Sharon Van Etten Quotes

Every time I'm home, it's like a vacation, but I've been playing in bands since I was 11. I guess our goals were always small goals. It started off my goal was just to be in a band. Then it was to have a drummer that would show up.

I just looked like there was only one thing I could do: be in a band. It looked like I was already successful, basically. Which is what I wanted to do when I was 16. I just felt like if you did that, aesthetically you would just draw people who were doing the same thing.

I was a musician and did moderately well at that. I made an enjoyable living as a very young man, but I think as I became more comfortable and knowledgeable about myself and what I wanted, I moved into acting. I came to it rather late - later than most. I just really wanted to try my hand, and thankfully, it worked out for the most part.

I played my first show when I was 17, and that was a big moment. I realized it was something I could keep doing.

I literally came out of high school thinking that I was going to do something in the sports world because I grew up with a very sports-oriented family. My last year of school, I got involved with playing guitar and singing, and I joined a band and I just decided that year somehow that I was going to play music.

So don't think in reality I am a singer, I think I am a human being that has sung always all her life, and has learned a little to sing, and has found herself in the middle of a career.

I wanted to play in a band, and I wanted to do music for a living, and that's what I dedicated my life to.

I'd love to do something where I played a musician.

I've also become much more the musician I've always wanted to be.

So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.

I'm approaching a period in my life though where I'd like to be totally absorbed into music, doing concerts, writing something. Basically, that IS what I am doing.

When I was 11, I decided to start rapping, playing guitar, and writing songs. Everything really blossomed from there.

No one else in our family was a professional musician so this took an enormous leap of faith on their part.

I think it was 37 years that I did music.

I'm having fun just being a musician as well as an artist at this point.

I was 17 when I released my first record. I didn't really figure out what I wanted to say, how to get a message and put it together.

As a little kid, I'd put on shows for my family. I would sing songs and play piano. I thought while growing up in high school that I would stick with music and try to make a career out of that. As I gave it an honest, real shot, I realized it was not for me.

I wrote my first song when I was 54 years old.

I've spent my life playing music.

I went from wanting to be a Beatle to becoming a 'widdly-widdly' guitar player.

I started out doing the acting, and there was always an interest in music, and then the music just took off.

By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician.

We treated it as another acting job. Some of these other bands had been put together, and it was their dream come true to be in a band, and that wasn't really the case for us. It was the next part of what we were doing.

I was in a lot of bands growing up.

My family didn't want me to be a musician, and therefore, they never helped out in my efforts.