“We found a haven,” says Sharon Van Etten, cleaning her family’s kitchen after a “chaotic” morning. “We felt safe with each other in the context of this apocalypse. I said to myself, ‘Even though the outside world is burning, I have my unit, and they’re beautiful and wonderful.’ And when I thought about that, I felt alright.”

As she scrubs away layers of “breakfast residue,” hours after dropping off her five-year-old son at school, the songwriter breaks down a busy day’s agenda— including her plan to make a pre-tour packing checklist. She sounds tired, punctuating her greetings with deep sighs. But she also sounds cheerful, enjoying the simplicity of everyday life before being swept up yet again by her work.

All the outside factors that created that apocalyptic atmosphere—COVID-19, racial and political injustice, environmental destruction—are far from yesterday’s news. But Van Etten continues to find solace in her “bubbles”—both her family (her partner, music manager Zeke Hutchins, and their son) and the tight-knit community of musicians who helped craft her sixth LP, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. As usual, she wrings out every possible ounce of raw-nerve emotion, whether belting operatically over a ruminative folk number or quietly crooning over some gothic synths. And the record builds a fitting duality: meeting the hours of life at eye level but finding catharsis, even joy, through that act. In other words, All Wrong is her inevitable pandemic album.

“[Artists] have different ways of coping with it—whether you go there or you avoid it by making a fun dance record, a fantasy record or whatever,” she says. “I leaned into it because that’s kind of what I do. I realize that some people are tired of hearing about it, and I respect that. But this is my way of coping—seeking connection with others who want to go there.” In another timeline, this project probably would have sounded entirely different. Before the world turned upside down, the last few years of Van Etten’s life had buzzed from one big moment to the next—starting school for an undergrad psychology degree, landing a recurring role in the Netflix mystery-drama The OA, making a high-profile cameo on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks revival and releasing the universally acclaimed 2019 LP, Remind Me Tomorrow. Plus, the singer, who’d lived in Brooklyn for almost 15 years, moved to Los Angeles with her family later that year—just in time for society to collapse.

This new normal was weird, of course, but Van Etten embraced the bubble—relishing these moments of non-touring life with her family, starting to whittle away at song ideas in her newly constructed backyard studio. Creating that space, and learning how to operate it, was an eye-opening experience that inadvertently laid the foundation for the record’s skeletal, intimate aesthetic.

“I was learning how to record at home in a way where I could get usable tracks to take elsewhere,” she says. “That way, I’m not making a demo that I put my whole heart into but the tracks are too noisy or too low in volume. If I did that, then I’d have to rerecord them and find that emotion again. That’s what I was learning how to do when I was branching out and trying to work with a couple people— working with [Mini Mansions/The Last Shadow Puppets bassist and producer] Zach Dawes was the beginning of me finding out what the palette of my album was gonna be.”

Van Etten had already worked with Dawes on several previous projects: Remind Me Tomorrow, a slice of spectral twang called “Dry” (featured in the Netflix thriller There’s Someone Inside Your House) and a cover of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” alongside Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme. And Dawes had remained a close friend—which worked to Van Etten’s advantage when he landed an opportunity to go “after-hours” at LA’s famed Village Recorder studio. The singer jumped at the opportunity, working with a small session team, as she tried to build on the roomy, soulful sound of the “Understanding” take.

“At the time, I thought, ‘Let’s lean into this Dionne-meets-Roy Orbison kind of sound,’” she says. “We did a handful of songs there, and it was great playing with Zach, [drummer] Jay Bellerose, [keyboardist] Dave Palmer and [guitarist] Benji Lysaght. But as I listened back to these sessions, I kept coming back to the fact that I wanted to honor this time and this chapter in all our lives. And I thought, ‘Although it’s probably counterintuitive after having such a big production with John Congleton [on Remind Me Tomorrow], I want to keep it close.’ I wanted to use the tracks that I’d made myself while also bringing in my bandmates, who’ve stayed by my side. We’ve pulled each other through the ruts we’ve all been in over the last couple years.”

It’s a classic Van Etten move—ditching a more lavish production style because it doesn’t fit her recent reality. But her gamble paid off and the resulting album, which she co-produced with Daniel Knowles—a trusted collaborator who runs front-of-house for her live shows and helped her craft a 2021 cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale”— possesses a true family vibe.

Van Etten already had a creative rapport with Knowles, and she grew to trust his objective input. So when he agreed that the Village Recorder sessions “lost something” from her initial demos, they made the decision to pivot.

“I too felt there was something really specific about these demos she made in her backyard at the height of lockdown,” Knowles says. “They had a specific atmosphere and palette, informed by the environment and situation. I told her that she didn’t need to start again, and that connected with her at a time when she realized that herself. I think it took her a while to have the courage to say that.”

They came up with a unique solution— preserving the integrity of the demos by keeping most of the backing tracks intact, adding some parts from her live band and incorporating some of the Recorder overdubs when the songs needed an outside injection.

“I treated them almost as already cleared samples,” Knowles says. “We grabbed and flew in parts and manipulated them, almost like a trip-hop record or something.”

Despite that fragmented process, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong never feels disjointed. Most of the supporting cast is used for subtle washes of color, like the gently cascading synths on the oceanic ballad “Home to Me,” on which she asks her son to forgive her being gone so often on tour.

“I wonder what my kid is going to remember,” she says. “Is he gonna remember me home all the time? Is he gonna remember me gone? Is he gonna resent my career? Am I gonna regret working too much? As my kid gets older, am I going to want to switch my focus from work to family more than I thought? I think we’re all reevaluating what the most important things are right now. I want my son to grow up watching us figure it out—mom and dad—not acting like we have all the answers. We struggle. We’re in a good place; my partner and I communicate. We love our work. But I want him to see us doing what we love. I want to sneak these little messages in there [for when] he’s old enough to listen and read my lyrics. I want him to know it wasn’t always easy but [also] to see his mom and dad thriving.”

Van Etten’s band also brings an alt-rock edge—via sporadic feedback and distorted bass—to “Headspace,” an endearing look at finding intimacy in the ordinary.

“Not only specifically with [‘Headspace’], but in general, what I wanted to explore on this record was that, even when you’re in a good place in a relationship, there are things that are scary and frustrating,” she says. “I feel like learning how to work in a home together—you’re both parenting, both working and it’s like, ‘How can doing the dishes become sexy?’ It’s the same thing when we’re trying to put our son to bed. I’ll come out of his room and I’m tired and I’d rather zone out on my phone than be intimate—it’s the idea of connection when we’re around each other all the time. It’s that push and pull: the proximity of domesticity, even when you’re happy and in love.”

Sometimes, though, the other players are barely used on the songs, like on fingerpicked folk centerpiece “Darkish.” “Doing some mixes with her, you learn quite quickly that anything that doesn’t foreground her voice is your loss,” Knowles says. “She can carry stuff so much. Sometimes less is more, like ‘Darkish’—that was just, ‘Kick the doors open in the studio, have her play it once after lunch and that’s it.’ It’s not gonna get any better.”

The album has a subtle flow, but the peaks are as immediate as anything in her catalog. The grabbiest track, both melodically and thematically, is “Mistakes,” a dark yet uplifting singalong that draws on some of Van Etten’s biggest influences.

“The interesting thing is that, on the list of demos she sent me, it was quite lower down,” Knowles says. “I might be wrong, but I think it was something she tucked aside, wondering if it even fit with what she doing. I didn’t sense it was a high priority. The vocal melody and drum machine were there, and she basically played a synth-bass and a [bass guitar]. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m hearing Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and Berlin-era [David] Bowie.’ She was like, ‘That’s exciting. I was hearing Blondie’s CBGB stuff.’ I was like, ‘Great, that’s enough conversation to get things going.’”

That cold, angular quality contrasts with the words, which focus on embracing your quirks and finding beauty in the broken path. “I came up with the lyrics when I was just having a dance party with my family in the living room,” Van Etten says. “I had the realization that I didn’t care what I looked like. I am not a good dancer at all. I’m terrible. That’s why I made that joke about ‘dancing like Elaine’ [from Seinfeld]—because I’m awkward. [Laughs.] But I’ve realized, as I’ve gotten older, that I give less of a fuck. You have to allow yourself to make a fool out of yourself because you’re just trying to connect with the people you’re with—and who cares about the people you don’t know? It’s about being in the moment.”

Part of Van Etten’s mental clarity— or, really, most of it—comes from her family. “He’s five now, but my son just made me let go a little bit,” she says. “And my partner does the same thing: He’ll catch me off guard in the kitchen while I’m cooking, and we’ll have a slow dance to a jazz song. I have these moments where it’s like, ‘Thank goodness I don’t care as much because it takes so much energy.’ The other part of that, too, is the overall [thing that] I’ve learned more from my mistakes than any successes I’ve had. [It’s about] owning your mistakes and, hopefully, drawing from them to learn more.”

Fittingly, her family even indirectly inspired the album title, which she took from a seemingly unimportant line from the playful 1993 sports-comedy classic The Sandlot.

“It’s not an obvious [reference],” she says. “It’s one of those things that brought us a lot of comfort during COVID: We’d do Pizza Fridays, where we’d have pizza, watch a movie and just hang out as a family. It was sacred to us. We probably watched that movie 200 times or something. [Laughs.] I watched it a bunch before I even knew that I was making a record for real.

“This one time, we were watching the movie and that scene where [the main characters] band together as buds comes on,” she continues. “They are trying to get this Babe Ruth baseball back from the junkyard dog over the fence. The last attempt was with that crazy vacuum cleaner with that extended arm. They suck it up and almost get over the fence, but the dog jumps up and bites the neck of it, and the vacuum cleaner explodes in the kid’s face. He’s just covered in dirt, and he looks at his friends and very drily says, ‘We’ve been going about this all wrong.’”

She pauses and starts to smile. Then, she explains, “We were all kind of laughing, but I also teared up simultaneously—there was something about that sentiment, wherever we were in the pandemic: You’d think that you were getting better and through the hardest part, and then something else would happen that’s even worse than before. No matter how much we worked or waited for something better to happen, it didn’t. It struck me in this way. In some ways, I’m still unpacking it. There are a lot of ways you can read into that idea: in your little bubble, internally, in the greater world around us. There are things we can all be doing better.”

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