In celebration of Sharon Van Etten’s breakthrough third album, Tramp, we take a detailed look at how it was made. Growing up in New Jersey, Sharon Van Etten studied music by learning several instruments and singing in the choir. After graduating high school, she went to Middle Tennessee State University to study recording. Though she started writing songs around the year 2000, she didn’t perform or release music until 2005 when she moved back to New Jersey. Later she moved to New York and started working for Ba Da Bing Records. She signed to the Language of Stone label and released her debut album, Because I Was in Love in 2009. Her next record, Epic, was released in 2010 and included the song “Love More,” which was recorded for the Shaking Through documentary series. After a group of musicians, including Aaron Dessner of The National and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, covered the song “Love More,” Sharon reached out to them to see if they’d be interested in collaborating. She began recording songs with Aaron Dessner in his garage studio in Brooklyn. Her third album, Tramp, was eventually released in 2012.

In this episode, Sharon Van Etten describes this pivotal moment in her career when she was gaining confidence as an artist and learning how to collaborate with other musicians. She talks about how Aaron Dessner’s garage studio offered a her a place of refuge during a time when she was living between sublets and keeping her belongings in her car. In the garage studio, they were able to spend the course of a year building up her songs from minimal demos into fully fleshed out arrangements. Aaron Dessner describes his first time producing for another artist and how he was immediately struck by Sharon’s voice and musical mind. He talks about the music culture in Brooklyn at the time where he would be able to call in friends and collaborators to come over and record whenever they had time. This allowed them to have a community of voices, string arrangements and a full band sound for the record, which was new for Sharon’s music at the time. From touring with The National, to excavating songs from a hard drive, to bringing in friends like Bryan Devendorf, Zach Condon, Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, Matt Barrick and more, to learning to deal with anxiety and crowds, to taking inspiration from Patti Smith’s Just Kids, to a turning point moment for both Sharon as an artist and Aaron as a producer, we’ll hear the stories around how the record came together.

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