Sharon Van Etten / We've Been Going About This All Wrong / 2022
Mistakes
buoyant, playful, tender
A loose, joyful sketch of dancing badly and not caring, where physical clumsiness becomes a stand-in for emotional self-acceptance. Sharon Van Etten trades her usual weighty introspection for something looser and funnier, though the giddiness carries an undertow of hard-won relief.
self-acceptance imperfection as freedom physical joy intimacy letting go of control
Who's speaking
First person, addressed intimately to a partner referred to as 'baby'; the voice is present-tense and unguarded, reading as sincere rather than performative
What happens
The song moves from a solitary bodily awakening — walking, moving, skating around a room — into a shared dance with a partner, where mistakes and awkwardness stop being embarrassments and start being proof of pleasure. By the end the forgiveness extends outward, covering lateness and other small failures, as if the dance floor logic has become a relationship philosophy.
How it's built
Built almost entirely on a repeating verse-into-refrain pattern rather than a conventional verse/chorus/bridge split. The title phrase recurs with slight variations and escalating repetition, so the song accumulates through insistence rather than development — mimicking the loop of a dance rather than a narrative arc.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins with the body in motion before any relationship is introduced — walking, waking, shaking — establishing physical sensation as the entry point into the song's logic rather than narrative or reflection.refrain of the word mistake follows almost immediately, front-loading the song's thesis before it's earned.Elaine reference
First refrain
“even when i make a mistake”
The phrase is repeated with a stutter, as if catching itself mid-error, then resolved by the flat declarative that follows, which reframes imperfection as simply preferable to whatever the alternative would be.
Middle verse
“i dance like elaine”
This comic self-deprecation lightens the song considerably; comparing herself to a famously bad dancer signals that the mistakes being celebrated are literal as well as metaphorical, keeping the song from becoming too solemn.
Escalating refrain
“turns out it's great”
The declaration shifts from comparative ('better than that') to superlative ('great'), tracking a growing confidence as the song loops, as though repetition itself is convincing the speaker.
Closing section
“even when you're late”
By extending the forgiving logic to a partner's lateness, the song generalizes its private dance-floor ethic into a broader relational stance — imperfection, in general, is no longer a threat.
Craft
- repetition/incantation
- The stuttering repeats of the same phrase (mistake, mistake, mistake) function almost like a dance move restated, wearing down the negative connotation of the word until it flips into affirmation.
- synecdoche
- The body stands in for the whole self — shaking, aching, waking — so physical sensation becomes the primary language for emotional states rather than direct statement.
- pop-culture allusion
- A brief comparison to a well-known TV character's infamously bad dancing signals self-deprecating humor and grounds the song's abstraction in something concrete and funny.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about relaxing into imperfection within intimacy — sexual, physical, relational — after presumably more anxious or self-critical work elsewhere in Van Etten's catalog. A stricter reading might see it as a simple ode to dancing badly with someone you love, resisting deeper symbolic weight; both readings coexist without contradiction, since the song's charm partly rests on refusing to overexplain itself.
Context
This song appears on We've Been Going About This All Wrong (2022), an album often noted for stepping outside Van Etten's earlier, more brooding sonic and lyrical territory toward something warmer and more playful. I don't have confirmed biographical detail tying this specific song to an event in her life, so this reading rests on the text itself.
Listen for
- the stuttering repetition of the word mistake and how its emotional charge shifts across repeats
- the shift from solitary movement in the verses to a shared, addressed 'you' in the refrains
- the comic deflation of the Elaine reference against the song's more earnest lines
- how the ending widens the forgiveness from dance mistakes to relational ones like lateness
About Sharon Van Etten
Sharon Katharine Van Etten is an American singer-songwriter, musician and actress. Originally from New Jersey, and currently based in Los Angeles, Van Etten's music is noted for its indie rock aesthetic and personal lyrical content.
b. 1981 / United States
Full biography and catalogue