‘Come arrrrn Shazza!” yells a man at the back. It’s not the most obvious thing to hear at a gig by a stylishly black-clad US musician, known for singing about abusive relationships. However, Sharon Van Etten reveals that she loves the nickname – used by her British friends – which prompts a group of women on the balcony to chant “Shazza! Shazza!”
This amusing, incongruous moment signifies a wider transformation. The New Yorker still sings about her past. I Told You Everything spills it out to a new partner with coal-black humour (“You said, ‘Holy shit’”). However, now that she is a mother, occasional actor and counselling student, songs from fifth album Remind Me Tomorrow are more electronic and uplifting. Comeback Kid and Malibu superbly filter Bruce Springsteen-type wistful storytelling into American gothic anthems.
It makes for an emotional rollercoaster. Van Etten’s vocals flit from Chrissie Hynde quivers to Siouxsie banshee wails as she careers from statuesque ice maiden to hair-flailing, whirling dervish. She loses herself in Hands’s fingernails-down-glass guitar melodrama and points an accusing finger in the sublime No One’s Easy to Love.
But behind the stark intensity lies a new mum’s concern for the future. It’s her two-year-old son’s birthday, and she reveals that a text from his party across the Atlantic reduced her to tears in a local restaurant until a passing fan came over and cheered her up. Van Etten insists that she “doesn’t get political”, but her solo/piano version of Sinéad O’Connor’s Black Boys on Mopeds – a song about dangerous times and police brutality that “means a lot to me as a mother” – is spellbinding.
By now, audience and performer have formed a mutual appreciation society. During the outstanding Seventeen – a surging conversation with her teenage self – she sings: “I see you, so uncomfortably alone … I used to be 17, now you’re just like me” at young women at the front, who squeal with delight. Moments later, Van Etten returns the affection when she introduces survivor’s anthem Love More as “a message of love”.
