On We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, her upcoming sixth LP, that threat feels more tangible. She wrote these songs at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, gripped by collective hysteria. At the start of the ordeal, she feared total annihilation. “I was like, ‘It’s the end of the world and nobody’s telling us,’” she confesses over coffee one morning. “I think we all have that feeling sometimes.” She pauses, then assumes the voice of a headshop philosopher: “Shit’s fucked, right?”
Working out of her home studio in Los Angeles, Van Etten found refuge from a few worldly ills, and a front-row seat to others. Wildfires blazed nearby, a constant reminder of the climate crisis. Illustrating the album’s apocalyptic stain, Van Etten rattles off a list of anxieties: “We’re losing our beaches. Everything’s on fire—there’s fire tornadoes. The ticks are out of control. Deer now carry and spread COVID,” she says, a bit fatigued by the end.
As flames ravaged the Sierra Madre mountains, Van Etten stayed indoors with her family at the behest of the National Weather Service. “The sky looked like it was on fire,” she recalls, adding that the air smoldered like coals in the belly of a barbecue. Her home was ultimately unscathed by the flames, but she struggled with an impossible question: How do you nurture your family when the world is literally burning?
On All Wrong’s operatic “Darkness Fades,” Van Etten sings of “writing on the dust”—an allusion to the ash that blanketed her car like poison snow—while the shadowy “Home to Me” parses maternal guilt, a gnawing symptom of her itinerant work. Van Etten wrote the latter song as a letter to her now-5-year-old son, something he can hold in the future, when her absence could kindle resentment. “I’m just like, ‘I wanna be able to give you everything, and I’ve chosen the worst career for stability,’” she says. “I can’t imagine touring so much when he’s in school, but I know I’m making these selfish decisions now that hopefully help us be able to thrive. I wanted to leave him a message to be like, ‘I know it’s hard and I love you, but I’m still home. I’ll come back. Whether I’m here or away, I’m your person.’”
Van Etten often counters the sonic immensity of her new album, stacked with towering choruses, moody synths, and a lingering sense of despair, with lamplit views of the hearth. On the festival-ready “Anything,” she presents an image glowing with the warmth of an Edward Hopper painting, bellowing, “You love him by the stove light in your arms.” Talking about the song’s origin story, she remembers cooking dinner one night, and as the jazz pianist Bud Powell’s “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” filled the kitchen, Hutchins dipped in and led her in a dance. “It was supposed to be our wedding song,” Van Etten says. She and Hutchins were scheduled to get hitched in May of 2020, and they haven’t been able to set a new date since the world overturned. “Shit on shit,” she says, referring to the past few years. “I have my ups and downs in my real life, but my partner’s amazing. He knows when it’s hard, and he just embraces it, and we get through it.” She smiles at the revelation. “Even when I’m a mess.”
