Sharon Van Etten

In a recent interview with The A.V. Club, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten talked about the long-term boyfriend she had back in Tennessee. He’s the bastard that led her to believe she wasn’t talented enough to play in front of people. “He was a rocker guy, and he just thought I wasn’t good enough to play out,” she said. “So sometimes I had to sneak out to play open mics. I had to hide the fact that I played.” 

After six years in the South, Van Etten returned north, moving in with her parents in New Jersey until TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, a high school friend of her brother, convinced her to come to Brooklyn. She did, and the rest of the tale plays like a parody of the naysayer she left in Tennessee. Her self-made record wound its way through a New England circle of musicians that sits at the intersection of psychdelic and folk. Soon, she was recording a proper album with Espers founder Greg Weeks for his Language of Stone imprint. The barebones, highly confessional Because I Was in Love is a daring and disarming debut, the sort of statement that puts you inside the writer’s worries and let’s you know that—since she’s here, singing them aloud—everything turned out at least OK. “Caught in a rut/ Foot hard to find hold,” she intones on the gorgeously pained “I Fold,” her voice leaning forward, toward the future. “Broken down/ Thought I was fine.”

Now, it appears, she is: “Love More,” one of the year’s masterpieces, which she recorded with a small ensemble for an arts project called Weathervane Music, finds Van Etten unshackling herself from the love that hid her away all those years. In the past year, she’s toured with obsessive fans Bowerbirds and Megafaun and been covered by Bon Iver. She’s currently working through new material for a follow-up. Fine, indeed. —Grayson Currin