The Private Canon: The Escape Plan of "A Crime"

There's no accounting for tastes, and there's no way to fully explain an infatuation. That doesn't stop me trying, or what else would I have to write about here?

My latest passion hit me like a ton of bricks, as they all do—though also like many of them, it was hiding there in plain sight, as if balanced precariously on a scaffold and ready to drop on my head. I first got into Sharon Van Etten's early records nearly a decade ago, probably on the strength of this Sound Opinions appearance, and I though I found both epic and Tramp richly evocative, I also found their deep-set, depressive sonority a bit much to take all at once; the songs I remember especially vibing with were the first's ironically cheery ode to resignation, "One Day" (as in, "One day I'll be fine with that"), and the second's hauntingly doomed, equivocal "Give Out" ("You're the reason why I'll move to the city, or why I'll need to leave").

She resurfaced in my consciousness a few years back with an assertive, bittersweet bit of wise nostalgia, the self-consciously Springsteen-ish "Seventeen," which she deconstructed on a characteristically illuminating episode of Song Exploder. But it wasn't until last week that I happened to be spinning epic, her first full-length album from 2010, when its opening track, "A Crime," gripped me by the shorthairs and still hasn't let go. I could simply enjoy its hypnotic power, as I recently wallowed for weeks in the masterful last album by Queen of Jeans. But I feel drawn to figure out exactly what it is about "A Crime" that's stolen my heart.

For starters, it sounds like it was recorded live, in a single take, just guitar and vocal, and that immediacy matches the song's confessional urgency. It doesn't mess around: Over a galloping coffeehouse strum in F#m, Van Etten's voice enters—a wounded bird's cry that would be overwrought but for its unfakeably raw sincerity—with a traffic-stopping lyric:

To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime
To admit I'm still in love with you after all this time

A prototypical left-you-but-can't-forget-you song, it is probably fairly read through the lens of Van Etten's famous career prehistory in an abusive, stifling relationship. I would say that's too narrow a frame, and risks falling into all the usual sexist traps of the biographical fallacy as applied to women writers, if the expanse of feeling expressed here didn't render such concerns moot. This song may have sprung from directly from her life—it seems it almost certainly did—but what it grew into is a vast plain, big enough for us all to share and shudder alongside her at a misplaced passion. (As I've said before: A song makes a space.)

The verses have a headlong, unpredictable quality, phrases spilling out over the bar lines like uncontained fury (the first verse, in fact, has so much to say that it's got an extra line in the middle that the others don't have), mostly alternating over a pivot of F#m and D, with brief intervening steps through E. The neat angles of these harmonies have some blurs on their edges, as in the E note she sings on the title phrase over the F#m, rather than dropping to a C# or up to an F#, creating a smudgy F#m7 feel:

The chorus uses the same three chords, but in a tellingly different order. As the melody leaps up and carves long, sharp thirds over those two major chords, the chorus only visits the song's home tonic of F#m in passing:

I don't want to overstate the impact of this hide-the-ball trick, but clearly a bit of what makes this chorus stand out at a sharp, achingly plaintive angle is its departure from the song's grimly determined home key of F#m; combined with the defiant vow of the lyric, this is a musical escape attempt with its own hard, bright shine amid the encroaching gloom. The song ends with Van Etten dropping the melody down in an awkward droop, and then leaves the guitar to ring out on the D chord—upbeat but irresolute, like an open door to a sunny day. Will she run through that door and not look back? Will she indeed never love that way, or any way, again? I may need to listen again right now to figure it out.

It's a tribute to how fully formed the song is that the version on the record, shared below, is essentially indistinguishable from the open-mike version captured at the top of this post.