Sharon Van Etten’s 2010 album Epic is a collection of seven songs mostly about how terrifying it is to love. Epic plunges you deep into “beauty and terror,” to borrow from Rilke, from the first chords of its first song and doesn’t let you come up for air until it’s over, mercifully, just 32 minutes later. “One Day,” melodically its lightest song and sixth in the track listing, spouts ruthlessly direct lines like “Just to remind you, I'm a mistake / How come you don't want to know?” until Sharon leads us out of the song by repeating its heartbreaking refrain: “If you don’t leave me now / Do you love me back?”
The album’s last song, “Love More” is big in its spareness, painting a picture of someone “chained like a dog” in the room she shares with her beloved. The abundance of the love is counterposed to the overwhelming absence of anything else:
I had nothing to spend
But time on you
But it made me love
It made me love
It made me love more
For better and for worse — often for worse — love is all there is in Epic.
“A Crime,” Epic’s opening track, sets the tone for the rest of the album. The song is just Van Etten’s voice, deep and plain and pretty high in the mix, and an amplified acoustic guitar. “A Crime” is loud, unlike many other similar female-singer-songwriter-with-a-guitar setups, and louder still in its imagery. Sharon starts off hardened and convinced of her position:
To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime
To admit I'm still in love with you after all this time
I'd rather let you touch my arm until you die
Seduce me with your charms until I'm drunk on them
Go home and drink in bed and never let myself be in love like that again
By the end of the song, though, she’s softened. Her self-imposed limits — never let myself be in love like that again — lose their sharpness. It’s because her voice has turned sadder, yes, but also because of a subtle lyrical change. As the phrase turns from line to refrain, “be in love” changes, simply, to “love.” It’s not the state of being she wants to prevent — that can’t be helped — it’s the action. By the end of the song she’s singing seven words — “never let myself love like that again” — over and over. The more she repeats them, the less convinced she sounds, and the less I believe her.
The last chord strummed on the guitar concludes “A Crime” rather abruptly, but the recording continues, capturing Van Etten posing an echo-y “yeah?” presumably to someone who told her the take sounded good. A door creaks open; we hear some unrecognizable ambient sound and then the whirring of a car or two rolling past. We’ve been granted reprieve, at least temporarily, from the suffocating intensity both of Van Etten’s feeling and of her frustrated and transparently wrongheaded insistence that she will “never love like that again.”
One week ago, Big Red Machine — the two-person outfit composed of Aaron Dessner (guitars, The National) and Justin Vernon (guitars, vocals, lots of other stuff, Bon Iver and Volcano Choir) — released a cover of “A Crime,” Epic’s opening track.
The Big Red Machine version is just as intense. Dessner and Vernon add tons of sound to the song’s acoustic-guitar spine: there’s a pile of screechy electric guitars, explosive percussion, and Vernon’s voice, mostly in falsetto, doubled on itself. The voice is loud-loud and builds the momentum of the song until the guitars whine high and persistent at the end, grinding over the same few chords as someone hits a drum in such a way that you can almost hear the wood of the stick vibrating.
Vernon spits the words out — never let myself love like that again — with more haste than Van Etten, like if he says them fast enough you won’t notice he’s lying. They’re both repeating them way too many times for them to actually be true. (Vernon is practiced at this, after all. “The Wolves,” from his 2007 album For Emma, Forever Ago, also ends on a similarly deceitful refrain: “What might have been lost / Don’t bother me.” Vernon screams it over and over; in live performances he asks the audience to join him, and then concludes the song with a loud, high-pitched yell.)
This sort of lyrical repetition and re-doubling pervades Epic. Sometimes its effect is one of emphasis, like in “Don’t Do It,” the album’s fifth track, where she challenges: “Do your worst if you can / Do your worst if you can do it.”
In “A Crime,” the repetition invites us to question what Sharon really means. Why is she saying these things so many times? Who is she trying to convince? Is anyone buying it? The rest of the songs on the record — lyrically wrenching as Sharon sings of her love, of trying to wrest herself away but ultimately ending up devoted and exhausted — give away the lie at the heart of “A Crime:” she will indeed love like that again, she loves like that still, she can’t help herself.
P.S. Thank you to my friend Kyle Nichols for sending me Big Red Machine’s cover on Monday. It truly takes a village!