It is night music, music for driving empty city streets after all the bars have closed. Remind Me Tomorrow is not a polite indie rock album. Often, when artists talk of far-afield inspirations, it smells like bullshit. In talking about the album, Van Etten has been bringing up a whole new core of influences: Nick Cave, Suicide, Portishead, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, Bruce Springsteen. It’s an instrument capable of conjuring cold, atmospheric tones, and those tones inspired her to the point where she named one of the album’s singles after the instrument. (The idea that fucking Scott Pilgrim might’ve accidentally played a role in this album’s creation is one of the more fun things about it.) She started playing around with Cera’s Jupiter 4, an analog synth that Roland made for a few years, starting in 1978. Instead, she was working on her film score and messing around in a practice space that she shared with the actor Michael Cera. Van Etten has said that she wasn’t even planning to make a new album when she started writing the songs that became Remind Me Tomorrow. We can still hear hints of that, but she’s filled the song, and the album, with different sounds. On previous records, Van Etten has gone for organic warmth. The music is so spare that it’s almost eerie. But the song itself captures the feeling of being lost in conversation with someone else, of unburdening yourself and finding someone willing to really listen: “Sharing a shot, you held my hand / Knowing everything, knowing everything, we cried.” She keeps that between her and whoever she was talking to. Van Etten’s voice comes in strong and clear: “Sitting at the bar, I told you everything / You said, ‘Holy shit, you almost died.’” We don’t get to hear the story that she’s telling the “you” of the song. “I Told You Everything,” the album’s first song, opens with empty space and shivery, echoing piano notes. It jumps out right from its first moments. Remind Me Tomorrow jumps all the way out. It sounded nice, but it never jumped out.
She was a great singer and an evocative songwriter, and yet the music, for me, blurred in with a whole generation of folksy, respectable Brooklyn NPR-indie. Van Etten’s old records featured the sort of music I could appreciate without fully loving it. And in recording these songs, Van Etten has made a tremendous leap forward. Instead, Remind Me Tomorrow is about finding new ways to process new emotions, about dealing with a reality where you’re happy but you’re also too busy and too overwhelmed to properly enjoy that happiness. Both of those life circumstances animate the album, but it’s not a concept record. Remind Me Tomorrow isn’t about motherhood, and it isn’t about finding yourself in a happy relationship after years of hopeless ones, either. Sharon Van Etten revisits her career's nooks and crannies in our new interview. And, most crucially, she’s become a mother. But she was still in it, and you still weren’t.) She’s gone back to college, studying to become a mental health counselor after realizing how much she got from emotional conversations with fans after shows. (She just played herself in Twin Peaks, in one of those roadhouse scenes.
#Remind me tomorrow tv#
She’s acted, appearing in The OA and Twin Peaks: The Return, two of the weirdest TV shows to pop up on our streaming services in recent years. She’s recorded a whole score for a movie. She’s recorded songs for movies and TV shows. She’s sung on other people’s records and shown up at other people’s live shows. Remind Me Tomorrow is Van Etten’s first in five years, but she’s done plenty since 2014’s Are We There. All of it, together, is overwhelming.Īll those overwhelming, overwhelmed feelings - anxiety very much included - are all over Remind Me Tomorrow, Sharon Van Etten’s new album. (Or at least I did.) People don’t really talk about that anxiety, but it’s there. And you feel an overwhelming anxiety, one that borders on terror. You feel nostalgia, a certain ache for the younger version of yourself that you know is now gone forever.
You feel all sorts of feelings when you become a parent. They’re aimed at you, and they’re trying to kill your kid with every too-fast left turn, every lane change. All of a sudden, it feels like every other car on the road is out to get you. There is a car seat installed in your car, and there is a tiny and fragile human, a human whose health and wellbeing are your responsibility, trussed up in it. If you ever want to freak yourself all the way out, try driving a newborn baby - your newborn baby - home from the hospital.
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