Crumbler

All I Can

Sharon Van Etten

Before she became a beloved recording artist, Sharon Van Etten was just one more girl with an idiot boyfriend. As she recounted to the A.V. Club, her man — a musician himself — thought Van Ettten wasn’t good enough to play music for other people. He was also controlling, so much so that when she wanted to play shows she would have to sneak out. The story has a happy ending — she became Sharon Van Etten, and he went to jail — and she seems to have a good attitude about things. Asked if there’s anything she wanted to say to him, she says simply: “Thanks for all the songs.”

I imagine she doesn’t want to write about him forever. But that’s the thing about idiot exes: Even when they leave your lives physically, the specter of them can linger. On the mesmerizing “All I Can,” Van Etten starts a new relationship, but feels so scarred by the last one that she hardly knows where to begin. “My memory steals every moment I can feel,” she sings, her past robbing the present of its meaning. She sings of “wanting to love as new as I can,” but being ruined by the thought that in some way she still belongs to the ex: “I do all I can, but who is my man?”

Three times during “All I Can,” Van Etten pleads for understanding with a simple line: “We all make mistakes.” It’s her apology for having been with the wrong guy before finding the right one, heartbroken and heartbreaking. The song builds in intensity from a whisper to a roar, then fades out with no clear resolution. Not unlike a bad relationship, come to think of it.

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