New Millennial Pop-Folk Blues

Sharon Van Etten, Remind Me Tomorrow

“Sitting at the bar, I told you everything,” Sharon Van Etten sings mournfully to open this album. “You said ‘Holy shit. You almost died.’” Van Etten doesn’t much explain what “everything” means in this song, “I Told You Everything.” But it clearly involves a youthful sexual experience that leaves her shaken and scarred, yet, she implies, compelled to eternally repeat. That sets this album’s mingled themes of dread and disappointment.

If, like me, you encountered this album through its advance singles, particularly “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen,” you probably anticipated these themes. Heavy with melancholy and a sense of mortality, these songs reflect an artist who, thirty-seven years old when she recorded them, recognized an unmet need for pop music with a grown-up audience. But they don’t really reflect the album’s larger soundscape, which is unremittingly grim, verging on bleak.

Previously noted for a substantially acoustic singer-songwriter sound, Van Etten’s fifth album shifts to an atmospheric electronica sound notable for its minimal guitars. And by “atmospheric,” I mean a minor-key bass chord on Farfisa organ runs through nearly this entire album, making your teeth vibrate like a 1980s horror movie soundtrack. This chord is so understated, though, that you may only notice its persistence on the fourth or fifth listen.

Yet this isn’t a horrific album. Sad and pensive, perhaps, often preoccupied with the past despite the pressing imminence of the present, but the only scary thing is how we interpret it. I noticed this on “Jupiter 4,” which has lyrics of unalloyed love—”Our love’s for real, how’d it take a long, long time to let us feel?”—played ironically against chords that sound like a breakup song.

Put another way, Van Etten does the opposite of Hank Williams, who often played gloomy lyrics against bouncy tunes. Van Etten, like Williams, puts her words and music in direct opposition. Listening to this album, you may feel a growing sense of dread. Not only that somber chord, but Van Etten’s contralto voice, which contrasts with the music but doesn’t oppose it. Her voice seems separate from the instrumentation.

Sharon Van Etten

This has good and bad qualities. This album’s first three tracks are so uniform in sound and tempo that, if you’re listening with half an ear while driving or studying, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s one fourteen-minute song. Only with “Comeback Kid” does the sound become differentiated enough to feel a change. This is also where Van Etten’s vocals become distinct enough to follow without a lyrics sheet.

After that point, however, everything opens up. Her dynamic changes, and her voice becomes a more prominent instrument. Though still atmospheric and dense, she becomes more willing to step up or fade back, appropriate to the message she conveys. Yet she never loses that reverse-Hank Williams trick, because her songs remain sonically stark, regardless of how optimistic or despondent her words.

Please understand, this isn’t a timeless sound. My previous reference to 1980s soundtrack music isn’t flippant. Her foregrounding of Farfisa or synthesizer on every track harkens back to the music that dominated the soundscape of Van Etten’s childhood. As the oldest Millennials approach forty, but frequently still can’t afford a down-payment on a house, this lingering backwards gaze will touch their situation concisely.

Hearing this album as a unit, one wonders whether Van Etten intended it to announce her planned retirement. The single “Seventeen,” with its themes of generational angst, became her first to hit any Billboard chart. Like most Millennials, she both is and isn’t an adult, with all the responsibilities of a career and new motherhood, but a paucity of trust from her economy. One suspects she’s touched a nerve.

Motherhood in particular lingers throughout this album, though usually not overtly. On the final track, “Stay,” she muses, “Imagining when you’re inside, when you make those kicks inside. Don’t want to hurt you. Don’t want to run away from myself.” The prospect of caring for a helpless life, when her generation frequently can’t care for itself, scares her. But, she continues, “You won’t let me go astray.” Adulthood persists, regardless.

Pop music often requires artists to remain eternally teenaged and rebellious, because kids have more disposable income. But Van Etten’s compositions reflect a generation that never had economic stability enough to rebel, and now faces impending middle age. I find a kindred spirit in her: grown-up, yet still carrying the unfulfilled impulses of youth. This album starts slowly, sure. But by the end, it’s pop for a newly older generation.