The album title
We've Been Going About This All Wrong channels all of the uncertainty floating in the air in 2022, an era distinguished by a pandemic and political tumult. During this period,
Sharon Van Etten moved across the country, got married, and started raising a family in an unfamiliar city during the pandemic lockdown.
Van Etten is hardly the only person to experience personal upheaval as the world roiled, but the strength of
We've Been Going About This All Wrong is how her specific stories have a wider resonance. Some of that power lies in her evocative lyrical sketches, where images of yearning, parenthood, isolation, and love create the impression of difficult but necessary emotional growth; it's the shedding of the skin in preparation for a new stage of life. Appropriately,
Van Etten creates a vivid, intense soundscape for this evolution, using the retro-new wave flourishes of 2019's
Remind Me Tomorrow as a foundation for a dynamic, dramatic interior epic.
Van Etten played nearly every instrument on
We've Been Going About This All Wrong on her own in her home studio, and the album, appropriately, has a bit of an insular feel, as if it depicts the tension within her own psyche. This doesn't mean the record is delivered on a miniature scale. Although there are moments, such as "Darkish," where she's accompanying herself with no more than an acoustic guitar, there are also steely rhythms, washes of synths, and squalls of distorted guitar, all elements that give
We've Been Going About This All Wrong painterly details along with a sense of momentum.
Van Etten isn't wallowing in melancholy, she's accepting the sadness along with the joy, using both emotions to push into a new stage of life. That sense of optimism, no matter how muted it may sometimes be, gives
We've Been Going About This All Wrong an air of unguarded hope. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine