Sharon Van Etten's voice can shift from the sweetest bedtime storyteller to an anguished lupine howl in the space of a single bar. Heartbreak drove the singer/songwriter from the American South, where she was studying music, back home to the Eastern Seaboard. Heartache haunts ​many of her songs​—it's there in her wails, in the ragged drums and tangled coils of guitar, in her pleas to break or be broken—but it's tempered with exquisite joy: a gleeful hiccup in a vocal melody, a major-key arpeggio, a moment of hope and grace.