Sharon Van Etten is an indie rock powerhouse with an illustrious career spanning more than fifteen years. Over six solo albums, Van Etten has evolved her folk sensibilities into cinematic synth-pop, touring the world with hits like “Seventeen” and “Every Time the Sun Comes Up.” This year, she released her first record with a full band, Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory. Like many musical projects of the 2020s, this full band arrangement stemmed from a burst of post-pandemic creativity.
“We were getting ready to tour in 2022 for the album We've Been Going About This All Wrong, which was recorded in the height of the pandemic, so mostly long distance and piecemeal for safety reasons, but we had to get in the same room to rehearse the songs and figure out how we were going to translate it in the live setting,” Van Etten said. “So I thought, what better way to reconnect as human beings than get a rental house. This house had a detached studio, and we all just lived and worked and caught up on each other’s lives.”
“At the end of the week, we had some leftover time, so we ended up writing two songs in an hour fairly effortlessly and walked away from that week ready to go on tour. I remember going home and talking to my husband, saying that this might be the next step, to be in a room with everybody and start songs from the ground up and just learn how to let go and play and write in this way together.”
The Attachment Theory
Devra Hoff is Van Etten’s bass player, and has been touring with Van Etten since 2019. She has composed and arranged film scores, released multiple solo albums (including one of Laurie Anderson’s top five favorite albums of all time), and played in several bands, including Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows and The Nels Cline Singers.
Jorge Balbi, Van Etten’s drummer, is a Peruvian-American percussionist who also mixes, produces and designs sound. He worked with Olivia Rodrigo on her Guts album, as well as artists like Paulina Rubio, Harper Simon and David Poe.
Teeny Lieberson plays keyboards, guitar and sings backing vocals for the Attachment Theory. During the 2010s, she was the frontperson of the band TEEN with her two sisters, Katherine and Lizzie. She currently performs solo as Lou Tides, which is a darkwave synth-pop project. Van Etten has admired Lieberson for many years.
“It's been an honor to get to collaborate with her finally, because I was always too shy to say hello,” Van Etten said.
The newest member of the band is Shanna Polley, who plays guitar and occasionally keys. Her background is in sound design, recording, and composing, and has a degree in music composition and computer music from Columbia University. Polley has also released multiple records as Snakeskin, her DIY bedroom pop project.
First time full band experience
“The experience was beyond my expectations,” Van Etten said. “It was a very prolific time. I think in a week we wrote fourteen songs, and then we went back into the studio in Los Angeles, at a place called 64 Sound, and ended up writing another ten. So, we had a wealth of songs to choose from to figure out what the overall sound was going to be.”
With each record, Van Etten’s music has progressed further from her indie folk roots into an electric, atmospheric alt rock sound. Van Etten attributes this transformation to the instruments and experiences she’s picked up along the way.
“It's funny, when I look back at every album, it's an accumulation of knowledge and experience, but also moving place to place,” Van Etten said. “When I was living in New York and writing songs for Remind Me Tomorrow, I shared a space with Michael Cera, who had a Jupiter 4, and I ended up writing a song on that. That experience made me want to engage more in the synthesizer world. After moving around and being kind of a vagabond, I finally have all of my instruments in one place, and I tried to figure out a way to marry them all over time.”
Music in the family
Originally from New Jersey, Van Etten moved to Tennessee to pursue a degree in recording, but dropped out after only a year. She spent five years in an abusive relationship with a musician who discouraged her songwriting, but after fleeing in the middle of the night — taking only what she could carry — she began self-releasing handmade CDs of her music. In 2009, Van Etten released her folksy debut full-length record, Because I Was in Love, and in the years following, she made her way up the New York City music scene by collaborating with dozens of talented artists on some of the most defining indie music of the 2010s.
Now, a commercial and critical success, Van Etten is married to fellow musician Zeke Hutchins. They share an eight-year-old son who’s begun to carry on the family musical tradition.
“We were standing in line at LACMA in LA, and it was a long line, and he was getting a little fidgety, so I reached into my bag and I had two pencils. Instead of drawing, he just started tapping on his knees,” Van Etten said. ”Now he's a full-on drummer, piano player — he’s been taking lessons, and he can sightread and play pieces at his age level. We have book time for learning, and then there's, we call it ‘freestyle,’ where you don't have to think about it, just play. We have family jam sessions, and my husband was a drummer, so it’s in his blood.”
Van Etten said that the Attachment Theory has become like a second family to her son. After seeing the band in action on the Englert Theatre stage, it’s clear that the group’s energy is in sync with one another. With their collaborative songwriting being so fruitful, it’ll be exciting to see what comes next from this dynamic new venture.
