tarifa

I went to see Sharon Van Etten last night. She’s touring with Julien Baker and Angel Olsen. She’s got a new album out. It was night, the stage lights were bright, a periodic breeze brought relief from the heat. Somewhere near the middle of the set she paused to say that she doesn’t only talk shit about ex-boyfriends, and then she played “Tarifa.” Probably because I had assumed she’d only be playing new songs, and also because this is my favorite song of hers, I was totally bowled over. “Tarifa” is a song about a moment becoming enormous with more love than you ever thought you could have. The lyrics are evocative, Van Etten cutting herself off before she can get to the ends of her sentences, never quite pinning the feeling down, letting it envelop her instead. Suddenly I was every place I’d ever been when I’d felt that enormity—looking at a night sky in Half Moon Bay, swimming in a quarry in Tennessee, driving a backroad in Michigan, on the shore of a lake in Villa la Angostura—and I was also in Central Park, feeling it again, like it had never left, and now I’m here, feeling it at my desk, like it has been part of me all along.