“The thing about revisiting cities...

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten built on the achy, sparsely adorned folk sound of her 2009 album Because I Was in Love on last year's follow-up, Epic, a short but near-perfect record...

Diminutive Sharon Van Etten reaches for a big, expansive voice with Epic. Her sophomore effort comes on like the lilting soundtrack to a breakup phone call: Powerful, almost angrily strummed chords set the stage as full-on country-folk instrumentation hovers mournfully, and there’s more heart-on-sleeve, lonely-girl...

For five years, Sharon Van Etten wrote music in secret, stockpiling songs she hoped to perform under better circumstances. “I started playing open mics when I went to college, but then I took a break,” Van Etten explains. “My boyfriend at the time wasn’t very supportive of my music and didn’t think I was good enough to perform, so I had to hide it from him...