JUL 21 | Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Julien Baker

Sharon Van Etten’s latest and sixth studio album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, was released in May 2022 on Jagjaguwar. Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around, and We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong concerns itself with the questions we ask ourselves when we think the world—or at least, our world—might be ending. Have we loved as well as we could? Did we try hard enough? How do we protect the things most precious to us from destructive forces beyond our control? And how do we salvage something worthwhile when it seems all is lost? In considering these questions and her own vulnerability in the face of them, Van Etten has created a stunning meditation on how life’s changes can be both terrifying and transformative. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong articulates the beauty and power that can be rescued from our wreckages.

Since the release of Remind Me Tomorrow (2019), “an album of hope, intimacy and perseverance” (The New York Times) and one of 2019’s most praised albums, Van Etten has collaborated with artists ranging from Joshua Homme and Courtney Barnett to Norah Jones and Angel Olsen. Earlier releases were covered by artists like Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Big Red Machine and Idles, celebrating Van Etten’s legendary status as one of the great songwriters from the very beginning. When the time came to return to her solo work, Van Etten reclaimed the reins in a way she hadn’t since 2010’s epic and 2014’s Are We There, co-producing with Daniel Knowles, and recording and engineering much of it herself in her new custom built studio in her family’s LA home. The more she faced—whether in new dangers emerging or old traumas resurfacing—the more tightly she held onto these songs and recordings, determined to work through grief by reasserting her power and staying squarely at the wheel of her next album. That interplay of loss and growth became a blueprint for what would become We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong.

Throughout We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, and as always, we are at the mercy of Van Etten’s voice: the way it loops and arcs, the startling and emotive warmth of it. What started as a certain magic in Van Etten’s early recordings has grown into confidence, clarity, and wisdom, even as she sings with the vulnerable beauty that has become her trademark. As Van Etten plays guitar, synthesizers, piano, drum machine, Wurlitzer, keys, and more, she’s supported by her regular touring band of Jorge Balbi on drums, Devon Hoff on bass, and live musical director Charley Damski on synthesizers and guitars.

Unlike Van Etten’s previous albums, there were no singles leading up to the release of We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. Recent singles, “Porta” and “Used To It,” do not live on this album. Van Etten comments, “I wanted to approach this release differently, to engage my fans in an intentional way, in an effort to present the album as a whole body of work. These ten songs are designed to be listened to in order, at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told.” This is, in itself, a subtle act of control, but in sharing these songs it remains an optimistic and generous one.

This year, Van Etten performs a string of southern dates with support from Mia Joy before embarking on her European Darkness Fades Tour, followed by The Wild Hearts Tour with Angel Olsen, and Julien Baker.

Biography provided by artist management.

Angel Olsen released her latest album Big Time in June 2022 via Jagjaguwar. Ahead of its release, she presented the gorgeous singles, “All The Good Times,” the album’s title track, and the album’s centerpiece “Through The Fires.” Big Time was forged in a whiplash, the rare, fertile moments when both fresh grief and fresh love occur, when mourning and infatuation heighten, complicate, and explain each other. This is immediate in “Through The Fires,” throughout which Olsen’s singular voice unfurls over piano, drums, and a string trio as she commemorates working through and breaking boundaries to find one’s true self. It’s heartbreaking and resilient all at once. The single was accompanied by a lyric video shot by Angela Ricciardi.

Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, written during the time Olsen was coming out as queer and having her first experience of queer love and heartbreak. But this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss; both of Olsen’s parents passed within weeks of each other, just after Olsen came out to them.

Big Time was recorded and mixed with co-producer Jonathan Wilson at his Fivestar Studios in Topanga, CA. Drew Erickson played piano, organ, and handled string arrangements, and Olsen’s longtime bandmate Emily Elhaj played bass throughout. Big Time proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. While her previous record All Mirrors (2019) was full of dramatic shifts and twists, here the surprises come in their simplicity—a slow swell of strings, instrumentation that cycles like a storm, or sparkling horns in a light-flooded break-up ballad. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Recently, Olsen and director Kimberly Stuckwisch announced a new film, also titled Big Time, presented by Amazon Music. The 28-minute film premiered in June 2022 on the Amazon Music channel on Twitch and via the Amazon Music App. The Big Time Twitch Watch Party also featured a Q&A with both Olsen and Stuckwisch, followed by a concert airing from the premiere party at Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles.

Olsen kicked off The Wild Hearts Tour with Sharon Van Etten and Julien Baker in July and will tour Europe this fall.

Biography provided by artist management.

A Memphis, TN-based singer/songwriter with a knack for finding the shaky ground between heart-wrenching and cathartic, Julien Baker’s stark and soulful music evokes names like Bon Iver, Daughter, and Natalie Prass. Noted for its personal lyrics and vulnerable delivery, her first album, Sprained Ankle, was released in 2015. She continued to draw critical acclaim as one-third of Boygenius, a group she formed with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers in 2018. In the meantime, her solo material gradually expanded arrangements from spare piano and guitar to add keyboards, a rhythm section, and more by her third album, 2021’s Little Oblivions.

Baker honed her music skills while playing in her high school band, Forrister, with whom she continued to perform while attending college. After writing a batch of songs that didn’t seem to fit the group’s more rock-oriented vibe, Baker headed to Matthew E. White’s Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, VA to begin recording what would eventually become her solo debut, 2015’s Sprained Ankle. Issued by 6131 Records, it reached No. 23 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and led to an invitation to join the Matador Records roster. With a more expansive sound and equally intimate lyrics, the self-produced follow-up, 2017’s Turn Out the Lights, was recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis. It landed on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 78.

She then joined fellow indie singer/songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus in the trio Boygenius. Together they issued their eponymous EP in late 2018, also on Matador. Bridgers and Dacus appeared on a track, “Favor,” from Baker’s third solo set, 2021’s Little Oblivions. Self-produced and recorded in Memphis, it further expanded instrumentation, with Baker covering most of the performances herself. The album cracked the Top 40 of the Billboard 200 and reached No. 6 on the Top Independent Albums chart.

Biography provided by artist management.

Quinn Christopherson is an Ahtna Athabascan and Iñupiaq songwriter, born, raised, and based in Anchorage, Alaska.

Biography provided by artist management.