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.