Everyone’s Going Solo; Sharon Van Etten Formed A Band

In the latest BrooklynVegan cover story, Sharon Van Etten discusses finding the direction for her new album by doing something she’s never done before, forming a band. The result: a reckoning with mortality over the loudest, hardest, most overtly post-punk songs she’s written to date.

“I’ve always wanted to be in a band,” Sharon Van Etten says. In fact, she almost auditioned for a local screamo band when she was attending high school in Clinton, New Jersey in the late 1990s, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was back before she had her driver’s license, and when her mom heard her practicing along to the band’s demo tape, she said “there’s no way in hell I’m taking you.”

After spending her twenties dealing with imposter syndrome and an oft-publicized relationship with an abusive partner who discouraged her from pursuing music, Sharon finally introduced herself to the world with her 2009 debut album Because I Was in Love. It’s a deeply compelling album fueled by little more than Sharon’s acoustic guitar and her evocative voice, but it wouldn’t be long until the album’s singer/songwriter format started to become too limiting. “When you’re a ‘female guitar player that sings,’,” she says in a mocking tone, “everybody wants to label that. But it’s like, I had Fad Gadget in my car, you know?”

Over 15 years and six albums later, Sharon’s finally rocking with a band and living out her Fad Gadget (and Joy Division and The Cure and Pylon and Nine Inch Nails) dreams with Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory. She gradually started bringing more musicians into the studio with her over the years, and she began touring with a consistent live band after meeting her longtime-but-now-former guitarist/bassist Doug Keith around the time of her 2010 sophomore album Epic, but she was always still operating as a solo artist with backing musicians. Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is not that. You’ve heard of band members going solo later in their careers, but The Attachment Theory finds Sharon doing the opposite, kind of like David Bowie did 20+ years into his career with Tin Machine. Sharon Van Etten is going band.

The seeds for both The Attachment Theory’s existence and the synth-rock/post-punk-infused exterior of their new self-titled album were first planted around the time of Sharon’s 2019 album Remind Me Tomorrow. Sharon had begun transitioning from primarily playing guitar into playing more of the piano on 2014’s Are We There, and when she met up with producer John Congleton to discuss her vision for Remind Me Tomorrow, she told him her three main influences for the album were Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, Portishead, and Suicide, sending the two of them down a synthesizer-fueled rabbithole.

“I put down the guitar because I felt very limited,” Sharon says. “Like, I always go to that chord, these are all the chords that I know, am I just rewriting the same songs I’ve always written? When you start playing a chord [on a piano], you have space. And a synthesizer is even more space… it can be dreamy but also aggressive, depending on what you’re playing, and so I think that kind of opened my world melodically.”

When it came to figuring out how she was going to execute the Remind Me Tomorrow songs in a live setting, she found Charley Damski through “one of those apps for creative people trying to network” and brought him in as a multi-instrumentalist and musical director. Charley introduced her to drummer Jorge Balbi, and she met bassist Devra Hoff through Xiu Xiu leader Jamie Stewart, who played a number of the synth parts and other instruments on Remind Me Tomorrow. Sharon and her band developed a lot of chemistry as they took stadium-sized anthems like “Seventeen” and “Comeback Kid” around the world, but COVID hit right after their first year of touring came to a close, altering her musical trajectory once again.

At this point, Sharon had amassed an even greater collection of keyboards and synths, and she used the period of isolation to write 2022’s We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, a dark, immersive album that served as a stark reflection of the altered world we all suddenly found ourselves living in. Charley Damski, Jorge Balbi, Devra Hoff, and other musicians were brought in to perform on the album, but much of the collaboration that happened between them occurred remotely. The chemistry and the liveliness of the Remind Me Tomorrow tour was forced to take a backseat.

So, when Sharon and her band finally were able to resume touring, she thought a good way to reconnect would be to rent a house with a studio–Gatos Trail Recording Studio in Yucca Valley–rather than doing a rehearsal week at a practice space where everyone goes home at the end of the day. “I thought it’d be nicer to have more of a literal band camp,” she says with a laugh. The musical getaway also gave everyone a better chance to get to know Teeny Lieberson, who Sharon brought in as a new keyboardist and backing vocalist for the We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong tour. She’d been a fan of Teeny since her Here We Go Magic days and continued following her as she formed the band TEEN and later launched her solo project Lou Tides. They’d shared stages a few times, “but I was too shy to reach out to her until I was looking for a synth player/singer, and she just popped in my head,” Sharon says. “I don’t know why after all these years I was finally ready but I reached out to her on Instagram. I just DMed her, I was like, ‘I know this is kind of random and out of the blue but I’m doing this project, would you be interested?’ And she was like ‘Yes! Let’s hop on the phone.'”

Feeling “really inspired by the sonic palette that [they] had developed” once the band rehearsed their material for the tour, Sharon did something she’d never done before; she asked the band to jam. “I felt very safe and very inspired and not judged at all, and I just asked if we could just jam, without it having to be anything,” she recalls. “I didn’t really have any intentions other than to just kind of cleanse the pallet. And within one or two hours, like effortlessly, we wrote two songs that ended up becoming ‘I Can’t Imagine’ and ‘Southern Life.'”

After leaving “band camp” and returning home to her family, Sharon told her partner (and ex-drummer) Zeke about the jam sessions and realized she might’ve just stumbled into the direction of her next album. “I think creatively for me, this next step would be to learn how to write with other people, in a band setting,” she remembers telling him. “It was really inspiring. I felt like it lifted my melodies to different heights.”

The next break they had after tour, Sharon booked another week at Gatos Trail with the band, and this time the intention off the bat was to keep writing and jamming with them. “We were on fire,” she says. “I think we wrote like fourteen songs in a week. It was one of those things where I didn’t know I was ready until it was happening; it wasn’t this big, like, ‘Now it’s my band record.’ [It was] like, ‘Well, this is where we are right now.'”

If We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong reflected the isolation and the apocalyptic doom of the 18-month-long global lockdown, then Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory reflects the release of all the pent-up energy of that period, the anger directed at a world that’s still full of apocalyptic doom, and just a glimmer of hope. The album explores the intensified experience of navigating a world of unrest as a member of the Sandwich Generation–the nickname given to adults who are simultaneously raising children and caring for their aging parents–resulting in recurring themes of death, the afterlife, mortality, and even the thought of immortality. The first line on the album, inspired by anti-aging technology, is “Who wants to live forever?”

The songs are powered by a propulsive post-punk backdrop that moves from the Cure-ish layers of “Idiot Box” to the proto-shoegaze of “Indio” to the hard-edged funk-punk of “I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way),” all delivered with a kind of telepathic momentum that only comes from a group of people feeding off of each other. Soaring above it all is Sharon’s voice, towering enough to earn comparisons to Kate Bush, Bruce Springsteen, or Bono while sounding like nobody on this earth besides Sharon Van Etten herself. The secret weapon, though–as with so many great post-punk bands–is Devra Hoff and her gut-punching basslines.

To help The Attachment Theory put the lively sounds of their jam sessions to tape, Sharon reached out to Marta Salogni–a prolific producer whose wide-ranging résumé includes work with Björk, Depeche Mode, black midi, Animal Collective, Frank Ocean, FKA twigs, and countless others–who she met on a whim after being seated at the same table at a friend’s wedding. “She’s a great storyteller,” Sharon says, “and the way she talked about music made me love it more.”

“She had this particular story about Brian Wilson where one of her first times in California, her friend let her borrow a car and she drove it to this area where he goes and gets his ice cream, and she was like, ‘Maybe I’ll see him at the counter.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, he wasn’t there, and the server probably thought I was crazy but I put a $20 bill in an envelope with a note in it, and I was like, ‘Next time he comes in, buy him an ice cream and just tell him thank you for everything.” And she’s like, ‘I’d like to believe that one day that Brian Wilson ate an ice cream and read my note and just knew, just got the letter.’ To which I was like: ‘I love you so much, whoever you are.'”

Sharon told Marta that she wanted to make a truly collaborative band album, with the band performing live in a room and each member having a voice during the production process, and she says that Marta made that a priority and had the patience for it in a way that not every producer would. Marta also shares Sharon’s love of synthesizers, and helped the band find the perfect studio to record in: The Church in London, which was owned by the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart in the 1980s and 1990s and used during the creations of Eurythmics’ own Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Depeche Mode’s Violator, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Ride’s Going Blank Again, Spiritalized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, Radiohead’s OK Computer, and other classic albums. (More recently, it was bought and refurbished by Paul Epworth and has since been used by Adele, Beyoncé & Jay-Z, Lana Del Rey, The 1975, The Weeknd, and others.)

Sharon, Teeny, Devra, and Jorge all set up together in the middle of the room–sans Charley Damski, who played a prominent role in the writing process but parted ways after getting a gig as a touring member of Lana Del Rey’s band. With the studio’s board also in the room, Marta was right there with them, making eye contact, communicating with the band in real time, and adding to all the chemistry. With Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory being a self-described “very London record,” The Church’s atmosphere suited these songs in more ways than one. On top of The Attachment Theory pulling influence from the London post-punk movement that The Church has been long connected to, the music they wrote, Sharon says, “felt kind of dark, it felt rainy, it felt cold, but it felt aggressive,” like the city itself.

**

Sharon’s lived in NYC, she now lives in LA, she made this record in London, and on the Tuesday before the album’s release, she returned to her birthplace of New Jersey to bring The Attachment Theory (including touring guitarist/keyboardist Shanna Polley) to The Stone Pony in Asbury Park for her first-ever headlining home state show. (That’s where the photos in this article were taken.) After years of building albums in studios and later translating her songs for the stage, Sharon finally found herself in the reverse situation, with a batch of gritty, intense rock songs written by a full band who visibly couldn’t wait to get up on stage and play them together. The album and this already-energetic tour ushers in a natural yet distinct evolution for Sharon, an artist who already has a legacy set in stone but still has just as much hunger at every turn as she did in her early days.

“I feel I’m constantly finding myself,” she says. “I’m going to keep searching and keep trying new things. I’m still on the journey. I’m still on the slow-build, grass trail, constantly digging.”

**

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory — 2025 Tour Dates
Fri. Feb. 28 – Oslo, NO @ Rockefeller *
Sat. Mar. 1 – Stockholm, SE @ Fållan *
Sun. Mar. 2 – Copenhagen, DK @ Vega *
Tue. Mar. 4 – Berlin, DE @ Astra Kulturhaus *
Thu. Mar. 6 – Paris, FR @ Le Trianon *
Fri. Mar. 7 – Antwerp, BE @ De Roma *
Sat. Mar. 8 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso *
Mon. Mar. 10 – London, UK @ Royal Albert Hall *
Tue. Mar. 11 – Manchester, UK @ Albert Hall *
Wed. Mar. 12 – Glasgow, UK @ Barrowland Ballroom *
Thu. Apr. 24 – Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern ^
Fri. Apr. 25 – Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl ^
Sat. Apr. 26 – Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel ^
Mon. Apr. 28 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club ^
Wed. Apr. 30 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer ^
Thu. May 1 – Boston, MA @ Roadrunner ^
Fri. May 2 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel ^
Mon. May 5 – Detroit, MI @ Saint Andrew’s Hall ^
Tue. May 6 – Toronto, ON @ History ^
Thu. May 8 – Madison, WI @ The Sylvee ^
Fri. May 9 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed ^
Sat. May 10 – St. Paul, MN @ Palace Theatre ^
Mon. May 12 – Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre ^
Tue. May 13 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Metro Music Hall ^
Thu. May 15 – Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile ^
Fri. May 16 – Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile ^
Sat. May 17 – Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre ^
Sun. May 18 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall ^
Wed. May 21 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern ^

# with She Keeps Bees
* with special guest Nabihah Iqbal
^ with Love Spells

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory by Sharon Van Etten