speaks to all the personal setbacks and disappointments we all experienced by not being able to get on with life as hoped and planned. Van Etten’s album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong runs the gamut of all the emotions felt during this time, including the collective vertigo of peering over an abyss. “Where will we be when our world is done?” Van Etten asks on the song “Darkish.”
However, the album also covers the elation many of us felt during those moments we realized how lucky we were. Lucky to still have our lives, or love, or our loved ones, or even just a shifted perspective. It’s in those moments of elation that perhaps we felt most seismically that we’ve been going about this all wrong.
Leading up to the release of We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, Van Etten decided against releasing any singles. “The ten tracks on the album are designed to be listened to in order, all at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told,” the press release reads, and it reminds us that “things are not dark, only darkish.”
To that end, I carved out plenty of time so that I could listen, a few times, exactly in the way Van Etten prescribes—in one sitting, meditating over the album as one unit, never skipping over or skipping around. Overall, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong achieves what it endeavors. It’s not so much a complex, tightly developed thesis on the potential end of the world, like Cate Le Bon’s pandemic album Pompeii (2022), which weaves the present with a disastrous ancient history. Rather it’s much more interior—a soundscape of Van Etten’s personal emotional nooks and crannies, which can be just as powerful, and universal.
However, the album’s biggest weakness is that it’s often lyrically vague. This typically can be compensated for through deeply expressed emotion via the vocals or the instrumentation (ideally both), but there are several instances where Van Etten seems to float above it all, and I sometimes questioned whether the point was more just to make ethereal, interesting music. Which is fine in and of itself. It’s an enjoyable, sonically beautiful album. But I’m not sure it sharply encapsulates the pandemic, in part because some of the tracks tend to blend together.
We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong begins with “Darkness Fades,” featuring guitar that mimics the sound of rain—a gentle downpour, steady tender drops. “Rain” is the first word Van Etten sings, her voice full and bold and sonorous, and it immediately brings to mind the album’s cover art, a painted photo of Van Etten standing with a house and a yard at her back, the rainbow oranges and reds of a retreating storm reflected on the ground. It’s meant to convey an interplay of growth and loss, an old life making way for a new one. “I wanted to convey that in an image with me walking away from it all,” Van Etten says in the press release, “not necessarily brave, not necessarily sad, not necessarily happy...”
“It’s been a while since I held you close / Been a while since we’ve touched / All the doors close,” she continues to sing on “Darkness Fades,” and then the song suddenly turns thunderous with drums and synth and bass. Van Etten’s voice soars and careens and keens and weaves in and out of the instrumentation, already creating catharsis. It’s a strong opening track, a microcosm of the emotional ups and downs we’ll experience throughout the rest of the album, from song to song.
The next track, “Home to Me,” features dark drums that create a steady, underlying heartbeat. The song was written about Van Etten’s son, a reflection of his growing older and growing up, and the sadness this can evoke in a mother, in tandem with the joy. The synths grow in intensity in a conscious effort to reflect the passing of time, and the dread and terror that can engender in a mother’s heart.
“I’ll Try,” the song that follows, is slinky and dance-y, with Van Etten’s voice taking on a husky whiskey tone. It picks up the synth of the previous song, and there’s an uncanny kernel of the Thompson Twins’ “If You Were Here,” lending the track a distinct ’80s feel. There also seems to be a reference to the mask-wearing that became so routine—“Wear my protection by ways no one can judge”—as well as the racial injustice that became just as dire and immediate an issue as COVID-19—“Let’s go march.”
“Anything” takes that husky element to Van Etten’s voice in the last song, “I’ll Try,” and turns it into a full-on Stevie Nicks sexy-raspiness. This track deals with the insomnia—or “coronasomnia”—many of us experienced over the past two years. “Up the whole night / Undefined / Can’t stop thinking ‘bout peace and war,” she sings. There’s tumult in the song, with pummeling drums offset by dueling guitars. It’s a short, ultimately crashing track that lasts a mere 2 minutes and 29 seconds. “I couldn’t feel anything,” Van Etten repeats over and over.
“Born” is a strange song in that Van Etten’s voice now becomes languid, slow, and slurred, much like one sounds the morning after a rough night—apropos as a follow-up to a song about sleeplessness. The vocals turn celestial, suddenly reflecting the glory of being, well, born—if not literally, then being fortunate enough to wake to a new day, or to rise into a new understanding of self.
“Headspace” takes us again into stark juxtaposition, with a dark, grinding, industrial sound punctuated by buzzing distortion and syncopated beats. Nine Inch Nails is clearly an influence here, though Van Etten’s vocals remain pretty and angelic in stark contrast. There’s a tinge of rejection—“Baby, don’t turn your back to me”—as well as sexual aggressiveness. “Put lips on neck to me / Hold yourself up against me,” she sings, proving that the strongest appetites don’t disappear even in times of fear.
“Come Back” is about the desire to reconnect with a lover, or, conversely, with oneself. It’s a swaying, rocking ballad full of aching melancholy and thunderous harmonies. The next song, “Darkish,” is spare, with only acoustic guitar and Van Etten’s transcendent voice, and it’s notably reminiscent of some of the most beautiful, haunting Radiohead offerings. The track features some nice ambient touches—the sound of a breeze, birds chirping, the creak of a chair —that highlight its sparseness, even though towards the end we are treated yet again to glorious, rolling-thunder harmonies.
“Mistakes” is a thumping, disco-inspired track, again in stark contrast to the preceding song, and it celebrates radical self-acceptance, and making peace with our mistakes. It also contains the album’s funniest line—“I dance like Elaine / But my baby takes me to the floor / Says ‘more, more’.”
Van Etten specifically set out to tap into the Cocteau Twins as an influence prior to the making of We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, and it couldn’t be more apparent on the final song, “Far Away.” The track is an appropriate, cathartic ending to the album, tying in the slower pace of some of the acoustic songs, the electronic elements of the dancier bits, and the celestial quality of some of the most memorable vocal moments. “Been down on myself / Said won’t go back,” the song begins, and we feel like she, and we, have worked through something. “Long gone I’ll see you far away,” Van Etten sings over and over, and it sounds so incredibly hopeful.
Notable Tracks: “Anything” | “Darkish” | “Headspace” | “Mistakes”
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