Sharon Van Etten opens her second album, epic, in a register of grounded wisdom. “To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime/To admit I’m still in love with you after all this time,” Van Etten declares on “A Crime.” She weaves her verse into a tangle of seduction and toxicity before landing on a clear thought that becomes a promise and a refrain: “Never let myself love like that again.” Van Etten sings herself into and out of these seven self-preserving words. Each syllable becomes a life raft for anyone who needs it.
epic’s seven songs of survival and becoming marked the firm arrival of then-29-year-old Sharon Van Etten from New Jersey to Brooklyn and the forefront of indie rock. With a lingering twang from five turbulent years in Tennessee, epic was her first time playing with a full band, and she sounded newly poised. In interviews, she spoke openly about the partner she’d left behind, who discouraged her songwriting and worse. “I had just come from an abusive relationship [...] and I was really lost,” Van Etten says in a short documentary that accompanies this 10th-anniversary epic reissue. “I played music because it made me feel better.”
Her healing path brought complexity and depth to epic—where there’s a grave narrative, there’s an empowered hook; where there’s horror, there are peace signs—and this revelation rings through every note. There’s comfort in her radiant harmonizing with folk singers Meg Baird and Cat Martino, in the intensity and warmth of her melodies, in the sunstruck instrumentation that builds on the best of Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, and the harmonium that graces “Love More”—it’s all relief. Van Etten was building her confidence and learning to trust other people, a process she said extended to her studio collaborators, including members of She Keeps Bees and the War on Drugs; her label, Ba Da Bing, where she was an intern-turned-signee; and the community at Zebulon, the Williamsburg venue where these songs first took flight. As Van Etten states in the epic Ten film, letting people in is a difficult step in moving forward as a survivor, but a crucial one. epic is the sound of interconnection and growth.
When epic turned 10 last year, Van Etten decided to honor this pivotal moment by inviting even more people into it. She assembled a covers album featuring foundational artists of her life, like Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams, as well as eventual peers like Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner, who helped amplify her profile in 2010 when they covered “Love More” live (before the album was even out). It’s a testament to Van Etten’s craft that her songs bloom in so many contexts, from Vernon and Dessner’s ripping rock take on “A Crime” to St. Panther’s sleek R&B remake of “One Day.” The gnarled cover of “Peace Signs” by UK pub-rockers IDLES is not listenable per se, but that might be the point—their version underscores the essential aggression of brutal lyrics like “I told you I could no longer see,” the marching rhythm and stakes of Van Etten fighting back. “I am not afraid,” she sang on “Peace Signs.” “I am something.”
There was already a disarming openness to epic, and the best covers find new horizons in these songs still. Courtney Barnett, accompanied by Vagabon, lays bare the shattering narrative of “Don’t Do It,” urging a friend to hang on. Shamir reimagines the impressionistic drone of “DsharpG” as an incandescent ballad, layering glittering acoustic guitars over a low-end rumble, spinning out their virtuosic vocals, pitching the whole song skyward.
Two towering epic Ten recordings play like tacit acknowledgments of influence. The original “Save Yourself” is animated by Lucinda Williams-style no-bullshit resolve and her same defiant skepticism, which makes the experience of hearing Williams croon it herself doubly thrilling. “Don’t you think I know you’re only trying to save yourself?/Just like everyone else” is about as empathic as an eye roll gets. To be broke, adventuring, outsmarting your heartache—these are big Lucinda themes, and they echo through “Save Yourself.” Like many great songwriters, Van Etten grew up listening to Williams, and this cover sits at the center of a timeless creative equation: when you listen to an artist, you are always, to some degree, listening to every artist who inspired them to be one. Or as Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker reflects of her college years in the liner notes to epic Ten: “Sharon’s words, melodies, and rawness, became my words, melodies, and rawness, and permeated the sea of moments I was living in, making them more bearable [...] Her way of writing changed my way of thinking.” epic Ten charts this musical-emotional continuum in both directions.
If you were a fan of Van Etten before epic, maybe you remember the excitement of seeing that distant, grainy live clip of Justin Vernon covering “Love More” in high falsetto in 2010, knowing this important artist would soon be reaching many more people. Maybe you also remember that in 2010 it was less common for a woman in indie music to be talking unguardedly about her experience of being in an abusive relationship. Van Etten put this reality and its aftermath at the heart of “Love More,” a five-minute hymn of resilience that is the anchor of epic and her songbook. “You chained me like a dog in our room,” she sings in her low register over the gentle harmonium drone. “You were high, when I was doomed.” Van Etten has called “Love More” her “most revealing song” about this exceedingly difficult time, and said it was also about “two friends who pretty much saved my life when I was at my lowest point.”
It’s hard to imagine a more apt meeting than Fiona Apple and “Love More.” Apple has been galvanizing listeners to speak their truths with conviction since she was a teenager in the 1990s—when Van Etten was also a teenager, listening to Apple in her bedroom. “Love More” is filled with a raw emotional strength and honesty that is practically synonymous with Apple, who channels it here with otherworldly bolt-cutting power.
For the first time on a recording, Apple plays the ashiko hand drum—an instrument that, like Van Etten’s harmonium, you pull close to your body. The harmonium is traditionally used in Indian devotional music, and it creates healing vibrations; the reverberations of the ashiko drum have a similar visceral resonance. Apple puts gravity into her arrangement, fortifying Van Etten’s words: the elongated “chained,” the clipped “high,” the booming “doomed,” as if to say she understands them. Apple has always been open about the fact that she is a survivor. In her “Love More” cover, every careful note is a potential expression of solidarity.
Van Etten and her collaborators made “Love More” float on what she once called “a river of harmonies,” which reaches its widest opening in Apple’s cover. If Van Etten’s “Love More” evokes sun finally pouring through a window, then Apple’s is the renewed clarity of stepping out into the light. “Love More” is a song about regaining control of one’s life, the finale to a feminist album about reclaiming one’s voice and returning to love in the wake of trauma. Apple’s cover makes these ideas lucid and real, in her taut a capella vocalizing and her rapturous self-harmonies. It’s an anthem for anyone who has embarked on that journey. Joining “Why Try to Change Me Now” and “I Want You” in the pantheon of classic Fiona Apple covers, her “Love More” contains a powerful alchemy of both autonomy and connection, of inner strength as well as the assurance that anyone who has survived is not alone. As Apple communes with Van Etten’s words—“She took the time to believe in what she said/She made me love, she made me love, she made me love more”—she offers abiding proof.
Buy: Rough Trade
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