![]() Maybe he’s going to be more avant-garde than I am.” ![]() He also has a ukulele that he’s learned to hold like a tiny guitar, although Van Etten laughs, “The main thing is he likes detuning it. (If there were any doubt, Sharon Van Etten’s child will have no trouble being cool.) “I know when he likes stuff, because he’ll tap his foot,” she says, clearly proud that Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” recently earned the boy’s stomp of approval. “The first thing that we say when we wake up is, ‘Do you wanna listen to music?’” Usually, he will nod, and Van Etten will switch on WFMU mother and son are particularly fond of the station’s morning music-and-humor show Wake and Bake with Clay Pigeon. But these days her son is her alarm, waking her each morning around 7: “It adds more structure to my life.” “Back in the day, I would have met for a cocktail and said a lot of things I would have regretted,” she says with a laugh, sipping her first of two cups of coffee. Van Etten’s never been an early riser, so the decision to meet for breakfast heralds a change in her circadian clock. “I just want to make things, I want to work, I want to try new things, meet people. ![]() “If you’re open to opportunities, then I feel like more things end up coming up, because you’re not just looking for one particular thing and you can see everything in the periphery too,” she says of this freewheeling phase in her life. (She’ll be back for Season 2, which is likely to drop sometime this year.) In the meantime, she also became a mother (her son turns 2 in March: “He’s pretty new,” Van Etten says) and went back to school to begin her journey toward becoming a certified therapist. Since her last record, 2014’s Are We There, she has gone from indie-rock singer/songwriter to all-around Renaissance woman, stumbling into an acting career that found her not only making an appearance on David Lynch’s hallowed Twin Peaks: The Return but also scoring a recurring role on the sci-fi Netflix series The OA. It’s the perfect time for a change of scenery, as Van Etten’s career, too, is in the process of metamorphosis. ![]() “Seventeen” was also her way of saying goodbye to New York, the city she’s called home for the past 15 years: The lifetime East Coast resident is plotting a move to Los Angeles this fall. “I found while revisiting these places how they’ve changed, how they haven’t changed, how some are built up, some are run down,” she says. All the while, an actress playing a younger version of herself follows Van Etten around like a sneering but sympathetic shadow. The video serves as a kind of scrapbook of the places from Van Etten’s past, some of it set in the house she grew up in, the state park where she worked as a teenager, and, after a turbulent early adulthood and an eventual move to New York, the rock clubs she’d haunt on the Lower East Side. Van Etten’s already had an emotional morning, caused by the premiere of the music video for her evocative and highly personal new single “Seventeen.” (“I know what you’re gonna be,” she taunts her younger self, repeating the line a few times before wailing it at the top of her lungs.) Though Van Etten is no stranger to airing private feelings in public, the knowledge that “Seventeen” was finally out in the world had, just before we met up, brought her to tears. Still, follicles don’t always tell the full story. So people are like, you must be in a really good place right now, your hair’s pretty long.” “Whenever I get stressed out, I’ll cut my hair. “My friends and I joke that you can tell how stressed out I am by how short my hair is,” the 37-year-old musician tells me. When we meet for breakfast one morning in early January, Sharon Van Etten’s dusky hair is cascading well past her shoulders-a good sign.
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