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Sharon Van Etten, Live In Concert: SXSW 2012

By Stephen Thompson
Published March 15, 2012 at 12:41 AM EDT

Staring out across the sea of people crowding an outdoor band shell in Austin, Sharon Van Etten practically dared her audience to pipe down and listen as she held long, cooing notes. She had the guts to trot out tiny delicacies like the spare ballad "Kevin's Way," complemented perfectly by the gorgeous backing vocals of Heather Broderick.

When I saw her at SXSW in 2010, she slunk shyly onstage at a church to tentatively sing breathtakingly fragile songs from her breakthrough album, Because I Was in Love. It's almost impossible to comprehend the transformation she's made since then. At NPR Music's showcase at Stubb's on Wednesday night, she flexed her songs' newfound muscle without obscuring the beating heart and raw nerves that lie beneath. The wounded acoustic material of her first album has given way to "Serpents" (from this year's mesmerizing Tramp), the bracing and caustic rocker with which she closed her performance. With its rigid, driving beat behind her vocals, the song fully captured many of Van Etten's newfound identities: frontwoman, bandleader, stealth rock star.

Credits

Producers: Amy Schriefer, Robin Hilton; Video by: XI Media; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait

Set List

  • "All I Can"

  • "Warsaw"

  • "Give out"

  • "In Line"

  • "Kevin's Way"

  • "Magic Chords"

  • "Leonard"

  • "Serpents"

    • Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
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