photos by Ryan Pfluger

Sharon Van Etten returns from a five-year studio break with a new genre-defying, accidental methodology, dreamt up while her young son was napping.

Close your eyes and conjure your own Sharon Van Etten song. You’ll probably hear a folky acoustic guitar and the mournful black magic of her voice in full flight. But it’s unlikely that you’ll summon the droning synth-bass and clattering trip-hop drums of “No One’s Easy to Love,” the centerpiece of her fifth LP, Remind Me Tomorrow.

“The demo of that song was just me on acoustic guitar with a drum machine,” the singer/multitasker says over the phone while at home in Brooklyn, moments after greeting her one-and-a-half-year-old son. “But it went from a Leonard Cohen vibe to David Bowie to what almost feels like Beck.” And the album, she hopes, will embody that sort of broader transformation—revealing new facets of her musical taste, opening sonic doors that have previously remained shut. “When I played it for people, they were excited because they heard a lot of [influences] that most of my fans don’t know I listen to: post-punk, synth music and minimal, dark electronic music. I was a punk when I was younger! I just started off writing really minimal folk songs. So I was excited to have the opportunity to let my freak flag fly a little bit and let people get to know me better.

“I have different tastes,” she adds. “I’ll go to a punk show, a classical show, a musical and a noise show in one month. It’s healthy to explore and learn.” And Remind Me Tomorrow is an education on that front, essentially a “hello” handshake for a songwriter you probably thought you already knew—and were more than satisfied with.

Van Etten emerged with a fully crystallized aesthetic on her acclaimed 2009 debut, Because I Was in Love: homespun folk tunes built on emotional catharsis and the dynamics of her voice. The threadbare arrangements (an organ here, some cymbals there) were like pages to words or a canvas to paint—merely a medium through which she told her stories of heartbreak, loneliness and surviving abuse. Van Etten worked to expand her reach on her next two LPs—embracing a full-band indie-rock approach on 2010’s epic and 2012’s Tramp (the latter produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner) and brightening up 2014’s Are We There with flourishes of organ, drum machines and horns. But for all of those mini-evolutions, Van Etten still felt like she was in danger of repeating herself.

“After a while, I started thinking, ‘Am I just writing the same song over and over again?’” she says with a laugh. “I’m proud of everything I’ve made up to this point. I don’t think I’ve ever really compromised, but every time I make a record, I want to do something differently.”

Remind Me Tomorrow is more than a superficial makeover, even though it’s a bold one—with its deep-dive into synth pads, heavy beats and overall darker (and occasionally abrasive) singing. The album also marks a noticeable songwriting shift, relying as much on texture and atmosphere as melody and harmony. There’s hardly a guitar in earshot—and the ones you do notice (the acoustic strum of “Seventeen,” an Americana anthem drowning in Krautrock spookiness) are hardly perceptible.

“It’s funny because [the musical change] wasn’t a conscious decision at the get-go,” she says. “I didn’t even know I was writing a record. In 2015, I took a break from touring to figure out how to be home and focus on my life: my friends, my partner, enjoying New York instead of being gone all the time. During that time, I got asked to do a score for Katherine Dieckmann’s Strange Weather. Her reference for that film was Ry Cooder’s score for Paris, Texas. That’s very beautiful, ambient guitar music, and I don’t consider myself that good of a guitar player, so it was a challenge in itself. While I was working on that in the studio, there would be days when I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere and hit a roadblock, and I’d put the guitar down. During that time, I shared a practice space with Michael Cera, and he had a synthesizer and organ lying around. Just to clear my head and to focus on something else for a minutes, I messed around on his instruments, not really knowing how they worked. As I created these sounds, I realized that I gravitated toward the keys. My partner was also a drummer for a while, so I had a kit lying around, and I started doing syncopated beats. It was just me clearing my head so I could go back and finish the score with a new perspective.”

But after a year of no-pressure experimentation, she decided to more officially explore this accidental methodology. “I started playing differently, singing differently, playing in different keys,” she says. “It was really fun.” Three primary influences emerged: trip-hop act Portishead, arty synth-punk duo Suicide, and Nick Cave’s heavily ambient and electronic 2016 LP, Skeleton Tree, which he recorded in part after the tragic death of his 15-year-old son. (The latter album is particularly special to Van Etten, who gave birth to her first son in March 2017.)

Producer John Congleton, a longtime fan and acquaintance, relished the opportunity to re-contextualize her reference points. “When I mentioned [those artists] as the center of the record, his eyes lit up,” Van Etten says of Congleton, whom her friend Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater had previously recommended. “It was kind of a relief because I would think that people who knew my music would get nervous about that, but he got excited. I just took that as a good sign.”

“I assumed that it would be a longshot [to work with her],” Congleton says. “I’ve done stuff that’s certainly Americana, but I’m not the obvious choice for that kinda thing. She was just at a point where she wanted to do something completely different, and maybe I was the only person she talked to who got really excited when she mentioned those influences. Suicide is one of my favorite bands; I’m a massive Nick Cave fan and have been for years. She said those things, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, let me hear those demos!’ They were really interesting, but they weren’t at all what I was expecting. I was expecting her to send me songs of her and the guitar: ‘Here’s the harmony, and here’s the melody,’ essentially. But the demos were kind of weird practice space jams—these long meditations with a little drum box, a Rhythm King. I was really excited by that. They didn’t feel like standard songs, and they were sort of unpredictable in their forms, and even how the chords felt. They were really harmonically repetitious but also surprising in how she voiced the chords and where they fell—shit that I love.”

The chemistry was immediate, but Van Etten was cautious. She handed over “Jupiter 4,” a brooding anthem she’d sketched out on a Roland Jupiter-4 synth, and let Congleton build up an initial arrangement on his own. “I did a bunch of recording by myself, and then I set up [the other musicians] in the room and they played along to my tracks,” the producer says. “It’s funny how it worked out—she showed up at the studio right when we were ready to go, so she kind of just walked in and got behind the microphone. We recorded the first song, and I think it’s the second take that’s on the record. At that point, she’d just gotten there, so I was like, ‘Let’s fucking do another song!’ I had tracks ready for ‘Memorial Day,’ so we did that one. She did the vocals, and we did a couple overdubs here and there, and it was still 6 p.m. It felt great. She said, ‘This is cool. Let’s just do this.’”

The duo was too busy to keep that momentum going at the time: Congleton remains one of indie-rock’s most in-demand producers, best-known for his work with bands like The Decemberists and The War on Drugs. Between her numerous live dates, film scoring and new motherhood, Van Etten also found time to launch an acting career with her supporting role on Netflix fantasy-drama The OA. (She also popped up for a cameo on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks revival.) But Van Etten and Congleton did manage to reunite two months later and finish the album properly, with the producer frequently rotating the studio musicians from his crew of famous session friends (including four drummers: Midlake’s McKenzie Smith, Joey Waronker, Brian Reitzell and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa)—in an attempt to “constantly keep it interesting.”

“She was pissing in the wind,” Congleton says of Van Etten. “She was ready to try anything—like, ‘You just put it together, and we’ll see how it goes.’ I felt free to try anything. I took her references and what she talked about, took it to heart and pushed it all the way, and she responded.”

Van Etten felt liberated by this leap into the unknown. She trusted Congleton’s instincts on the arrangements—that’s his eerie theremin on “Jupiter 4”—and the final production. (He decided to keep her raw scratch vocal for the pulsating lead single “Comeback Kid.”) But she admits it was a bit nerve-wracking to hand over some of her directorial vision.

“I was also a little intimated initially by the idea of working with John because of who he’s [produced]. But I was finally ready to relinquish that kind of control,” she says, noting the freedom of focusing primarily on her vocal performances. “It was definitely challenging. It took a second to get used to—to think, ‘This isn’t something that I would do.’ I would laugh internally because I would know immediately: ‘That’s why I’m working with John. I would be doing it myself if it’s something I would do.’ He would pull things out of people. He would tell each musician some different reference and, when they’d play together, you wouldn’t know what to compare it to.”

For all its experimentation, Remind Me Tomorrow is far from a shark-jump. Van Etten’s confessional, if a bit mysterious, lyrics remain integral—and she had plenty of real-life drama to draw from. The record’s early direction felt joyful, she says, after the birth of her first son. But Donald Trump’s presidential rise, and the bitter social landscape it created, altered her focus.

“The only time I was able to write was when my child was napping,” she says of her early progress on Remind Me Tomorrow. “I’d put my headphones on and listen to my demos and finish writing lyrics. It was a really crazy perspective—I started writing all these demos when I was super happy and in love, at home. I was pregnant when Trump got elected and, when I had my baby, I found myself staring at him with my headphones on, trying to be positive. There are different perspectives at every editing point.”

As Remind Me Tomorrow proves, it’s a new phase in more ways than one.

“It’s a collection of all those [emotions],” she adds. “It’s being happy in this dark time and feeling guilty about it. [Laughs.] And trying to be positive while being scared. Realizing that no matter what goes on, your biggest job is to make your kid feel safe. When it boils down to it, all you can do is what’s in your control: to be a good partner, to be a good mother, to be a good friend, even though all this other shit’s going on. It’s conflicted, yet I think it’s still hopeful. But I’m not going to back down and not admit that it’s a dark time and that I’m struggling with these emotions in this new phase of my life.”

This article originally appears in the January/February 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.