PHOTOS: JULIA LOFSTRAND | Sharon Van Etten celebrated Tramp’s 11th, not 10th, Anniversary at the Troubadour in Los Angeles this past Sunday. Not wanting the album’s milestone to be buried by her album released last year, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, the show sold out within minutes upon which she released live stream tickets with all proceeds going to the Turkey-Syria Earthquake Relief fund.
Neil Young played his first debut solo show at the Troubadour, an unknown Elton John played eight shows there that launched his career, and Sharon Van Etten, one of the great modern indie-folk artists of our time, continued this iconic venue’s legacy.
Adriana McCasim was a fitting opener for the night. Spatial and anxious, her self-produced songs were a perfect subtle prelude. Shortly afterward, Sharon Van Etten and her band were greeted on stage by fervent applause that turned deathly silent as the brooding instrumentals of Tramp’s opening track “Warsaw” collided with her timeless voice. “Warsaw,” followed by “Give Out” and “Serpents,” is a most haunting piece of album sequencing.
Van Etten released the video for “Serpents” only just last month. Not feeling comfortable in her own skin, she killed the video upon its release—it’s one about an abusive relationship that decimated her sense of self and spawned many of her songs. Since then, she’s fallen in love with the right person, had a child, and gone back to school to become a therapist. The raw emotion of that song and what it has taken for her to step into her power radiated into the audience.
She was generous with the Tramp’s anecdotes. We learned that “Kevin” was a real person she sublet an apartment from in NYC while finishing the album, and that during her stay she dumped a guy on New Year’s Eve after realizing she wanted to be alone because it was what she needed. Sharon Van Etten is an artist healing herself through her songs, and in doing so, she’s healing others.
During “We Are Fine,” something inside of me shifted. Weeks before the show I tagged her in a post about the heart-wrenching loss of my mysteriously vanished Sharon Van Etten shirt I got last summer at her Wild Heart Tour. My belief in a benevolent god was restored when she had one mailed to my house. And then—she announced that this impromptu anniversary show would fall on what would have been my sister’s 32nd birthday.
My sister was a sex-trafficking victim who lived a short and tragic life, and I’ve had my share of abusive relationships. For years my grief has suffocated me, but during that song about supportive people and happier times, I looked up at the Troubadour’s historic wooden ceiling beams and shed tears as I breathed in some form of dormant happiness and hope. “I’m Wrong,” is about seeing someone who told Van Etten that her art wasn’t good enough. “To be here up on this stage means everything,” she said. I looked over and the girl next to me was crying.
We gathered ourselves for “Magic Chords,” and weren’t even phased when she stopped the song for mixing up the first and second verses because capturing life’s imperfect moments is what her music is all about. Angel Olsen came out for a surprise encore performance of their duet, “Like I Used To,” and the show closed with a literal gripping version of “Seventeen” as she grabbed the shirt of a fan in the front row and yelled the lyrics, “I know what you’re gonna be, you’re crumbling up just to see, afraid you’ll be just like me.”
Sharon Van Etten is a collective healing space.
