Hovering in fight stance near a row of swinging heavy bags is Sharon Van Etten, working on her uppercut. It’s quite good. She leans in and carves the air with a curved arm, her gloved fist spiking up past her nose. This is her first boxing lesson, and moments before, she was sweating and breathless. But as she pauses to master isolated blows, she looks fierce, her punch focused and sharp. I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of it.
Van Etten is inside Gleason’s, the oldest active boxing gym in America. Its pale stone building stands sturdy among the glass-faced luxury shops of Dumbo, Brooklyn, like a callous toughening a manicured hand. The interior walls are plastered with flyers from title fights and autographed glossies. A flag-sized photo of Muhammad Ali, who trained here in the twilight of his career, is strung from the ceiling.
When I invited Van Etten to join me for an introductory training session, she agreed, eager, as she put it, to take part in any kind of “self-defense jam.” Crouched, fists grazing her mouth, the 41-year-old looks more resolute than the woman who started out singing pained love songs in New York bars over a decade ago, her face hidden beneath dark bangs.
Gleason’s first-timers must sign a liability waiver, and Van Etten chuckles as she skims through the paperwork at the gym’s entrance. “In case I break my fist,” she deadpans. But moments into our session, injury—or at least humiliation—seems quite plausible. We are learning the basics from a former featherweight world champion with a tightly drawn blonde ponytail, nicknamed “The Heat.” All around us, there is the ambient sound of violence: sparring pads slapping against gloves, the incessant drumroll of a battered speed bag.
We warm up with jump ropes, which tangle immediately. Petite and poised in simple black bike shorts and a white T-shirt, Van Etten soon finds her rhythm. The Heat instructs us to jump for three minutes, rest for one. This is the pulse of Gleason’s—the same cadence that anchors a boxing round—measured by a squawking timer bolted to a black pillar. We jump rope, panting, for two rounds before The Heat stops us. “I’d usually ask for three,” she says. “But I think you’d die.”
Navigating Gleason’s is like passing through a factory teeming with dangerous machinery. You lurch back to avoid an airborne punching bag, sidestep shadowboxers, leap away from jump ropes cutting through the room. The Heat eventually leads us through the gauntlet to the gym’s perimeter, where she teaches us the punches. We lob jabs, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts against The Heat’s training paddles, which she in turn bops against our heads to stimulate our defense. The Heat can’t help but laugh at our sluggish reflexes, with the playful sadism of an older sister slapping you with your own hand and saying, “stop hitting yourself!” When The Heat isn’t looking, Van Etten and I swap exhausted glances.
As we transition to the heavy bags, The Heat instructs us to hurl nonstop jab-cross combinations for one minute. It might sound like nothing, but throwing a rapid flurry of punches for even a few seconds can be brutal, and I sometimes soften my blows just to keep upright. But Van Etten doesn’t miss a beat. She maintains a steady rumble until the timer lets out its merciful screech.
As a songwriter, Van Etten refines the mess of life—love, fear, longing—into pristine phrases. “We’re a half-mast flag in wind.” “I can’t wait till we’re afraid of nothing.” “No one’s easy to love.” Her lyrics are spare and universal, delivered by a compassionate narrator. Still, I’m surprised by how easy Van Etten is to be around. She is thoughtful, self-aware, and slightly mischievous. She takes delight in the handful of cigarettes we smoke together. “Are you going to be a bad girl?” she asks me as I produce one from my pack after our boxing session.
She can seemingly chat with anyone. Waiting for the F train one day, she whips out some conversational Spanish to help a woman find her way to Coney Island; she says “trust yourself!” to a waiter who thinks he’s mixed up our to-go bags. Late one night, posted up at a sticky bar in lower Manhattan, Tina Turner’s “The Best” pours out of the sound system. When the chorus hits, Van Etten throws two fists in the air, singing in the direction of our friendly bartender.
She has undergone a constant, subtle evolution as a musician across the last 13 years. Her 2009 debut Because I Was in Love was a quiet rapture, documenting the sting of an abusive relationship through tiered melodies and the sparse words that bloomed within them. On that album’s “Tornado,” alongside casual guitars and a lonely tambourine, she embodied an imprisoned cyclone—a force swirling forward, gaining strength with each rotation. Her art, audience, and role as a musical lodestar have only expanded since. She’s worked with indie rock’s upper crust, including Bon Iver, the National, and Angel Olsen. Nick Cave hand-selected her to open his 2013 tour. Fiona Apple covered one of her most beloved songs. Barack Obama is a fan. One time, her immaculate voice made a New Zealand broadcaster weep on live television.
In the years leading up to Van Etten’s last album, 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow, she fell in love with her manager and onetime drummer, Zeke Hutchins, had a son, and decided to leave Brooklyn for the California hills. The record itself was a shrine to those seismic changes. Triumphant but brooding, it was shaded by an abstract dread. Van Etten looked at the sun and feared the storm, knowing that all this bliss could be ripped away.
On We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, her upcoming sixth LP, that threat feels more tangible. She wrote these songs at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, gripped by collective hysteria. At the start of the ordeal, she feared total annihilation. “I was like, ‘It’s the end of the world and nobody’s telling us,’” she confesses over coffee one morning. “I think we all have that feeling sometimes.” She pauses, then assumes the voice of a headshop philosopher: “Shit’s fucked, right?”
Working out of her home studio in Los Angeles, Van Etten found refuge from a few worldly ills, and a front-row seat to others. Wildfires blazed nearby, a constant reminder of the climate crisis. Illustrating the album’s apocalyptic stain, Van Etten rattles off a list of anxieties: “We’re losing our beaches. Everything’s on fire—there’s fire tornadoes. The ticks are out of control. Deer now carry and spread COVID,” she says, a bit fatigued by the end.
As flames ravaged the Sierra Madre mountains, Van Etten stayed indoors with her family at the behest of the National Weather Service. “The sky looked like it was on fire,” she recalls, adding that the air smoldered like coals in the belly of a barbecue. Her home was ultimately unscathed by the flames, but she struggled with an impossible question: How do you nurture your family when the world is literally burning?
On All Wrong’s operatic “Darkness Fades,” Van Etten sings of “writing on the dust”—an allusion to the ash that blanketed her car like poison snow—while the shadowy “Home to Me” parses maternal guilt, a gnawing symptom of her itinerant work. Van Etten wrote the latter song as a letter to her now-5-year-old son, something he can hold in the future, when her absence could kindle resentment. “I’m just like, ‘I wanna be able to give you everything, and I’ve chosen the worst career for stability,’” she says. “I can’t imagine touring so much when he’s in school, but I know I’m making these selfish decisions now that hopefully help us be able to thrive. I wanted to leave him a message to be like, ‘I know it’s hard and I love you, but I’m still home. I’ll come back. Whether I’m here or away, I’m your person.’”
Van Etten often counters the sonic immensity of her new album, stacked with towering choruses, moody synths, and a lingering sense of despair, with lamplit views of the hearth. On the festival-ready “Anything,” she presents an image glowing with the warmth of an Edward Hopper painting, bellowing, “You love him by the stove light in your arms.” Talking about the song’s origin story, she remembers cooking dinner one night, and as the jazz pianist Bud Powell’s “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” filled the kitchen, Hutchins dipped in and led her in a dance. “It was supposed to be our wedding song,” Van Etten says. She and Hutchins were scheduled to get hitched in May of 2020, and they haven’t been able to set a new date since the world overturned. “Shit on shit,” she says, referring to the past few years. “I have my ups and downs in my real life, but my partner’s amazing. He knows when it’s hard, and he just embraces it, and we get through it.” She smiles at the revelation. “Even when I’m a mess.”
On the album’s cover, plumes of gold and carmine smoke billow behind Van Etten’s L.A. home. She stands in the foreground clutching a wool topcoat, walking away from it all. Her hair is freshly short and sharp. For years, Van Etten’s dark locks spilled past her shoulders, but the big chop was partly spurred by a desire to look like “Old Sharon,” as she refers to her former self. Specifically, she wanted to recreate a photograph taken of her in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park around 2005, when she was 24 and working retail at a wine shop. Even the coat she sports on the cover is a custom-made replica; she wore the original so often that a sleeve eventually fell off in the middle of the street. Back then, she was the brilliant upstart. Today, an entire generation of songwriters have pored over Van Etten’s lyrics, tracing the arcs of her heartrending melodies.
Van Etten’s music has come to define a certain class of indie songwriter: an exposed but resilient storyteller who can incubate pain and return it to the world as an instrument for healing. But when I ask her to ponder this influence, she gets a bit squirmy, too humble to acknowledge her place in the vanguard. Her spiritual descendants are more eager to champion her impact. “I don’t know a single musician or songwriter in my world that has not been completely influenced by Sharon Van Etten,” says Mackenzie Scott, who has released five albums of meticulous, slow-burning rock as Torres.
Scott remembers being nurtured by Van Etten when she first migrated from Nashville to Brooklyn in the early 2010s. “Of all the musicians that I looked up to, she was the first one to support me,” Scott says. She laughs as she recalls a vital lesson Van Etten imparted early on, when the two women were at the Lower East Side institution Pianos, drinking and enduring a subpar opener. “I kind of made fun of it,” Scott says, “and Sharon looked at me with a very serious look. She was like, ‘I don’t think there’s any room for discouragement or hating on other musicians. If someone’s trying, that should be enough.’ I will never ever forget that.”
Tennessee songwriter Julien Baker warmly recalls being swept under Van Etten’s wing during early stints in New York—sleeping on her couch and enjoying a homemade egg scramble in the morning. “I got the sense that Sharon was, in a really focused, intentional way, trying to create community,” Baker says, noting the friendship Van Etten kindled between her and Scott, and later, Angel Olsen.
Eclectic 27-year-old artist Shamir discovered Van Etten in high school, drawn to the heft of her song “Serpents.” “It chokes me up every single time,” he says. Last year, Van Etten enlisted Shamir to cover another one of her songs, “DsharpG,” for a reissue of her 2010 album Epic. He was honored but terrified by the opportunity. “It’s clearly such a personal, emotional song,” he says. Reflecting on Van Etten’s relevance, Shamir adds, “I’m sure that there’s direct links from Sharon to Snail Mail, Mitski, or Vagabon. And obviously myself. I’m not sure what any of our careers look like without her.”
Van Etten’s work has a timeless quality, and her influence isn’t limited to younger artists. Americana icon Lucinda Williams, 69, is a longtime admirer of hers, and she was delighted to cover “Save Yourself” for the Epic project: “When I was in the studio recording it, I remember thinking, I wanna make a record that sounds like this!” Williams recalls the first time they met, backstage at one of her gigs. “You kind of just wanna hug her,” she says of Van Etten, who has also pointed to Williams as an inspiration over the years. “I felt like a big sister.” As we wrap up our call, Williams’ gravelly voice perks up: “Anything I can do for my little sister Sharon!”
Sharon Van Etten was raised in suburban New Jersey. She describes her family as “loud” and “always late.” Her parents were constantly rushing around, trying to wrangle all five of their kids into the minivan. (Van Etten is the middle child.) She refers to her childhood self as a “church giggler.” In high school, she took up classic teenage pastimes: smoking cigs and kissing boys in her best friend’s Toyota Corolla.
Van Etten briefly attended Middle Tennessee State University, but the recording industry program didn’t suit her, and she dropped out within a year. In an attempt to get her back home, Van Etten’s parents cleared her bank account. Instead, she got a job and found a surrogate family at Red Rose, a local cafe and music venue in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She also fell in love. That relationship, defined by someone who smothered her and penalized her for performing, has been coiled around Van Etten’s narrative for years. “I thought that’s what love was,” she says now.
Five years after she first arrived, Van Etten left Tennessee abruptly. She packed her things in a duffel bag and showed up on her parents’ doorstep without a word in advance. There were conditions for her to stay back home: She’d get a job, and see a therapist, a practice she now cites as pivotal. In therapy, Van Etten faced the trauma she’d sustained in Murfreesboro, and was encouraged to pursue music seriously. In the early aughts, she relocated to New York City, found work at Astor Wines, and started performing at since-shuttered haunts like Zebulon and Cake Shop. She was so green that she had no idea she was supposed to get paid for some of her earliest gigs.
Her naivety and candor have, as she puts it, “bitten me in the ass,” and over the years she’s learned to draw boundaries. (One of those is keeping her son’s name out of the press.) Navigating increased exposure can also be a tightrope for her. She recalls a recent interaction with a man in a local shop, who was convinced he’d seen her face somewhere. Van Etten skirted the topic as long as she could before her son outed her. “He was like, ‘Mom! You sing!’” she recalls, looking both charmed and put out. When they left the store, Van Etten tried to convey her embarrassment to her kid. “If he doesn’t like my music, and I go back in there, isn’t that weird?” she asked her son. He took a moment to reflect. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “I don’t think he’s gonna like your music!”
At this point, Van Etten sometimes daydreams about a quiet retreat from the stage lights. “I feel like there’ll be a point in my life where I’m just gonna fade away in the middle of nowhere,” she says. In this post-retirement idyll, she’ll sit on the piano at a local bar, singing jazz standards in jeans and a T-shirt while Hutchins backs her on drums. Her alter ego even has a name: Diane. I ask if she covets this identity because of her public presence, or if she’d want to reinvent herself no matter what. “Maybe both,” she admits. “I get embarrassed when I meet people now and tell them what I do. ‘I’m a singer’ feels weird and extravagant to say. I just wish I could be like, ‘I’m a barista.’”
Does she feel guilty? “A little bit. I don’t want to hide my identity, like I’m ashamed. I just wish I had a normal job.” Being a singer-songwriter whose work is starkly autobiographical, she adds, can be uncomfortable. “It’s so much myself.” If she could go back and rewrite one line of her own history, she would have marketed herself with a band name instead of the one on her driver’s license. When she was starting out, she remembers thinking, I don’t want people to think I have a band, and then they come see me and I’m solo. She laughs at the logic. “But nobody knew who I was anyway.”
One afternoon in February, Van Etten stands in a red velvet suit at Manhattan’s Canoe Studios, a sun-drenched space on the far west end of 26th Street. It’s Fashion Week, and the roomful of elaborately dressed revelers are circling luxury brand The Academy’s fall collection like vultures. Behind me, a young woman muses, “There’s probably so many famous people here!”
By the window, Van Etten plays “Give Out” from her 2012 album Tramp, the Hoboken, New Jersey skyline stretching in the distance. “I’m biting my lip, as confidence is speaking to me,” she sings, her face angled slightly away from the crowd. With her slicked hair and pointed white boots, Van Etten seems beamed over from a Lynchian nightclub. There’s something especially vulnerable about her performance, so spare amid the chattering room. For the first few songs, she holds the microphone stand against her torso, her eyes lightly shut. A few spectators slip away from the bouclé jackets and tailored vests, enraptured by her voice. As the sun sets, the city lights blink on like marquee bulbs.
The next day, Van Etten tells me she was nervous performing at the fashion show. “It’s definitely something I’ve gotten better at, but I’m still that little girl that wants to hide behind my hair.” She had a vision of sprawling across the piano but remained upright, fearing a wardrobe malfunction. Did playing to a crowd of distracted strangers remind her of early gigs? “Yeah,” she says, a little winded by the realization. “No shame on anyone there talking, but it’s just so hard to do. I remember what that feels like. ‘People aren’t here for you!’ It’s good to be reminded.”
Throughout our conversations, Van Etten reflects on her former self almost as if she’s reminiscing about a younger sibling. Old Sharon dyed her cropped hair a different color every month, rode a low-rider bike to work, and scraped by on coffee shop wages. She smoked two packs a day and drank a lot of whiskey. “I don’t even know how I still have a voice,” she says. “Old Sharon was a little reckless.”
She talks about her toxic relationship in Murfreesboro, how she would sneak out to play shows when her boyfriend was on tour. He had decided that her songs were too personal, and chastised her for performing them. “I still get so angry at myself because it’s like, why did I stay?” Since then, she’s decided that relationships don’t have to ebb and crash like tidal waves, that she can accept love from a supportive partner. That she can trust herself. Van Etten used to view self-assurance as a foreign object, something wielded by another. Today, it is firmly in her grasp.
Visual Direction / Production by Jenny Aborn. Styled by Taryn Bensky. Makeup by Aimi Osada. Hair by Barbara Thompson. Photo Assistant: Theodore Samuels. Sharon Van Etten in Kes top, Khaite trousers, Nili Lotan Blazer, earrings and necklace by Fig. 7.
