Sharon Van Etten

DC was the first stop on the tour for Sharon Van Etten’s forthcoming album epic (with a lowercase e, she pointed out to the audience, “It’s a joke that not many people find funny”), and, fittingly, it was a night of quiet grandeur. In contrast with the intimacy of her previous album Because I Was In Love (2009), she began the set backed by a full band, and it was a surprisingly great fit. The additional instrumentation brought an energy and urgency to the new songs (“Don’t Do It” and “Save Yourself” being reason alone you should start getting really excited about epic) that most listeners wouldn’t have previously associated with her music. But even in the midst of the band’s percussive stomp and chords strummed so hard her guitar kept falling out of tune (“It’s still not used to me playing it like this”) the smoky nuances of Van Etten’s voice found a way to fill the room to its farthest corners.

After playing epic in its entirety (the closer, “Love More,” is a stunner), the band began to shrink. It worked a bit like Stop Making Sense in reverse: first the drummer and bass player left, leaving just Van Etten and a backing vocalist. Then after a couple of songs it was just Sharon, guitar, and us. In this snug setting, Van Etten treated everyone to a gorgeous Blaze Foley cover and then few songs from Because I Was In Love, each sounding softer and more affecting than the last. By the time she played the final song, “Heart in the Ground,” the crowd was hanging on the tiniest lyrical variations, the kind you only notice in a setting so cozy, like the refrain’s gradual progression from “Can I live without you?” to “I can live without you.” I don’t think anybody escaped without having been wrecked by the song—the people sitting cross-legged around the stage, the people leaning slumped-shouldered against the amps, the people in booths who suddenly seemed to hush their ice cubes mid-clink. All were briefly united in a terrific, lonely reciprocity, one so pervasive that when someone sneezed loudly during the verse, Van Etten marred neither rhythm nor mood when she snuck a “bless you” in the middle of one of the lyrics (“I’ll never be graceful,” she quipped earlier when tripping over a mic cable, but this, and basically everything else about her set, provided evidence to the contrary.) Then Van Etten finished the song and put the guitar back in its case. I want to believe that once we filed downstairs and out the front door, the voice was still up there, hanging somewhere in the room.