All through “Darkish,” a song toward the end of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album, birds twitter away in the background. 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. 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. 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. What has remained constant—and compelling—is her instinct to use music to both shape and challenge her domestic environment.
The idea of a “pandemic record” already seems passé to many musicians apparently determined to avoid the association. 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. 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. But it’s also lyrically one of her most insular. 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. “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. Here, in the confrontation between fatalism and futility, she captures the absurdity and anxiety of having one’s small life buffeted by dramatic external forces.
With every record, Van Etten has managed the difficult feat of expanding her sound without smothering her appeal: After 2014’s fluid Are We There, her 2019 album Remind Me Tomorrow embraced distortion and damned atmospherics. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is a raging bonfire, and although its scale is monumental, it boasts a revealing depth of field, every dramatic arc finely detailed. The tension doesn’t break until the third song, “I’ll Try,” when a hard, sharp drum roll lets loose a staticky ooze and a crescendo that sparkles with a little new-wave glitter; meanwhile, she considers helplessness in the face of fear with sincerity and a sneer. The album’s choruses are fierce, primal pleas, though Van Etten knows that want is never that straightforward, and surrounds them with verses mired in distance and confusion. “You come home to me,” she yearns on “Home to Me,” a future message for her young son that anticipates him resenting her professional commitments, and confronts the reality of who needs who more.