Sharon Van Etten was born in Clinton, New Jersey the daughter of a history teacher mother, Janice Van Etten, and a computer programmer father, Stephen Van Etten. Sharon Van Etten is the middle of five children, an older brother, two sisters Jessica and Laura, and a younger brother Pete. Her parents had a "big vinyl collection. We would always listen to it. We went to shows all the time of their favourite musicians and my brothers and sisters and ... See more [+] I would pretend we were in a band together." Van Etten grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, where she lived at the corner of Prospect and Vreeland streets, attending Yantacaw Elementary School. She sang in choir and studied clarinet and violin and piano. Van Etten started singing in church choir. "My mom brought me to church every Sunday, and, I'm not a very religious person, but that was the one plus to going. I really liked the feeling of a lot of people singing together. The reverberations felt really amazing at a young age, and I didn't really understand it yet." Her family later moved to Clinton, New Jersey, where she attended North Hunterdon High School. Van Etten said that although she sang in choir starting from 6th grade, she didn't begin to take it more seriously until high school. She taught herself how to play guitar: "I started writing songs, I guess, in high school when I was learning how to play guitar." Van Etten credits choir with teaching her how to sing harmonies. In 6th grade she was part of a choir called The Mini Singers. Van Etten said that "it was a bunch of kids singing pop songs. I really, really liked that. It was the first time I learned how to sing harmonies." Van Etten was part of the high school choir group, The Madrigals, who performed a lot of classical pieces. Van Etten credits this training with how she learned how to write harmony. She moved to Tennessee to attend Middle Tennessee State University and studied recording, but dropped out of college after a year. Van Etten ending up working at the Red Rose, a coffee and record shop and music venue in Murfreesboro, for about five years. Van Etten said she was writing songs then, but did not perform publicly. Van Etten said the boyfriend she was with at the time wasn't very supportive of her so she had to hide the fact that she wrote songs because he didn't think she was good enough to perform in front of people. After six years of being told that "her music was terrible," Van Etten left the abusive relationship in the middle of the night and moved back to New Jersey to live with her parents. With their support, she said, "they took me under their wing and let me get my act back together." Career After moving back home to New Jersey and working at Perryville Wine and Spirits, Van Etten saved up enough money to move to Brooklyn in 2005, where she was encouraged by Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio to pursue a career in music. Malone said she'd approached him at one of his shows and gave him a CD-R of her songs. Van Etten was friends with Malone's brother, Colin, in high school. Malone normally doesn't listen to fan submissions, but "he put Van Etten's album on and fell in love. 'She's been silencing rooms in drunken bars for a long time,' Malone says. 'Really very arresting. She just sends me.'" Malone ended up playing Van Etten on his Guest DJ set for NPR's All Songs Considered. Van Etten released a number of hand-designed and self-released recordings prior to her debut studio recording. These were hand-painted designs she would sell on her website, as well as postcards, and sometimes t-shirts. She also worked as a publicist at Ba Da Bing Records in order to learn how the music industry worked, but didn't tell them that she was writing and performing music. She got the job via a friend, Alicia Savoy, who she went to college with in Tennessee. She started out as an intern and worked her way up to being a full-time publicist. Van Etten said that Jeffrey Davison, a deejay on WFMU who has a show called Shrunken Planet, was the first person to play one of her homemade CDs on his show. Van Etten has become close to Davison and his wife, who have her over for record listening evenings. Because I Was in Love Van Etten's official debut, Because I Was in Love, was released on May 26, 2009, on Language of Stone, and was manufactured and distributed by Drag City. In 2008, Van Etten had gone on tour opening for Meg Baird, a founding member and lead female vocalist for the Philadelphia folk rock band Espers. During the tour Van Etten met Baird's Espers band-mate Greg Weeks. Weeks and Van Etten co-produced and recorded Because I Was in Love at Hexham Head studio in Philadelphia. Van Etten kept "the album's arrangements minimal and direct, augmenting her voice and guitar with only the occasional splash of organ, brushed cymbals, or multi-tracked vocal harmonies." While Van Etten sang vocals and played acoustic guitar and tambourine, Weeks played electric guitar, organ, and wood blocks. epic On September 21, 2010, she released her second album epic on Ba Da Bing Records. The record features Meg Baird, Cat Martino, and Jessica Larrabee on backing vocals. NPR described it as possessing "a fuller sound compared to the super-spare arrangements on her first two self-produced albums, but epic still feels incredibly intimate, with lots of room to breathe and unfold." epic features the song "Love More," which is characterized by its use of harmonium and guitarist and arranger, Jeffrey Kish on guitar with the Space Echo. On the title of the record: "But the joke was, if someone was hearing me for the first time, they're not going to feel like it's a big deal, but to me it was a really big deal. So I called it epic but with a lowercase "e," to kind of make a joke about how it's really big but it's not that big. It's a big change for me, but if it's your first experience, you're not even gonna know. I don't know, it's a joke that, I think, nobody thinks is funny, but I liked the fact that it's a lowercase 'e,' and that it got approved, and it's really this kind of tiny record in an epic way to me. And it kind of marks the change of me having a band, and I'm really excited about it. But it's all lowercase." Tramp Sharon Van Etten (January 6, 2013) Her third studio album, Tramp, was released on February 7, 2012, on Jagjaguwar. Tramp was produced by The National's Aaron Dessner, and recorded in his studio from October 2010 to July 2011. The album features guest appearances from Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner, Matt Barrick, Zach Condon, and Jenn Wasner. In regard to the album's guest appearances, Van Etten told American Songwriter magazine, "People may think 'They got this star-studded cast,' but what it boils down to is that they're friends that wanted to participate on this record." Tramp debuted at No. 75 on the Billboard 200 charts. The record has been described, compared to her prior records, as having "a professional polish, with layered vocal harmony, electric and acoustic guitars, organ, ukelele, and drums. Most songs follow the classic arc: quiet beginning with an instrument or two, a gradual increase in volume and complexity, followed by a peak, and a quiet denouement." Are We There May 2014 brought about the release of Van Etten's fourth record, Are We There on Jagjaguwar. Van Etten self-produced the record with Stewart Lerman. The record includes Torres' Mackenzie Scott, Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg, Lower Dens' Jana Hunter and Efterklang affiliate Peter Broderick. Van Etten said some of the instruments in the recording of the album were used by John Lennon and Patti Smith. The album was recorded at Hobo Sound Studios in Weehawken, New Jersey, and at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. (wiki)
