Since early in her career, Sharon Van Etten has been refreshingly open about her recording process and the lifelong learning aspect of it. This generosity has shown up in episodes of the podcasts Song Exploder and Life of the Record, as well as a companion documentary providing a behind-the-scenes look into the making of Van Etten’s recent release, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory – to name a few. Through the years, we have seen Van Etten...
Interviews
Hana Stretton
Terroir is a term often used in the worlds of food and wine to describe the geographical and environmental conditions of a region, and I would argue that it also applies to music. Not just the way a room sounds, but the geographical and social surroundings around an artist as they write and record a record. The places and things you see and the people you interact with every day can have a huge impact on the music you make; much more really than what kind of microphone you might use. A record made in Las Vegas is likely to sound quite a bit different than a record made in a small rural village in upstate Maine.
I feel like Australian ambient-adjacent folk artist Hana Stretton embodies this concept and embraces and reacts to the environment around her as part of her music-making process. Her first LP, Soon, was recorded in the New South Wales bushland, but for her most recent album, tiarn, she relocated to a small beach town called Tabourie...
