Sharon Van Etten will release Remind Me Tomorrow, her first album in almost five years, on January 18th via Jagjaguwar.
Following the release of lead single ‘Comeback Kid,’ Van Etten now shares ‘Jupiter 4,’ and its accompanying video. ‘Jupiter 4’ is one of the first songs recorded for the album, which helped Van Etten and producer John Congleton align ideas about a potential sonic landscape to explore. His eerie mix of drones, synths and theremin complement Van Etten’s evocative lyrics of finding love, as she sings, “Baby, baby, baby // I’ve been waiting,waiting waiting // my whole life for someone like you. // It’s true that everyone would like to have met // A love so real.” The video, directed by Katherine Dieckmann, elevates the song’s haunting emotion. The two first met when Van Etten scored Dieckmann’s film Strange Weather.
Watch the video for ‘Jupiter 4’ below.
“I had been looking forward to collaborating with Katherine again since finishing our work together on her film in 2016. Since wrapping the film, she has not only been a guiding force in my work, but a light and guiding force in my life as well, sharing with me stories of how she and her husband made it work with two kids as artists living in New York and encouraging me to return to my music after my son was born,” describes Van Etten. “I asked if she would ever want to make a music video for me. She asked what the mood would feel like and I simply said ‘apocalyptic mom.’ And with that – she said ‘Absolutely.’ That’s why I love her so much.”
Dieckmann explains, “Getting to make a video for ‘Jupiter 4’ was such a gift that Sharon gave to me. The song is a fever dream, a spell cast in the name of obsession. I was hypnotized by it when I first heard it, and have never stopped being hypnotized by it – and by now I have probably heard it over a hundred times, maybe more. The trick was to figure out how to match the power of the song with visuals that could serve its ideas without spelling any of them out. I decided right away to work in an inky black-and-white palette and use raw elements (water, fire, earth, mist, dirt, summertime’s lush meadows and blooms) as a natural support for Sharon, and shoot her as a strong sculptural presence in space, to accompany the deeply immersive quality of the track. Sharon melded herself effortlessly to every natural location, and delivered a sync performance that was so passionate and vulnerable that it struck silent everyone who was lucky enough to see it happen.”
“It was a magical shoot,” Dieckmann continues, “one meant to honor ‘Jupiter 4’’scombination of brooding ambience with searing declarations of passion. I still have to ask myself, is the love ‘so real,’ or is it actually unreal? The beauty of the song, and hopefully of the video too, is that it lets that mystery be.”
As Van Etten’s first release since 2014’s Are We There, Remind Me Tomorrow reckons with the life that gets lived when you put off the small and inevitable maintenance in favour of something more present. It was written while pregnant, going to school for psychology, and after taking The OA audition. Since then Van Etten guest-starred in The OA, performed inDavid Lynch’s revival of Twin Peaks, scored her first feature film, Dieckmann’s aforementioned Strange Weather, and the closing title song for Tig Notaro’s Tig. The range of her passion (musical, emotional, otherwise), of new careers, projects and lifelong roles, has inflected this album with a wise sense of a warped-time perspective.
