A Crime

Some songs begin mid-argument. "A Crime" begins after the argument is over, when the damage is already done and the only question left is what to do with the feelings that outlasted the relationship. It is the opening track of Sharon Van Etten's second album, Epic, and it runs just over three minutes.^[5] In that time it manages to be furious, tender, ashamed and stubborn, often within the same phrase.

What makes it linger is how little it does to help you. There is no big production, no narrator stepping back to offer perspective. There is a voice, a guitar, and a person who cannot quite decide whether she is accusing someone else or confessing something about herself.

Where the song came from

Van Etten has been plain about the circumstances behind Epic. She has said the record was written in the wake of a very bad relationship, and she has been careful to add that the album is not really about him. In her telling, it is a story about getting over the situation.^[1] She has described the man as someone who would not even let her have a guitar, and credited the relationship with kicking her out of Tennessee.^[1]

That detail matters for how the song sounds. Before she was a recording artist, Van Etten had studied music production at Middle Tennessee State University, left school, and helped run a small concert venue in Murfreesboro. After moving to Brooklyn in 2006 she worked as a publicist for the label Ba Da Bing, and she was shy enough about her own music that the label's founder was surprised to learn she was playing shows at all.^[1] A partner who discouraged her from playing was not only controlling her time. He was standing between her and the one thing she was quietly building a life around.

The album itself was made quickly. It was recorded and mixed over eleven days in Philadelphia in the late spring of 2010, with Brian McTear producing, and released that September on Ba Da Bing.^[5] Where her 2009 debut had been mostly voice and guitar, Epic brought in a fuller band, though its first song holds most of that back.

A song that argues with itself

Critics who wrote about the song at the time tend to hear two things at once. One reviewer describes the guitar as hard-strummed and forceful, the singing as urgent, and the whole performance as heartbroken without sounding fragile.^[4] Another writer, looking back, hears something almost opposite: an acoustic guitar and a voice that is a little flat in its affect, a restraint that gives the song its power.^[3]

Both descriptions are accurate, and the tension between them is the point. The narrator is not collapsing. She is holding herself together with considerable effort, and the strain shows in the places where the performance tightens and then lets go.

Thematically, the song works through a refusal that does not hold. The narrator wants to be finished with someone, and wants to be the kind of person who learned something and will not repeat it. But the song keeps admitting that the feeling has not left. Reviewers have heard a hopeful, romantic undercurrent beneath the bitterness^[4], and others hear a shift from defiance toward a softer, more exposed ending. The anger is real, but it is serving as armor, and the song gradually lets the armor slip.

One of the quieter achievements of the writing is how it handles blame. A weaker breakup song would assign it cleanly. Here the narrator keeps turning the question around, asking what her own part was in staying, in believing, in loving someone who did not treat that love carefully. The title itself reflects this ambiguity. A crime implies a victim and a perpetrator, but it also implies a witness who did nothing, and the song never settles on which of those roles the narrator is playing.

Love as something you can be guilty of

The most unsettling idea in the song is that loving someone can feel like an offense. This is a familiar experience for anyone who has stayed too long in a bad situation: the sense that the feeling itself is a failing, that a wiser person would have stopped caring sooner. The narrator is, in effect, on trial in her own head, and the verdict keeps changing.

There is also a more specific kind of shame in the song, the shame of still wanting to be understood by the person who misunderstood you. It is easy to write about leaving. It is much harder to write about the stretch afterward when you know leaving was right and still catch yourself composing a speech to the one person who will not hear it.

Van Etten has spoken elsewhere about how a painful stretch after a breakup shaped her. When her parents took her in for about a year, they asked that she get a job, go to therapy and go to school, and she has said that period taught her to talk about what mattered most to her.^[2] Whatever the exact relationship between that time and this particular song, the connection fits. "A Crime" sounds like a first attempt to say the unsayable thing out loud, in a form someone else could hear.

The sound of restraint

The album that follows is more varied. One reviewer praised its range, from a country-tinged pedal steel sound to the atmospheric, keyboard-heavy "Dsharpg," and called the seven songs cohesive from start to finish.^[4] Against that backdrop, the opener is the plainest thing on the record, and that plainness is a choice.

Putting the starkest song first sets a contract with the listener. Whatever else the album does, it will not hide behind arrangement. The record closes with a stretch of silence and street noise before fading out, a small reminder that these songs belong to a real room and a real city.^[3] It has been suggested that the opener is the one that sets the tone for everything after it, and the tone is honesty first, ornament second.

Why it resonates

Part of the song's reach is simply that it keeps being passed along. The writer Dan Solomon, who first saw Van Etten play house shows around 2007, recalls hearing the song everywhere in the years afterward, in cities as different as Brooklyn, London and Austin, and describes it as the kind of song that made years of his own life feel validated.^[3] He hears it not as a straightforward breakup song but as one about lingering pain, since the breakup has already happened by the time it begins, and he notes that it keeps raising its emotional stakes without adding anything to the arrangement.^[3]

That is a good description of why it works for listeners who have never been in the narrator's exact situation. Most of us have been somewhere the song is describing: past the event, still living inside its consequences.

The song's afterlife says something too. For the tenth-anniversary edition of Epic in 2021, Van Etten assembled a companion album of covers, and the first artists she approached were Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon, working as Big Red Machine. They had already covered a different song from the record, so she suggested "A Crime" and proposed it as the opening track of the covers album, reasoning that it is so stark and minimal that interpreters would have room to make it their own.^[2] The result added drums and louder guitars, which is a useful demonstration of how much open space the original leaves.

Other ways to hear it

Because the song withholds specifics, it supports several readings. The most direct is as a portrait of an abusive or controlling relationship, which fits what Van Etten has said about the circumstances of the album.^[1] In that light, the narrator's self-questioning reads less like indecision and more like the aftermath of being taught to doubt herself.

A gentler reading treats it as a song about ordinary heartbreak, the kind where nobody is a villain and the pain comes from a mismatch of timing or willingness. And a third reading, which the title invites, takes the crime to be the narrator's own: not the love itself but the silence, the years she spent not saying what she needed. On that reading the song is less about the other person than about the cost of keeping quiet, which suits an artist who was, by her own account, reluctant to share her music at all.

None of these readings cancels the others. The song is built to hold all of them.

Conclusion

"A Crime" is a small song with a large reach. It does not resolve its argument, and that is the reason people keep returning to it. The narrator never learns whether she was wronged, or complicit, or simply human, and the song has the nerve to leave the question open.

For Van Etten it was also a beginning. Written by someone who had recently left a situation that tried to take her instrument away, it opens an album in which she picks the guitar back up and plays it with conviction. Listening now, you can hear the cost of getting there and the relief of finally saying it.