Review: Sharon Van Etten confirms she’s a witch leaning towards the light at Iowa City’s Infinite Dream fest

Sharon Van Etten wants to look into your eyes.

I know because she looked in mine when she came to Iowa City to play the first show of her U.S. tour earlier this month. Before she took the stage at the Infinite Dream Festival with her band The Attachment Theory, she joined Nightbitch author Rachel Yoder in conversation at the Old Capitol on Sept. 17. You’ll be able to hear the whole conversation on the relaunch of Yoder’s podcast The Fail Safe.

Yoder asked Van Etten how she came to music. Growing up in New Jersey as one of five kids, Van Etten’s parents shared their love of music with their children. “We took a lot of family road trips and had a lot of sing-alongs on the very few records we could all agree on, which tended to be male-centric, with harmonies — and as a woman I couldn’t hit the melodies so I constantly sang the harmonies by nature, and found a voice.” 

As a kid, she stole her brother’s guitar while he was out of the house and learned to play in secret, trying to write her own songs.

“I bled from learning how to play the guitar,” she said, “and he saw the blood on his guitar and took me under his wing.”

“It seems very fitting,” Yoder laughed, “for Sharon Van Etten to say I was found out by the blood on the guitar strings.”

When Van Etten sings in the second-person, it feels like she’s singing only to you. On “Seventeen,” she knows you better than anyone: “I know what you wanna say,” as if she could see right inside you. Yoder asked, “for the poets in the crowd,” who Van Etten was talking to in her songs when she addressed a “you.”

“My song ‘Seventeen’ I didn’t realize until later … I was talking to every version of myself,” Van Etten shared. “When I perform that live, I try to make eye contact with as many people as possible — to make sure that they’re having that conversation with themselves, and that I see it — that I see the multiple layers of a person, or try to.”

I’ve listened to Sharon Van Etten for over a decade. I first heard her voice in my freshman college apartment, where I was always semi-falling apart. At the time, Van Etten’s melodic whispers were a balm, a spooky solace, a beckoning to mystery.

“Do you identify as a witch?” Yoder asked.

“Yes,” Van Etten said.

From my wooden chair, I raised a hand and asked her how the person writing the music had changed, spiritually and emotionally, from her earliest solo work, 15 years ago.

Van Etten looked right in my eyes. She had been speaking in my ear for so long, her music striking something that was always nearly about to spark a fire that would save me. 

“Younger versions of myself had emotions that felt unruly and unidentifiable and unrelatable,” she said. “But I’ve learned how to harness it. Growing up, I accepted more love into my life and I trusted more people.”

Still holding my gaze, she described the change. “I still very much write out of a dark emotional time, but in the editing and sharing and collaborating I try to lean more toward the light.”

It makes sense that her new band is called “Attachment Theory.” The songs on their first album are all about how to connect, how to treat ourselves and the world, the people we love — asking questions, leaning in, rather than giving one’s power over to a lover, or the world.

Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory’s new self-titled record was written collaboratively. Van Etten started jamming with her band, all in a circle, and learned to conduct. 

“I just walked up to the mic and said, ‘Who wants to live forever?’” she said about writing the first song on the album, “and everyone started falling in … I was learning how to move my hands and talk about where the melody should go.”

Later that night on stage I watched her hands conduct not only sounds but energy. She was joyful and so in her body. She enacted the songs like an elevated mime, telling us stories, but more than that: she was making real life as she sang, like her every gesture were a spontaneous generation.

Performing “Afterlife,” she made physical contact with every member of the band, her long black dress flowing as she connected in sweet, almost private moments, one after another: “Will you see me in the afterlife?” Each was a little duet inside the song.

When she sang “Seventeen,” she looked into my eyes one more time. As the song began, she located me with everyone pressed against the rail at the front of the Englert. She smiled, devilishly, sweetly, and pointed, “I know what you wanna say.”

Then later in the song, after all the la la la las (each of which she used as an occasion to point to a different person in the pit), she crawled out of the light.

Crouched like a gremlin on the edge of the stage, reaching out a claw of a hand, she pointed to a friend beside me. In full darkness, at the lip of the stage, her whole self the same shadow shade as her dress, like a bat, she screamed, “I know what you’re gonna be, I know what you’re gonna be.”

“Is pursuing a music career selfish?” Sharon asked and promptly answered her own question at the Old Capitol.

“On a bad day I’m standing on stage and I wonder, why am I asking so much of all of these people? And so I question the reasons why I’m doing it. On a good night I realize I’m creating a space for people to commune and share ideas and feel safe in a world that feels like it’s crumbling.”