Fans of acoustic guitar-playing female singer-songwriters are so flooded with options these days that they are in the position to be pretty discriminating. Artists such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, Jana Hunter, and Mariee Sioux have issued a steady stream of quality music, and have collectively set a fairly high standard for newcomers to match. Yet on her debut full-length album, Because I Was in Love, Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten proves that she has the expressive voice and the songwriting chops to ably hold her own in the company of her peers.
As with the aforementioned artists, Van Etten's work retains some echoes of folk tradition but generally operates in a more personal, introspective space. Following a number of hand-designed and self-released recordings, a 2008 tour with Meg Baird brought Van Etten into the orbit of Philadelphia's Espers, whose Greg Weeks recorded Because I Was in Love at Hexham Head studio. With Weeks' veteran assistance, Van Etten keeps the album's arrangements minimal and direct, augmenting her voice and guitar with only the occasional splash of organ, brushed cymbals, or multi-tracked vocal harmonies.
Though the arrangements are spare, the performances on Because I Was in Love are not skeletal-- these are full-bodied songs that sound finished, as though Van Etten had already lived with this material long enough to know intuitively how best to present it. In this regard Van Etten's work can resemble Chan Marshall's earliest Cat Power recordings, especially in the way that Van Etten's confident, nuanced soprano is able to help temper the emotional fragility of her material.
As the title suggests, Because I Was In Love spends most of its time chronicling the bittersweet ache and light-headed confusion that can only arise through the ebbs and flows of romance. Unlike some low-key vocalists who prefer to sing as if nobody were listening, Van Etten instead sings these songs as though she had an audience of one, with nearly every lyric directed straight to some unnamed "you." And, at the risk of conflating the performer with her performance, suffice to say that throughout the album Van Etten really nails it, sounding every bit like someone trying to get her head around a complex and evolving relationship.
On opener "I Wish I Knew" or the sumptuous "Much More Than That", Van Etten writes with such intimacy (her lyrics filled with direct lines like, "I wish I knew what to do with you," or "Please don't take me lightly") that the listener gets an almost disconcerting sense of eavesdropping on a private conversation. Elsewhere, as on "Tornado" or the captivating "Consolation Prize", Van Etten sounds more reflective, keeping a measured distance from her narratives, even if her songs' ultimate conclusions ("The moral of the story is don't lie to me again") recognize the impossibility of pat endings and easy solutions.
Most crucial to the album's success, however, is Van Etten's unerring sense for crafting memorable, seductive melodies. Here again she takes no shortcuts, as she largely forgoes standard verse-chorus repetition in favor of a more organic style, with wonderful songs like "For You" and "Holding Out" gently unwinding like the lines across a hand-drawn road map. Even in a folk scene that can sometimes feel over-crowded, Because I Was in Love positions Sharon Van Etten immediately towards the front of the pack.
