“Been writing on the dust,” she all but roars over the uneasy martial rumble of “Darkness Fades,” a reference to the wildfire ashes that caked her car in the driveway. She morphs between disembodied texture-as she sings about craving destruction, she becomes just another weightless shade of oblivion amid the cosmic winds of “Born”-and stinging, bewildered focus. But it’s also lyrically one of her most insular. It’s her most epic record her tenaciously beautiful voice is streaked like burning embers through the terrible black wildfire smoke she watched creep toward her new family home. Yet Van Etten has enthusiastically characterized We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong as one, and despite its declarative title, she embraces the complications of the past two years: how this rupture has affected her relationships, her priorities and responsibilities, and her capacity for hope. The idea of a “pandemic record” already seems passé to many musicians apparently determined to avoid the association. What has remained constant-and compelling-is her instinct to use music to both shape and challenge her domestic environment. The changing ambience plots the material distance she has traveled in 14 years, from her DIY beginnings as a young woman fleeing an abusive relationship and claiming a space of her own, to a mother, partner, and beloved songwriter. There is a thread between “Darkish” and Van Etten’s earliest CD-R recordings, a set of similarly intimate vignettes on which you could often hear a train rattling past the window of her tiny New York apartment. It’s the sparest track on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, which Van Etten produced in her new home studio in Los Angeles: just open-ended chords of inquiry on her acoustic guitar, buoying a similar openness to her steady but inconclusive meditation on what it takes to nurture the home you always yearned for. All through “Darkish,” a song toward the end of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album, birds twitter away in the background.
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