For this issue, Nine Perfect Minutes Zoomed into Sharon Van Etten’s L.A. kitchen, where the former indie It Girl was waiting for her 8-year-old son to get home from school. Dressed in a boyish black T-shirt and skinny jeans, her hair wet from a shower, her face free of makeup, not even a slash of black eyeliner, it was Van Etten in her off-duty role as a mother and wife, rather proud of herself because she had just taken a face plate off her oven door to clean it. Since moving to California in 2019, she’s acquired a few other new skills— not least of which is acting, starring as Rachel on the Netflix mystery drama The OA and in two feature films, Never Rarely Sometimes Always and How It Ends. But these days Van Etten knows how to take apart a toilet, has mastered meal planning (“Shopping in L.A. is MUCH different from shopping in New York"), and loves to cook (“If I’m upset, I can’t cook”). Not any of the kinds of activities you would associate with the ethereal, seemingly emotionally bruised singer who often cries on stage, winsome in her vampish stagewear, off-the-shoulder black tulle, and early-1960s cocktail gowns with nipped-in waists, the kind you can imagine Audrey Hepburn wearing when she was Breakfasting at Tiffany’s. Or attending a society funeral.

Mostly people know Van Etten because of her six much-loved albums, where she has written songs that could break your heart— most of them the strained sound of love unraveling, each keening syllable a dark mirror held up to listeners for them to commiserate and experience Van Etten’s pain as their own. But the eloquent expression of pain is just one side of Van Etten. “She’s not sad like her songs,” says Peter Silberman, lead singer of the Antlers, who asked Van Etten to sing on his band’s magnum Hospice, a sad record in its own “She’s really much funnier than you’d expect. She’s a total goofball.”