Peace Signs

Most songs about survival ask you to lean in. "Peace Signs" grabs you instead. It lasts under three minutes^[1], it leans on a pounding kick drum, and it turns a singer known for hushed confessionals into someone who sounds ready to fight her way out of the room.

It is the second track on Sharon Van Etten's second album, Epic, and it follows the sparse opener by kicking the door open.

The record it came from

Epic came out on September 21, 2010, on Ba Da Bing Records. The seven songs were recorded and mixed in about eleven days that spring and summer at Miner Street Recordings in Philadelphia, with Brian McTear producing and a circle of friends and local players filling out the band^[1].

At the time, Van Etten was still establishing herself and was interning at the Brooklyn label that released the record^[4]. The album marks the point where she stopped being a lone performer and started thinking in terms of a band^[2]. She has talked about learning to ask other people for help, and said that this willingness gave her the courage to build a group around her songs^[2].

The album also sits just after a harder chapter. Her debut was shaped by the end of an abusive relationship in Tennessee, and by the time of Epic she was living in New York and building something new, with less urge to dwell on the past than before^[3].

A song that sounds like a decision

The track has been described as a turbulent rocker, and the description fits^[3]. The build is the point. Chords jangle slightly out of true, the drums keep insisting, and her voice hardens as the verses intensify. Where much of her early work trusts hush and space, this song trusts force.

That choice is itself a statement. For a writer whose reputation rests on vulnerability, volume becomes another way of being honest. Anger and resolve are emotions too, and they were part of the story she needed to tell.

Van Etten has not published a line-by-line account of what the song is about, and none of the interviews I found explains the title. Anything said about its meaning is therefore interpretation, built from the sound, the placement on the album and what she has said about the record as a whole.

Themes: defiance, release, and the cost of getting free

The most persuasive reading treats the song as a break from the album's inward-looking moments. The record as a whole has been described as an emotional reckoning that both lets go of old pain and offers some relief^[3]. "Peace Signs" is where the letting go turns physical and loud.

The title sets up a useful tension. A peace sign is a gesture of calm and goodwill, but it is also a flippant, casual wave, and it can be given as a sendoff. The music is anything but serene. That gap between the gentle phrase and the aggressive delivery is where much of the song's energy lives, and it invites you to hear peace as something fought for, not handed out.

There is also the matter of the band. Writing and recording with other people, rather than alone with a guitar, is its own kind of freedom, and a big shared sound can feel like a form of safety. In that sense the arrangement carries as much meaning as anything else on the track.

Consider how the song handles time. At under three minutes it is the shortest piece on the record, and it spends almost none of that time on preamble. There is no slow reveal, no long instrumental stretch to settle into. The urgency suggests someone who has waited long enough and has decided that the moment for saying it has arrived.

It also matters what the track does not do. It does not resolve into a tidy chorus of reassurance, and it does not turn the tension into a neat lesson. The listener is left inside the feeling instead of being walked out of it, which is a more truthful way to describe how recovery tends to go: forward in bursts, with plenty of noise along the way.

The vocal performance carries a lot of this. Instead of the soft, close-miked delivery associated with her earlier recordings, her voice pushes against the instruments and gets sharper as the arrangement thickens. Listeners who came to her through the quieter songs often single this out as the surprise, a reminder that restraint was always a choice rather than a limit.

There is a social dimension too. Part of what a rock band offers a songwriter is witnesses. Playing a song like this with a group, in a room with other people reacting to it, changes the stakes: private feeling becomes shared energy. For an artist whose earlier work was often tied to isolation, that shift from solitary confession to collective noise is hard to overstate.

Where it sits on Epic

The album is short, at about thirty-two minutes, and its sequencing is deliberate. After the spare opener comes this burst of drums and distortion, then the slow-burning pieces that critics singled out as highlights, particularly the two songs near each end of the record^[4].

Placed second, "Peace Signs" acts as a thesis for the album's range. It shows that the same writer behind the tender closers could also summon something raw and unvarnished. The record was well received, earning a Metacritic score of 82 and positive notices across indie press^[1].

Van Etten has also said that some of the record's melodic character came from a harmonium she borrowed, which moved her songwriting somewhere unfamiliar^[2]. The rock energy of this track and the drone of those quieter pieces are two halves of the same experiment.

The IDLES cover and a second life

The song found new listeners in 2021 when the tenth anniversary edition, Epic Ten, paired the original album with a set of covers by other artists. The British band IDLES took on "Peace Signs"^[5]. Van Etten had met them on tour in 2019 and bonded over missing home, and she felt their rock approach would suit a song she describes as having a fun, positive message^[2].

That remark is worth pausing on. It complicates any reading that treats the song as pure rage. By her own account the song carries a bright, affirming core, and the aggression is the engine for that optimism, not a contradiction of it. A cover from a band known for loud, communal catharsis highlights the same reading.

Alternative interpretations

A listener could take the song as directly autobiographical, a statement about leaving a bad relationship behind and refusing to be quiet about it. The surrounding history makes that plausible^[3].

Another reading is more about artistic identity: a young musician announcing that she will not be contained by the folk singer-songwriter label. The song shows an appetite for noise that she later followed through albums with fuller bands and, eventually, synthesizers.

A third approach hears the title ironically, the casual peace-sign wave of someone leaving a conversation they have no interest in continuing. Since the artist has not settled the question, all three can coexist.

Why it endures

The cover itself offers a clue about how the song travels. A punk band can pick it up and lose nothing, because the skeleton of the piece is simple and sturdy: a driving pulse, a rising tension, a refusal to back down. Songs with that kind of structure tend to survive translation into other styles, and the fact that this one did suggests the force was always built into the writing, not just the performance.

It is also worth remembering how the song looks from a decade on. Van Etten has since moved through synthesizers, acting roles and study of psychology, and her later records are often more polished and more ambitious. Hearing this early, rough-edged track in that light, it feels like the first draft of an artist who would keep testing how far her voice could go.

Part of the appeal is how little the song explains itself. In under three minutes it delivers a mood rather than a story: effort, tension, then release. Anyone who has had to build a calmer life after a difficult stretch can find their own version of that arc in it.

It also marks a hinge in a career. After Epic, Van Etten would work with Aaron Dessner of The National on demos that led toward her next record, where electric guitar and drums became central^[2]. "Peace Signs" is an early, compact preview of that direction.

Conclusion

"Peace Signs" is easy to underrate beside the more famous ballads on its album. It is short, abrasive and a little mysterious, and that is exactly why it works. The song shows a writer discovering that strength can sound like a wall of drums, and that peace, when it comes, is often earned loudly.