On first glance, “Porta”, the single that preceded her sixth album, suggested that maybe she was emerging into some sunlit emotional uplands. The video features Van Etten pumping up the Benatar beats on her boombox and joining her Pilates instructor Stella for a vigorous workout in the golden light of a Californian studio, like a 21st-century Olivia Newton- John of powerhouse cores and midlife wellbeing.
It all feels light years away from the furious, desperate Jersey Girl liberty she rued on “Seventeen”.
But actually listen to the song and the darkness that’s long fueled her work quickly reveals itself. While the Sharon in the studio is chuckling and performing her kinesthetic jumps, the Sharon on the soundtrack is avoiding eye contact and trying to slam the door shut on stalkers and those who want to “steal her life She’s since said that “Porta” was written in 2020, at the rock bottom of a fresh squall of depression and anxiety.
“Porta” doesn’t appear on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, Van Etten’s sixth album in 13 years - she’s stated that she sees the album very much as a self- contained, standalone narrative, and the songs only make emotional sense in this context - but it does act as a segue from 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow.
So many of the songs on the new record are aubades - that is, songs of separation set in dawnlight, though here they tend to be not so much parting lovers as those struggling through the isolation, insomnia and stray moments of eerie peace of early parenthood. The album opens with “Darkness Fades”, a soft strum of a song, so quiet you can hear the shooting stars fall, that slowly builds into awesome prayer trying to hold back the darkness that’s always there beyond the blue sky, the perfect lawn, the daylight world of domesticity. It leads straight into “Home To Me”, a funereally paced ballad of troubled parental concern and loss.
It can be hard to avoid confessional, biographical interpretations with an artist like Sharon Van Etten. She’s openly talked of her writing as a form of therapy, and, mindful of the impact of her songs on her audience, even took time out to return to college to study mental health counselling.
Though largely recorded at her new home studio in Los Angeles, with assistance from Daniel Knowles (once of Nottingham’s Amusement Parks On Fire) and various friends and neighbours, We’ve Been Going... is above all an incredible sounding record.
Though there are moments of quiet, almost unbearable, immense intimacy, there’s also “Headspace” an urgent, anti-doomscrolling anthem which is like Sisters Of Mercy and Berlin writing an industrial power ballad, and “Mistakes”, a piece of deranged disco with something of the sleazy electro swagger of high-’8os ZZ Top. The closing “Far Away”, meanwhile, sets sail for the heavenly Las Vegas residency of the Cocteau Twins.
But the defining heart of the record might be the few seconds of twinkling dawn chorus and susurrous tideswell that stretches between “Come Back” and “Darkish” - the sounds of a Californian morning emerging as the lockdown freeways stand silent. The first song is Van Etten roused once more to full imploring, impassioned, Hurricane Orbison mode - by the climax she sounds like she’s singing from the very bottom of the abyss of grief Roy approached at the close of “It’s Over”.
On the second song, the storm clouds are parting. Like when Dante emerges from the underworld, it’s not yet light, but at least the stars are now visible, wheeling overhead. And like Patsy Cline, exhausted from her midnight rambling, her voice cracks as it rises, swoops and falls, from celestial harmony to bitter, crazy remorse.
In a darkling, Dylanish line, she concludes, “It’s not dark... It’s only darkish, inside of me ”. It’s not the sweet silver larksong of a Broadway showstopper, and it won’t have you dancing on those tabletops, but for an artist so long trailed by the black dogs of despair, it feels like a mightily hard-earned breakthrough.
FULL ALBUM:
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