#92, “A Crime,” Sharon Van Etten (2010)

150 Favorite Songs: #92, “A Crime,” Sharon Van Etten (2010)

 When I heard “A Crime” by Sharon Van Etten the first time, it felt like years of my life had been validated. That's not hyperbole or exaggeration, either. It meant so much to me.

I was corresponding a few years ago with a songwriter whose work I really love. Nobody famous, but I was at a low point and felt like I was not at all close to accomplishing my goals as a writer. I hadn't begun pursuing journalism yet, and I had just sent out a round of query letters to literary agents regarding a novel I couldn't even get anyone to read in order to reject. So I wrote to this guy (okay, it was Jeffrey Lewis, I don't know why I'm keeping it a secret) and sent him just kind of a weird fan letter, because he had a few songs that really spoke to what I felt at that time. He wrote back the next day, probably because someone who is writing songs about not being successful has time to respond to people who write to him about why those songs resonate with them, and he said something that has stuck with me in the years that followed. I can't imagine he'd have a problem with me sharing it here: 

“[I]f it takes a million monkeys at a million typewriters to accidentally turn out something awesome and vital, then even the monkeys who never get recognized DID contribute to the process.  All of us creative types are part of the big monkey machine.  If there wasn't a million of us, nothing great would ever be created.  Which monkey's typewriter it comes out of, who knows, luck, whatever—we are all part of the process.”

It's kind of silly, maybe, but I've taken a lot of comfort in that idea over the years. And when I heard “A Crime,” which is a genuinely great song, it validated so many things for me. Because I remember hearing Sharon play her songs in Michael's living room in 2007, back when she was touring with Corbi Wright and playing living rooms, and now she had made this really beautiful song that you could hear all over. It was big in Brooklyn and Shoreditch and Austin. All over, all at once. 

And most of the other people who played Michael's living room, they didn't get famous. I didn't. Tony didn't, Brendon didn't, Kelli Shay didn't, David didn't, Karrie Hopper somehow didn't. John McCauley did, I guess, at least for a little while, but the fact is that there are just a lot more monkeys whose typewriters are producing things that the wider world isn’t interested in than who are. And there are reasons why those people didn't have a song that people connected to the way that they connected to “A Crime,” why they were never even in a position to have one. Some of them liked to alienate audiences as much as they liked to connect with them; others weren’t interested in putting in the extensive time on the road that it takes; I never did understand why Kelli Shay didn't, but that's where the monkeys and the typewriters come in, I guess. 

That takes nothing away from Sharon, or her success. “A Crime” is an incredible song, subtle in the way it takes a simple acoustic guitar and Sharon’s voice, a little flat in its affect, and turns it into something powerful and evocative. It’s not quite a breakup song—the breakup already happened at the start of “A Crime,” anyway—but it’s tortured love, and she unfolds it in a way that keeps escalating the stakes of the song. It’s bold in its choices; “A Crime” is the lead song off of her breakthrough album, Epic, but it ends with thirty seconds of silence, street noise, and the faintest hint of “Save Yourself,” the album’s third song, before you get into the rest of the album. And that album is meaningful—a few years ago, to celebrate its tenth anniversary, it was reissued with a bonus record of other artists covering the songs, and there are some heavyweights there. Lucinda Williams does “Save Yourself,” Fiona Apple does “Love More,” and Big Red Machine, which are Taylor Swift’s Folklore/Evermore collaborators without Taylor, take “A Crime.”

Sharon is still doing impressive work; honestly, I think she’s only gotten better since “A Crime.” (You’ll see more of her as this list unfolds.) I saw her play in 2022, when she was touring with Angel Olsen and Julien Baker, and it’s been a long time since she was a singer-songwriter the way she was when I met her, or the way that she is on this song—she’s a rock star now, leading a band and running around the stage in leather pants. And even though we weren’t really friends, I feel a sort of pride in knowing that she is out there doing what she’s doing. It’s not that her success belongs to anyone else, even in part—she worked impossibly hard to hone her talent, and put in an enormous amount of time and energy to build the career she has—but seeing what she’s done confirms something that I felt in the years that I was committed to being on that circuit.

I knew that it was something special, that I was meeting and performing with people who had all of the talent in the world, who really deserved to be on stages bigger than the ones in those houses and backyards and little community centers. Those places are good, but I really believed that so many of them could have worked anywhere. And then I heard “A “Crime one day, a few years later, while I was sitting in a coffee shop, and I learned that I was right. 

Here’s a bonus cover of “A Crime” by Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers, performed with Ani DiFranco on backing vocals.