Sharon Van Etten

0:08It was on tour with Megafon. We were in Montreal staying at their friend's house and they woke me up and they showed me a video of Justin Vernon, Aaron and Bryce Desner covering the song a lot more at their festival in Cincinnati called Music Now. And I just woke up in tears and because literally when I was finishing that tour I was going to finish like start recording epic. So my friends encouraged me to write them to see if they were going to be around and they all showed enthusiasm but they were all working on the records that

0:54are currently out. So they said sorry I'm really busy but when you're ready with new songs Aaron said let me know I have a studio in my garage in my backyard if you ever want to work on stuff together. So I kept that in my mind like in the back of my mind but in the meantime we've kept in touch. I've sent him demos I was working on and we met up for coffee a couple times and just talked about our philosophies and recording and collaborating and how to build on songs and things like that and we had a lot in common and we grew a friendship and by the time he had accumulated about 20 of my demos he just started laughing and said we already have your album we just need to record it now we don't need to demo anything so we just started recording. We experiment with speeding things up slowing them down doing them more acoustic as opposed

1:53to electric or vice versa and learning how to build upon songs like I'm wrong towards the end of the record which is a really open-ended you know talking about the drones really open-ended kind of a song there's a lot of space in there to fiddle with your pedals and to do vocal sounds and things like that so we just try we try new things I have songs that I never really played out before that they're encouraging me to try playing and we get a little rehearsal time in before the show and try to play the songs for people that we don't normally play so there are songs that I haven't ever been really confident about before but my band really likes trying new things and pushing themselves.

2:54I get a little nervous sometimes that my songs are too personal for people to relate to and as a challenge as a writer I want to learn how to write a better story to separate myself a little bit more from it in a way to protect myself but also to have more people be able to relate to my songs but I've been listening to a lot of Nick Cave lately and the Murder Ballads record and Boatman's Call are such beautiful records and he has a really amazing narrative and I wish I was descriptive in that way instead of all solely emotional sometimes. I feel like the older that I get I care less what other people think and I'm more confident

3:46in what I'm doing and I you know in my life I try to better myself by reading and watching movies and things like that and I hope that shows in my writing as well but I also funny thing about songwriting is that it's kind of like time traveling so because I wrote the songs in one time I recorded them in another time so it's almost like recording is reinterpreting that moment and then now performing them and there are three different head spaces and if I am becoming more and more confident then sometimes it messes with my head about where I'm at and where I was when I recorded it where I was when I wrote it and I just feel my like I'm just growing all the time.

4:34So we do something called Five Questions, Five Quick Questions, One More Dancers, Roder Studio, Leninger McCartney, when you hear a song what usually hits you first lyrics melody or rhythm. Melody. Song you've written you're most proud of. Oh I can. That was quick and in one word Sharon Venet. Nerd. Thank you. Amazing.