Sharon Van Etten

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, today we have Sharon van Etton on the show, the singer songwriter who Pitchfork recently crowned an indie rock institution. Van Etton was discovered in the early OTTs after performing at Open Mike's in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Her two thousand and nine debut album, Because I Was In Love was written as a way to process surviving a violent crime and an abusive relationship in her twenties. Over the next few years, Sharon continued her journey in music, releasing albums and touring internationally until on a whim around twenty fifteen, she auditioned for the Netflix show The Oa, landing a major role despite having no previous acting experience. In May, van Etton released her critically acclaimed sixth album, We've been Going about This All Wrong. In my opinion, it's her best. It's an album dedicated to the collective trauma amassed in the lead up to the Pandemic and beyond. On today's episode, Broken Record producer Leah Rose talks to Sharon Vanetton about some of those pandemic issues, like recording her new album in her LA based home studio during lockdown. While attempting to balance domestic life. Sharon also explains how her inner Jersey Girl comes out on stage and while wearing leather pants and heels on stage post pandemic feels so daunting. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Leah Rose with Sharon Vanetton. Your new album, it's a pandemic album, but it's also a forced domesticity album. You record it at home, you have a studio at home, But that must have been a completely different experience on top of the pandemic, on top of you know, what was going on politically, on top of wildfires, on top of being a mom, a partner. How did the situation at home influence the recording? Well, you know, as a mom, you know that you find the moments you can to make shit happen. You know, like I have thirty minutes to make some magic. I'm going to go in there. I'm going to do the best that I can. And you set realistic goals for yourself. And when you have to be able to ask permission, when you really need to be the one that works more than the other, like today's today, I really need to be in there. I'm hitting a stride here, and you know, my partner has pretty set hours in his day, meetings, meeting, zoom, zoom zoom, and in New York, I didn't have a dedicated studio for myself, so in that way it was for the better. It was in my garage, going through my back in my backyard, so I was able to most of the time if I needed to go in there, I could. If I needed to put my kid on the TV in order for myself to work for an extra hour, I would. Most of the time he was outside skating, and on early demos, you can probably hear him in the yard, and there's a window for my studio looking out, so I could see him going back and forth. And sometimes he would sit in there with me if I was just working on lyrics, and he would play the drums, and you know, other times I could just be reading to disconnect from an emotional place that took me too far, and we'd be hanging out in the living room just like talking and reading. But you just find whatever moments of inspiration you need. You know, do lyrics or do melodies come to you sort of like a flash of lightning, like you have to like go in and capture it, or is it something you can just sort of like work up and start with more like vowel sounds or guttural sounds and it turns into something. I mean, most of the time, melodies come as soon as I sit down to something, whether it be a piano guitar. Lyrics come way later, but I tend to sit down and create a chord progression and a melody, and I'll once I get from point A and point B, maybe there's a C. I don't always believe in the C, but I think if I find something interesting that can at least go to those places, I'll hit record and just let myself sing stream of consciously for about ten fifteen minutes, and I'll let myself wander melodically and see what it is that I find. And most of the time I just hit stop and I move on to the next thing, and I don't think about that too much, and I see if I can find another melodic idea on a different instrument. Sometimes two or three of those ideas in the same day ended up end up being married later on. Sometimes there are three different songs. Sometimes it's three pieces of garbage, but on moments where I can't even play an instrument and hear a melody. I go back to those songs and I listened back and pull out words and phrases and try to remember what it was I was going through, and then I'll shape words around them. On the rare occasion, the words just come out. Like the song Darkest came out in one sitting, and I just I let it live on its own. There's no like verse chorus situation. I don't know what that is, but it's like one solid piece and I don't know where it came from, but it just came out of thin air. What point in the pandemic did that come? That one was the probably the only one that was fully realized before the album. But I didn't want to put it on my last record because I thought it was too apocalyptic. And it was on a demo on my phone and you could hear the birds chirping through the windows, and I saved it and I put it in this folder because I thought it was just too dark for the context of the songs. And then this song kept coming up and the demos that I wanted to work on, and you know, I ended up rerecording that one in the studio. But the one thing I didn't want to lose was the birds, because there was this point in LA when people stopped driving and the sky turned blue and so many birds started coming out, And in the midst of what I thought was the end of the world, nature was coming back, and it gave me this moment. I don't know if you experienced the same thing, but in the midst of all this chaos and these fires and the earthquakes, I heard the birds and it made me remember this demo, and I thought, with how intense all my other songs are, this song now feels light and I don't want to build it up, and I want this one song to live on its song without any product action. And I knew that before I even built up the other songs. But I knew the other songs were going to go there, But that was the one where I just felt like, Okay, this is where everyone can kind of take a deep breath. I read an old Time Out interview that you did in twenty sixteen, and you said, I'm not a down in the dumps person. People think that I am because of the music that I write. Is that something that you feel compelled to tell people because your music is so emotional. Well, I definitely like reassuring people that I'm okay in number one, especially my mother, who at various points in my life, was like, I thought you were okay. I thought we were you know, I thought you were in a good place. I'm like, well I am. But like, this is my coping mechanism. This is my form of therapy. And if I didn't have music, I don't know where i'd be today. But I do have that outlet, you know, And I think that if any if you have an outlet, whatever it is, with being music or exercising or painting, it's like everyone needs to find their outlet to let out the side of them that is hard to communicate. And that's how I process my emotions. Yeah, So how do records usually start for you? Like, do you isolate certain sounds or feelings that you want to capture or is it more just you like noodling on an instrument or writing lyrics? How do they usually begin? Well? I tend to write and write and write and not think about the production part of it at first. And then when I have a collection of songs and I look at the entirety of what they are and what I'm talking about and what I'm going through in that moment. Then I realize that I'm capturing a time period and it feels like a chapter. And this particular chapter I had about twenty demos and it was COVID, Yeah, and I was going to lean into all of the trepid day and the darkness and the doubts and the rollercoaster of emotions that we were all feeling in parallel in different ways. But I wrote all the songs on different instruments, so even the bare bones of the songs all started in very different places, and I just knew that it was going to be a very emotional, a very dramatic record before I added anything to it. Do you ever do like a gut check with friends or with your partner to sort of like bounce your feeling about a subject off of them to see if it's kind of like a collective feeling. Absolutely, I mean I write from a really personal place, and you know, even before Quarantine, I wanted to make sure that after I write personal songs that they feel universal in a way where anyone can connect to them on their own level. So you know, I checked myself there before I share it with anyone else, and I will say about of what I write, no one's ears hear them, because I always write from a personal place and it starts there without every thinking that it's going to be for anyone else. So that's my first filter. Second filter is my partner who is also my manager, and he also used to play drums with me, so he has a musician's ear as well as thinking of all of my albums collectively and what the trajectory of my sound has been or will be, or what kind of twists and turns are interesting just as a friend. But he listens to the content sometimes and asks me, like where I'm going? You know? How dark? How dark is this? There's even been a song on the record where he thought I was singing too low. He's like, it sounds uncomfortably low, and I was like, I want people to be uncomfortably low with me. What other types of feedback does he give you, like specifically when looking at the story of all of your albums together, sometimes he'll comment on the tempo of my songs and say they could be bumped up a couple you know, bpms or whatever, because my songs tend to be very mid tempo. I think I've honed in my mid tempo ballad for sure, and so he'll check me on and trying to give some tempo to the records and not laughing at myself when a song is too lighthearted, because I'm like with mistakes. I thought, is this one too silly to include, you know, because it's about it's about me being a bad dancer. But he thought, He's like, this is the you know, as word as we start talking about sequencing of the record, and you know, this is a point in the record where that song comes in. We actually really need that one song, and it took us a long time to get there, but we did, and I found the confidence to sing something that lighthearted in the context of the weight of the whole album. I want to ask you about Home to Me. I believe it's a song about your son, but I just wanted to hear how it came to you and what you were thinking when you wrote it. Home to Me is definitely about my son. I have peppered in a couple of secret messages to him for when he's old enough to know better. He's five, and you know, he's only just starting to understand what I do. And it's interesting is he starts asking how many movies does it take to get to the city where you're going to go. It's all of like the increments are all about how many movies can I watch? On the way? You can watch The Sandlot four times? But you know, it's in the middle of the pandemic and writing a new record. I mean, it's very surreal to even imagine going on tour again. Yeah, I wasn't even sure if it would happen. Quite frankly, I'm scared to go back out, but I'm gonna do it because that's what I'm supposed to do and that, you know, because things are normal now, right so they say, But you know, I'm envisioning myself being on the road and my son's starting school, and I'm basically apologizing because I know how hard it is. But my I feel like my job is for him to grow up watching us figure it out, watching us make it work, and helping each other thrive even when it's hard. And I would not be my full self if I did not have music and my bond and the fans that support it. That's so important too. That's not a little point, right. It's so important to feel like yourself after you've had a child. It's just such a big deal. And I was another thing I was thinking about when I was thinking about you going on stage age after being home and being a mom and you know, wearing the pandemic clothes and whatever it is, you know, and all of a sudden you have to step on stage with maybe makeup or you have to do your hair and have like a cool outfit. That seems like such a big transition, and like, can you even like move your body in the way you want to move it? How do you get back into that mode? Let me tell you. I first of all, I got a pair of leather pants for the last tour, and I was nervous to put them back on. I was like, really, leather pants, Why did I do this to myself? Why am I going in this rock direction? Why am I trying to be Jane Jet right now? I really just I wish I could wear sweatpants on stage. You know. We just had our first warm up shows recently, and they're on one hand, it's nice to shake it off, and I'm I'm glad that I'm as my partner calls elevated, Sharon, you know you're still yourself. It's just like if you were going out on the town or something, and it helps to get into this alter ego ish in order to disconnect from that person. Yes, even like practice, Like I was practicing walking in heels again around the house because I've been wearing my bloodstones every day every day, Like Okay, well maybe I need to see if blunt Stones will collaborate with me on like a Chelsea boit because that's going to be my transition. Yeah. I was looking at your European tour dates last night and I was just thinking about it, like it must be such a singular experience for you, just as a mother and as a partner, how to figure out how to balance the domestic side of life and also like show up and be on stage and be so super present to the fans. Is there anybody in your life you can talk to about that, like how to balance that and how to sort of like come to terms within your mind. I mean I've talked to different parents for sure, And I think what's so unique is that any rigid parent would see my career and just be like, oh, yeah, your kid's never going on the road. I've never been like that in my life, But as I'm getting older, I know that I want some structure for my kid because I don't naturally have it as a musician and a pisces and I'm just a dreamer and I thrive in structure, even though I fight against it all the time. So I'm trying to find the best of both worlds. Yeah, most parents that I know that are on the road or dads, and they have a very different kind of attachment to kids that there's a separation a bit more where I feel constantly connected. And the mothers that I talked to, they again, they have different styles and they tend to be able to bring a nanny on tour full time, and I can't do that either. I love when my son comes out and he sees what I do. I want him to know what I do. I want him to know that I'm available. I want him to be able to visualize what my schedule is every day. So if I tell him I'm sound checking, he'll know what that means. If I tell him I'm just backstage with the guys, he knows what I'm talking about. And when he knows that I didn't sleep well through the night because of the bunk. Then he'll know exactly what I'm talking about because he knows what the bunk is, and he knows the backstage is, you know. But I also he starts kindergarten in August, and I realize that I'm going to be on tour for his first day of school, and my heart's already broken, you know. But I want him to have that, So you can't have both. Yeah. We had Michael Stipe on the show recently and he was talking about the postpartum period after you come off of a big tour or after you finish an album, and I was curious to know, since you've actually been through postpartum, are those sort of like feelings when you finish a big project. Absolutely not, I mean yes, I mean your soul is torn open, you like, give all these socks. I mean, anyone that's gone through thirty four hours of induced labor then to be cut open and then takes months to heal. And I'm you know, my son is five and I still feel my incision and I'm numbed down there and I pee every time I laugh. I mean, yes, but it's intense. When you make a record, it's intense. When you go on tour and you come home, it's intense, and it's like it's more. It's not postpartum. It's like you need a nap and you don't want to be bothered, and the things that people don't tell you. The healing process is different, and with touring, it's like you come home and you're exhausted. The physical, physical aspect is real. We have to pause for a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Sharon Vanetton and Leah Rose. We're back with more from Leah Rose's conversation with Sharon Vinnett. Let's talk a little bit about your background growing up in Jersey. Do you remember like the first artist or the first piece of music that you really connected to. The first song I ever fell in love with was Unchained Melody. I just thought it was one of the most beautiful songs I've ever written. I still do. But the first thing I sought out on my own was Elastica. I found it a Sam Goodie in the mall, and I remember that I wanted to be them so bad. That was like, they look so cool. It was like the connect you know connection, uh huh. I didn't know a lot of female rock musicians that were modern, but that kind of opened up this whole other gate as soon as my schoolmates were a here, like we're trading Walkman and sharing the cassettes were listening to and I was like, Oh, Sonic Youth cool, Nirvana cool, you know, Liz Fair cool. But that was kind of my gateway into getting into with the cool kids because I listened to a lot of classic music leading up to that. So were you listening to stuff that your brothers and sisters were hearing or what was like? What was music like in your house? It was all over the place. So I was one of five kids, and my dad had the final collection that he had since he was a kid, so it was a lot of sixties, sixties seventies rock. His favorite band is Jethro Tull, and he was listening to music constantly in the car. But it was Jethro Tull, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The King's smot the Hoople, and then my older brother who was super into that music as well, because we all listened to what my dad listened to. Yeah, my older brother gave me his box of tapes when he left for college as a going away present, and it was like n inch Nail's Pretty Hate Machine, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Jin Blossoms, sol Asylum. My mom was like folk. She likes Joni Mitchell and m Melanie and she got me into Married Shapin and Lucinda Williams. So like I feel like I'm so I'm inspired by so much that I get I get confused. Yeah, was the house loud? Like was there always music playing? Like? What was the regular vibe in the house? Oh? Absolutely, I mean my dad was blasting records downstairs, and then when there wasn't music going on in the basement, then the drums were probably being played or my brother and his friends were probably jamming. And like with road trips, especially when there's like seven of us in a car when we drove my brother cross country to go to Arizona State. We're in my parents green mini van and we have one of those max on the top of the car and the whole like, there's certain things that I was to remember from this road trip is that we all had our Walkman and neutral grain bars. I will never be able to eat one again in my life because I smell them forever or are you who did that prepare you at all for going on tour, especially early tours, just like being packed into a car with your family or just living in the house with a lot of things going on, like I'm sure at times it was chaotic, Like did that prepare you for that life? Oh? Absolutely? I mean I was a you know, I was raised as a camper, and you learn how to share space and not to take up a lot of space. And I also learned to be like a listener and not a talker, although I'm talking a lot right now, but I'm a better listener than a talker. I'm kind of indecisive because there were so many of us that I never I let everyone else make the decision because if I was another opinion in the mix, I just it stressed me out too much, and so I would I would just kind of let everyone else to side and deal with it because I didn't really care. Okay, I just learned to not care. So when did you start actually playing? When did you start picking up instruments and what did you play first? Instruments were encouraged at a really young age. I remember when I moved in about I think kindergarten and there was a it was like a fixer upper Victorian house where I first lived in a Nutley, New Jersey. But the people that moved didn't want to take their grand piano, and it was like this old grand piano and everyone was like it was chaotic with everybody like like moving in and like the kids claiming their rooms or whatever. But like I was too young to know, and I got I guess I got lost in the shuffle where I couldn't find anybody, and my mom was looking for me. I guess, you know, I was wandering around and then she heard me and I was under the piano crying, and she said that ever since that day, I gravitated towards that piano and I started just like hearing notes and humming along to it, and she's like, you always played it. And then I think by the time I was in second or third grade, I got lessons, and I got piano lessons early on, and then I got suzuki violin lessons through my local elementary school. And then in the middle of my sixth grade year, we moved and there wasn't really like a music scene there and so it wasn't until high school that I tried to go back into the music world, and then I did choir. And when I went into high school, as when my brother left for college and he left me his guitar and I started playing guitar and I was learning how to sing properly. And before that I was only singing in church. We used to go every Sunday. I wasn't really religious, but I loved messing with everyone in the room because they'd only sing the melody and I'd be the only one in the whole room singing a harmony. But I like challenging myself to like learn harmonies that way. And by the time I was choir, I I kind of found my niche. That's when the guitar and the singing started. Was there a point when you decided, maybe around you know, high school, late high school or early college age, that you wanted to try and take our crack at music full time or was it always sort of a hobby at that point. It was a hobby for sure. In high school, I used to write more silly songs with an older friend of mine. Her name was Dana, and we would sit on the main street and just write about what we saw like a gangster in the corner with his pants blowing in the wind, and you know this green canoe that sat on the main street. That were like, one day, we're going to save up enough money to buy this green canoe. But very like ween like songs. Yeah, and they were like a big you know we were you know they live, they live close to where we're from. Oh they're in Pennsylvania, right, New Hope. Yeah, so like I used to. I used to play on the corner of Lambertville and New Hope. And when I moved in the middle of my sixth grade year, we moved to a town close to Pennsylvania and Lambertville. Lambertville New Hope had like the open mics that I would go through later in life. But yeah, I mean, I just I didn't take it seriously, but I knew that I that was the only thing I ever cared about was music. I didn't know what I was going to do or how I was going to do it. But my parents when we talked about what I was going to do for a job one day, and I was like, I just I want to do music. They're like, but what about it? You know, they say after high school I have to go to college, so what I want want to do in college. And there wasn't like if I could have a year off to figure it out or anything. It was just not an option at the time. In the nineties, it wasn't really discussed. I don't feel like it was the natural thing to do. You can do it, so let's do it. And they wanted me to have a backup plan. Yeah. I threw a kid that was a year ahead of me in choir actually and in theater, which I also did musicals in theater. He went to a recording school in Middle Tennessee in Murphersboro. He said, you should check out Middle Tennessee. It's pretty cool. There's a good recording program, and it's in the fastest city, fastest scoring city in the South. So they said it was before East Nashville popped up at all. So I moved there in ninety nine. It was the only school I applied to, and I didn't get past the general studies classes because I had this illusion that I could finally go to school for music and I'd be taking music classes. But the whole first year was spent doing science and maths and like the English but I was like, I just I got like straight's in high school, and now I had to do this all over again. And I was so mad that I stopped going and I got a job at a venue, and that's when I started writing songs for real. But I didn't think I could do it full time until my twenties, when I left Tennessee with my tail between my legs after I had a bad relationship, moved back in with my parents for a year to save money, and then after that year, I moved to New York in about two thousand four two thousand and five and really really gave it my first go with the songs that I had written in the past. Do you remember some of those early performances and were you just sort of like closing your eyes and going inside or were you able to be aware of yourself in the situation. I used to hide behind my bangs, and I always had short cuts because whenever I got stressed out, I would cut my hair. And I always have the weirdest haircuts because I cut it myself, especially the back, but the front was always long. And so I would do this thing where I would perform and hide behind behind my hair. So I didn't have to look at people. And I used to just drink a little bit too much whiskey and go to open legs and tell people that I only wanted to write music to make people cry. Yeah, but I was like so shy. But I was also a shit talker, like I didn't know what I was doing. I was so I didn't know, Like I just I was driven to play, and I had no idea why. I didn't even I didn't have enough distance from the songs to realize how intense they were. And I would do this like weird thing in between where people weren't sure if I was doing stand up, if this was like performance art, or if I actually was playing real songs. Like they were so lost. But when I started, you know, singing more and talking less and you know, making less jokes, I think the music made more sense. I was thinking about you growing up in Jersey. Is there any sort of connective tissue that you feel between you Patti Smith and Springsteen? Like? Is there anything there? Like? Is there any commonality? I grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen, and as an adult I found Patty And I think when I finally learned how to have a band, they had a baby. I mean, that's that's my only thing. I you know, I appreciate them both for different reasons. Bruce was such a like a neighbor, a friend, you know, not my neighbor, but you know what I mean, I feel like everyone from Jersey. I still remember this kid in elementary school who swore that that was his uncle or his cousin or something, and I wanted to believe it's so bad just because his last name was Springsteen. But you know, I feel like everyone from New Jersey feels this camaraderie with Bruce Springsteen because he just talks about growing up in a small town and like working class, blue collar like stories that nobody tells. And that's a lot of Jersey. And you know, I didn't understand or come into Patti Smith's music until I had gone through until I lived a life a bit to be able to connect with her, with her trauma and with her path in life. And living in New York, you know, New York's to meet embodies Patti Smith so much, and even in the places that I lived, I felt like I was circling her past lives. And you know, it makes me made me think differently about how I phrased things and what it was I wanted to share versus how can I use things to symbolize versus speak so directly so that again more people can connect with it in their own way, versus just telling them exactly how I felt. And I'm still learning how to do that, and I still aspire to learn how to write in a more poetic way as she does. Yeah, I mean I feel there's a certain amount of grit between the three of you, like that might be a commonality. The way they engage with the audience, too, is something that I want to learn how to do better. I'm learning how to put instruments down. You know that, there's just part of me as a musician that I'm like, I still play, I play guitar, I play keys. I played a lot on this record. But I think in a live set, as I'm learning to let go of the instrument, I'm actually a better performer when I'm not multitasking if i can just sing. But I'm a little territorial where I'm like Charlie, I don't want you to play my guitar part, can you play the piano instead? But it actually doesn't help the situation. Most of the time, I just have to let go and be a singer. But it's such a hard thing to do after being my own band for so long. You know, Yeah, do you ever get hung up about what you do on stage? Like physically if you don't have an instrument? Well, yeah, what do I do with my hand? Sure? I mean I realize I'm a pointer. I'm like pointing so much, you know, like what would Alane do? You know? I'm like such a Jersey girl. I'm just pointing at everyone, and then I look back and I'm like, remember, people are just gonna mirror that. If you're pointing at everyone, They're just going to point right back to you. And then all of a sudden, like you have an audience, it's all pointing at me. And I'm like, maybe I need to figure out more signs. But yeah, I'm still figuring out that part of it. But it's fun to like walk around stage and mess with my bandmates and interact with them in other ways. But I need to watch a lot more performance videos to be inspired about what that is. But I also want to find it on my own without completely ripping people. Patty's a really crazy performer. She's really good. She's so I mean, she's so wonderful. I gotten to see her twice at Bowerie for New Year's before she stopped doing the New Year's shows. I remember where she was having a night and she kind of stopped the show and was just talking for a while and saying that, you know, she doesn't know why, but it was one of those days where she woke up and she's like, today is just not my day, having a bad day. Nothing happened, but having a bad day, and doesn't that just piss you off. She's just talking about how something I'm just She's like, I'm just trying to shake this thing off. I don't know what it is, but it's this thing and I've been feeling it all day. And the whole audience just started like connecting with her and like, yeah, it was like, you know, the do you believe in fairies kind of feeling where all of a sudden, like the energy of the crowd gave her her confidence back and she went right into pissing in a river and I lost my mind. It was one of the best performances I've ever seen in my life. I think that was two thousand and ten. So she's an expert vamper, which Springsteen is too, So there's another connection. Oh my gosh, Okay, I gotta learn on that. Yeah, the power of the vamp. Yeah, guys, this is where you can vamp. You wait on me to do some kind of thing. You know, you have to learn how to be able to speak right at a certain point and engage with the audience and and yes, be able to get another emotion besides the emotion of the songs that you're giving. Said that you can show them a bit about who you are, yea. And sometimes shit happens on stage. It's funny, and sometimes you need to communicate it. Sometimes you just I try to engage with the people in the audience and you never know it's going to come from there. But you know, it's uncomfortable sometimes when it's only song, song, song, song, song, song, song, and you don't ever try to connect with them in another way. We'll be right back after a break with more from Sharon van Etton and Leah Rose. We're back with Sharon van Etton, but before we jump back into the conversation, let's hear her new song Darkness Fades s Sun his whole. He oh, it's been warm suns too, the sin wet to oh dudek seem fun see um he stars far keeping water, start looking at I'm struggling for dreaming of a hell. Clock stays sticky back in darkness, Fates. It sounds like you're using your voice in a new way. It's like you're able to harness more power in your vocals. And is that something that's coming from your chest or is it more of like from your head, Like where is that coming from? And how did you prepare yourself to do that? I honestly, I was harnessing my inner choir girl, And you know it comes up through my boots, but it probably sits in my you know, in my abs, in my chest somewhere, you know, my diaphragm. But I took some vocal lessons from this woman in New York, Joe Joy. Ask you who used to sing a lot with Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson, And so she was a trained rock singer who doesn't judge you based on like how you sing, how you look, what your lifestyle is. She teaches you exercises and how to relax, like your throat, your jaw, your tongue, and how to project your voice in a different way by the shapes you can make with your mouth. And so you have to do a lot of visualizing. When you open yourself up like that and imagine like your body as a straw and just allowing air to go through. It's a lot easier sub than done. But yeah, when I when I first wrote that melody, it was I didn't know it was going to come out, and I felt like I was controlling so much grief and the only way I could get it out was pretending like I was in quire and singing it in this proper way. Almost I had to posture and stand and close my eyes and just visualize that I was singing in that way. Have you seen a difference in the way that you sang after taking the vocal lesson and doing the visualizations. I mean, it's something I have to keep up, but I'll bring the exercises on tour because it's also maintenance. It's muscle memory of even how you talk, so like if I was trying to save my voice, I would talk more like this. And it's the way that you aim the air at the roof of your mouth, so you're tricking your throat into not receiving error through your vocal cords. Oh but how I really talk. It all sits right here and that's the rasp. But if I speak like this, it's very different. But I can't do that without laughing. Yeah, this is some of the hard These are some of the hardest songs as a singer to perform. And I just had four shows in a row and I've had two days off in I could just feel it, you know, in my throat. I'm like, I need to practice more. I'm so like vocally out of shape. And they are very demanding songs, not just an intensity in the performance, but also the range is insane. I don't know why I did this to myself. Yes, okay, I just want to ask you about a couple more songs, if that's okay, of course, can you tell me about the story about every time the sun comes up? I know it's a line I'm probably going to regret the rest of my life. But we just were having a late night and it was a song that I hadn't finished, and we were ahead of schedule in the studio and we had time to work on one more and the band was encouraging we had to finish it because they were like, this is going to be a classic song. It's so Bruce Springsteen. And I was like, well, I don't know, like my lyrics aren't done, and they're like, why don't you just take a break, have like a drink and a smoke and come back and like we'll I'll play the song live and you can just you can just freestyle lyrics. We won't keep anything, and then we can at least get the band music done and then you can work on the lyrics another time. You can work on the vocals another time, because we'll be recording in separate rooms or whatever. And while you know, while I was having a drink with the band, like I literally, you know, I broke Stuart Lerman, who produced a record with me, I like broke one of his glasses and like I cleaned it up and like you had to do the dishes in the bathroom in the studio that we were at. So it was called like Hobo Sounded. It was an amazing studio that was just through the Lincoln Tunnel and Weehawk in New Jersey and I would take the bus there from the Port Authority and it was an amazing setup. It was just exactly what I needed. Wasn't too much, it wasn't too little, was just enough for what I needed at that time. And this the funny thing was where you did the dishes. It was in the bathroom, and I was just a little stone and I thought it was really funny that I was like doing the dishes after I went to the bathroom. And so I came back into the studio and like, the band's all ready for me to go, and I'm thinking, this isn't a keeper take, and so I'm just singing stream of consciously in the place of like just the bands playing live together, and I'm just doing these vocals that I'm like, I'm not worried because they're not going to keep it. But they kept it, and they said, I don't think you need to rewrite any of this, and I was like, oh man, okay, I'm probably going to regret this later. But I was just kind of documenting what happened, but like taking out a context. It seems kind of random. But I mean, that song gets stuck in my head like no other. Oh thanks. Also, I was reading about you've been studying psychology on and off, and it sounds like you've really wanted to at a certain point. I think around twenty fifteen, you want to take a break from music and you started to go back to school, but then you got the job on the OA, and it sounds like things have just been sort of like building and building. But that desire is still there to finish your psychology degree and possibly pursue that in some way or another. Is that something that you're still thinking about now? Absolutely, I've actually, you know, I never finished my underground But I'm two classes away from being able to transfer to a university. I just have to hit these these damn general studies classes. Yes, I just need one science and one statistics class and I can transfer to the psychology program in a university in California. But I can't wait to get past the you know, the general studies classes so I can figure out what it is that I most connect with, because I'm sure once I start digging into the more specific classes in psychology that I'll be able to focus on what it is I want to do, because I don't know if it's the social work aspect or if it's working out of a university and connecting with younger kids as they transition from their homes, or if it's one on one therapy in like my own practice, or if it's being a consultant in some kind of way. I'm not sure, but yeah, I just want to help. I just want to help people learn how to talk about their emotions because it's the only thing I've had that's been consistent in my life and learning how to hone and it's helped me a lot. So we'll see what We'll see where it goes. Maybe it was in the new Pitchfork profile on you that you said, maybe when you're fifty, you'll slow down with the creative side of things and focus more on building a psychology practice or figuring out what that is. But it also seems like you have so much creative ambition still and there's so much that you're still doing, and there's definitely more music. So do you think that's something that will actually ever happen. I mean, my goal is to have a degree by the time I'm fifty. I'm forty one. I think that's our realistical while chipping away at this degree while also still working on music, because that is something that I feel like I will always do you know, I don't know where these other interests will will take me. I'm just you know, I'm interested in a lot of things, but I think if I set goals for myself that they will be realistic. And you know, once I say Okay, I'm going to go to school for this, I'll focus on that for a semester or two, depending on what the program looks like, I'll say okay, then I'm going to get a dedicate a year to this, and we'll see where this leads. But you know, it's like, I think it's healthy to learn how to pivot, and as we get older, it's it's I think it's healthy to not depend on one thing to sustain ourselves. And again, I want I want my son to grow up thinking that anything is possible. So for me to be able to pivot from being on the road all the time to finding work that doesn't mean that I have to be absent, then I'm all for it. Well, thank you so much for doing this. It was so fun talking to you, and I wish you huge, huge luck on the tour. You're going to kill it. Well, thank you so much, Lee, it was really nice getting to talk with you. I appreciate you taking the time. It was really really fun. Thanks to Sharon Vnetton for giving us insight into the making of her new album. We've been going about this all wrong. To hear our favorite Sharon Vnetton songs. Check out the playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, vent Holiday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafe. Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share rate in the US on your podcast app. Our theme music Spy Candy Beats. I'm justin Richmond, h