For Sharon Van Etten, live shows are all about “feeling connection and sharing energy“. You’d think that would be a priority for all performers. But, by the time they can headline venues as big as Brixton Academy, many prefer efficiency. At the level where the lighting cues are seemingly as important as the music, passion is replaced by precision, off the cuff chat by carefully rehearsed dialogue.
Certainly, there’s a need for professionalism. Fans pay a lot of money to see the artists they love play the songs they love. But slick doesn’t have to mean soulless. Just ask someone like Nick Cave or Patti Smith. Even while performing the hits the way people want to hear them, they can make even an arena seem intimate, forming what feels like a personal bond with 20,000 strangers.
Van Etten gets that balance right too. As a performer, she’s fully engaged from the first note. During show opener Headspace — the most immediate track from sublime new album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong — she moves around the stage slowly but deliberately, physically and vocally matching the intensity of the relentless bassline that propels the song.
Next up: No One’s Easy To Love, which masks a soul-destroying vocal (“Don’t look back, my dear, just say you tried”) with an irresistible groove, is punctuated by rhythmic posturing and arm gestures. They only become more pronounced during the triumphant, soaring Comeback Kid. Even on the hottest day of the year so far, when simply standing inside Brixton Academy feels like running around a sauna in a trench coat, Van Etten’s giving these songs her all, leaning into them and the audience both literally and figuratively.
There’s no free-wheeling between songs either. Once she’s strapped on an acoustic guitar, she prefaces the desperate pandemic-inspired Anything (refrain “I couldn’t feel anything”) with an introduction as succinct, personal, and intense as the song itself. Promising to speak more later, Van Etten does just that when introducing another new track. “I’m not hot, you’re hot,” she laughs, before sharing the origins of Come Back: lost in the domesticity of cleaning and laundry, she’d forgotten the importance of communicating and connecting (that word again) with the person she loves. Dedicating it to her partner, who’s here tonight, only amplifies the message. And, as the song evolves from deeply personal, insecure vocal-and-acoustic-guitar ballad to confident, full-blown majesty, we all share in her emotional transformation over five minutes.
And, when she later reveals that tonight’s her biggest headlining show yet, we all share her joy, cheering impossibly loudly before she retraces her steps to get here and, clearly very moved, sincerely thanking everyone for “still caring”.
Even the band introduction feels similarly elevated. Van Etten doesn’t just follow the name-and-point convention. There’s a short reflection on her “road family” before each of the four superb musicians (drummer Jorge Andre, keyboard player and backing singer Lou Tides, guitarist Charley Damski, and bassist Devin Hoff) gets a personal intro and a hug. It doesn’t stop there. Crew members — from the lighting designer to the front of house engineer — get their own shout outs too. And later her young son comes out from the side of the stage for a hug of his own.
There’s a genuine authenticity to all this emotion that doesn’t just affect us in the audience; it bleeds into the performances too. Every Time The Sun Comes Up, one of just a few songs not taken from her two most recent albums, is faster and notably far more ecstatic than the rendition on Are We There. Mistakes, dedicated to all bad dancers, is positively jubilant, its swinging abandon only amped up by Van Etten’s vamping (including Saturday Night Fever finger-in-the-air pose) in front of the Twin Peaks red velvet curtain backdrop.
Darkish, performed solo with just an acoustic guitar to accompany her subtle, nuanced vocal, pulls us right in with its intimacy, silencing a crowd that, just minutes before, had been cheering for an encore. Those cheers return even louder when Van Etten and her band launch into Seventeen. A euphoric finale, with its “la-la-la” refrain custom built for singalongs, it’s another opportunity for the singer to commune with her audience. Coming right to the foot of the stage, she belts out the lines “I know what you’re gonna be, I know that you’re gonna be, You’re crumbling up just to see, Afraid that you’ll be just like me” as if she’s addressing each of us directly, the connection holds right up to the very end.
Sharon Van Etten
Brixton Academy, London
17th June 2022
Photo: Simon Reed
- This article originally appeared on Louder Than War.
