Sharon Van Etten Quotes

I've never been one for keeping a journal, so my songs were my journals. They allowed me to express my feelings and let people know what was going on with me. I knew that somebody would relate.

If you show you're human and have something to say, people will connect with you.

I realized that there's this fine line between being personal and being general and being alienating.

I want people to be able to relate to me and the trials and tribulations and struggles that I go through.

You can't worry too much about what you think the audience wants to hear. You just have to hope that you're a likeable enough person that what you're saying will relate to other people, so they can laugh at it as well.

I've come to realize that the more I censor myself, the less people relate to me.

My first album is a lot of my personal experiences. I wanted people to relate to what I've been through.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.

I just want to portray a very honest character that displays traits that people can truly relate to and can help them - the audience and myself because I learn from the characters as well - help them see themselves in a perspective that is outside of what they know already, and grow from that experience.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

To be honest with my music... for me to expect anyone to connect it has to come from a place of honesty.

I guess I'm trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.

If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.

The only thing I wanted to do in my music is be human and communicate all the aspects of that, which often means being vulnerable.

I feel like the more I share, the more relatable I am.

I've been honest with a lot of the problems I've had in life. Everybody has problems. They can relate to that.

Honestly, my goal is just to let people hear my story and just like, feed everybody that could relate to my story in any way.

I want everyone who's listening to know who I am and not just see me as this singer. I want them to feel connected to my story.

I've become so much more comfortable divulging things I've never talked about before, honing in on certain relationships that everyone can relate to.

I don't want to bore people with things that don't matter to them. I want to share parts of my life that are universally true with other people.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

I'm writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

When I put my first project out ages ago, I didn't want to show anyone my emotions. Now I think it's better for people to understand how I am as a person and let them relate.