Love More

Most closing tracks announce an ending. "Love More" does something stranger: it ends Epic by sounding like a beginning that hasn't decided whether to trust itself yet. A harmonium drones, a small circular pattern repeats, and a voice that has spent six songs wrestling with harm, blame and survival begins to rehearse a modest instruction for living.

The song is short on spectacle and long on repetition. That is the point. It treats tenderness as a practice you do again and again, not a conclusion you arrive at once.

A song that came before the album

"Love More" has an unusual origin. Van Etten has said she recorded it before she had decided to make the album it now closes, and it first reached listeners as part of the Shaking Through series from Weathervane Music, which documented the making of the song on video.^[1][2] When the rest of Epic took shape, the song was added as the seventh and final track, a position that lets it reframe everything before it.^[3]

Epic itself arrived on September 21, 2010, on Ba Da Bing. It is Van Etten's second album, seven songs running just over thirty minutes, recorded and mixed in eleven days in Philadelphia with Brian McTear producing at Miner Street Recordings.^[2] Guests included Meg Baird, Cat Martino, members of She Keeps Bees and David Hartley of The War on Drugs.^[2] The reviews were warm, with Metacritic settling at 82 and Pitchfork awarding a 7.8.^[2]

The instrument matters too. Van Etten has said she wrote the song on a harmonium borrowed from the band The Brunettes, and that the instrument's meditative quality, along with the need to keep air moving through it, helped her explore her vocal range.^[1] You can hear the consequence: the song seems to breathe in long exhalations, with a steadiness that guitar-driven songs on the album do not attempt.

The life behind the record

The record circles the aftermath of an abusive relationship that Van Etten was in for several years while living in Tennessee.^[3] She has been careful about how that history is framed, saying in an interview that the album is not about him but about her getting over the situation.^[3] That distinction is useful for hearing "Love More." The song is not a portrait of someone who caused harm. It is a portrait of someone assembling a self afterward.

Van Etten has described the song in just those terms. She calls it the track that pulled her out of feeling sorry for herself in her bedroom, and says it pushed her to reach out to other people and to collaborate, both in writing and in recording.^[1] She also says it sums up the record for her personally.^[1] That is a notable claim for a closing song, because it positions the quietest piece on the album as its real thesis.

Repetition as a form of faith

The central idea of the song is stated in its title, and the writing around it is deliberately spare. Rather than building a narrative, it stacks a few images of difficulty and distance and lets them settle against a plain resolution. A reviewer at Drowned in Sound called it the emotional anchor of the album, pointing to its simple, circular chord pattern and a lyrical ambiguity about whether hope or regret wins out.^[4]

That ambiguity is worth taking seriously. A weaker song would declare victory. This one keeps both possibilities in the room, and the circular structure supports it: nothing resolves in the way a chorus normally resolves. The music returns to where it began, which suggests that loving more is closer to a habit being practiced than a trophy being won.

NPR heard a similar movement, describing a song that lets a bleak and troubled past lay the groundwork for a tiny mantra to live by.^[5] The word "tiny" is precise. The ambition here is small enough to be believable. Nobody is promising transformation; the narrator is proposing an adjustment of direction, and a person in recovery can usually trust an adjustment more than a vow.

From self-protection to reaching out

Read against the rest of Epic, the song is a turn outward. Much of the album is about the claustrophobia of one relationship and the work of getting free of it. The closing track widens the lens. The question is no longer only what was done, or how to leave, but what kind of person emerges and how that person treats others.

This is where Van Etten's own account becomes the best guide. If the song pulled her out of her bedroom and toward collaborators, then the instruction in the title is concrete as well as emotional. Loving more can mean letting a borrowed harmonium into your life, asking people to play on a recording, and accepting that recovery is not a solitary act. The song models that by being a little communal itself: it was first documented on video as part of a collaborative series, and it later passed through many hands.

The covers and what they reveal

One sign of how a song resonates is who wants to sing it. Bon Iver and The National have both covered "Love More," and Van Etten has said she was astonished that they knew who she was.^[3][6] For the tenth anniversary edition of the album, called epic Ten, a companion disc collected covers of every track by other artists, including Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams and Courtney Barnett.^[2]

Apple's version is the most revealing. Stereogum described it as playful, euphoric and percussive, in the vein of her album Fetch the Bolt Cutters.^[7] Van Etten had never met Apple and thought the request a long shot, and she was stunned when Apple agreed.^[1] She has said the new arrangement felt like breaking the song's chains and gave her a sense of closure about the place she was in when she wrote it.^[1]

That reaction is its own kind of interpretation. The original is hushed, cautious and slow to commit. Apple's rhythmic, almost celebratory reading suggests the song always contained an appetite for release, and that the restraint was a choice of the moment, not a limit of the idea. Hearing both, the listener can understand the song as a seed that survives different weather.

There is also a quiet generosity in the way the song sits at the end. Closing an album with a plain instruction to the listener, and not a confession, hands the work of the record back to the audience. After thirty minutes of watching someone process pain, we are invited to try the same small gesture ourselves.

That invitation helps explain the song's life beyond the album. It has been taken up by other musicians, played at the tenth anniversary of the record, and passed along between listeners as something close to a private motto. Songs that function this way tend to outlast the circumstances of their writing, because the circumstances can be replaced by the listener's own.

Alternative readings

Not everyone hears a clean recovery narrative. The ambiguity noted by Drowned in Sound leaves room for a more tentative reading, in which the song is a resolution made against the grain of exhaustion, something said because it must be said and not because it is already felt.^[4] On this view, "love more" is closer to a note to self, repeated until it begins to be true.

Others might hear it as a quiet argument about forgiveness without reconciliation. Nothing in the song demands that the narrator return to anyone. The love in question can be directed at friends, strangers, family, or the narrator's future self. That openness is part of why listeners have told Van Etten that it gave them language for their own experiences.^[1]

A third reading is a purely musical one. The drone, the circular pattern and the unhurried vocal create a state more than they tell a story. If the lyrics were absent, the song would still communicate an intention to stay present. Some listeners will treat it less as a statement and more as a meditation.

Why it endures

"Love More" has lasted because it declines to be grand on an album called Epic. The title of that record points toward scale, and yet the song that ends it chooses the opposite register, asking only for a small, repeatable act. The contrast is the joke and the wisdom at once: the epic part of survival is mostly made of tiny decisions.

It also arrived at the right moment in Van Etten's career. Before it, she was a promising songwriter of hushed, searching folk. After it, she was an artist whose work other musicians wanted to answer. Her later records would grow louder and stranger, moving toward the dark synthesizer textures of Remind Me Tomorrow, but the moral center set down here, honesty about harm joined to a stubborn tenderness, would remain recognizable.

For a curious listener coming to the song now, the best approach may be to hear it last, as the album intends. Let the preceding six songs make their case about damage and departure. Then let the harmonium start, and notice how little the song asks of you, and how much that little is.