Sharon Van Etten / Are We There / 2014
Taking Chances
weary, suspended, quietly anxious
A quiet, unresolved meditation on staying in a relationship out of habit and old attraction rather than certainty. The song circles a single admission — that the speaker has repeatedly gambled on this person — without ever landing on whether that gamble paid off.
ambivalence in love risk and self-doubt inertia versus escape emotional dependency the pull of the familiar
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addressing a partner directly, using "you" throughout, but often slipping into a more detached, almost theoretical register when describing love and emotion in general terms. The voice feels self-aware but not fully in control of its own decisions, which makes it feel honest rather than reliable.
What happens
The song opens with a scene of stasis — sitting, watching, looking for an exit — and moves through fragmented observations about why people stay in relationships that touch them too deeply to leave. It never progresses in a conventional sense; instead it loops back repeatedly to the confession of having taken chances on this one person, each repetition sounding a little more resigned. By the end, the imagery of being on the verge of leaving suggests the cycle is about to repeat rather than resolve.
How it's built
The song avoids a clean verse-chorus arc, favoring short, imagistic verses that dissolve into a repeated, mantra-like refrain. That refrain doesn't build or vary much lyrically, which mirrors the stuck feeling the lyrics describe — the music going in circles rather than toward a climax. The near-identical final verse and refrain, ending on the phrase about leaving, function as a kind of non-ending, refusing catharsis.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Sitting on the porch, looking for a way out”
The scene is deliberately static: charm is performed, a call is answered, but the speaker is physically and emotionally positioned at an exit without taking it. This establishes the song's core tension between performance and genuine desire to leave.
First pre-refrain
The speaker links the depth of the partner's effect on her to her continued presence, framing intimacy less as choice than as something that overwhelms agency. The rhetorical question about plight suggests she's questioning whether people in relationships like this recognize their own precariousness.
First refrain
“Even I've taken my chances”
The word 'even' does a lot of work here — it implies the speaker sees herself as someone who doesn't usually take risks, making this admission feel like an exception, almost a confession of vulnerability rather than a boast.
Middle verse
“why don't we go now?”
This section drifts into more generalized, almost philosophical language about emotion and old songs, as if the speaker is trying to intellectualize her way out of the situation. The direct question about leaving now cuts through the abstraction, revealing the urgency underneath the detachment.
Third verse
“be alone and take”
The syntax here becomes clipped and destabilized, mirroring emotional confusion. The question of who sacrifices for whom in love suggests an imbalance the speaker hasn't resolved, positioning the relationship as transactional or unevenly costly.
Closing refrain
The repeated declaration of being about to leave, followed immediately by the same refrain of having taken chances, suggests the cycle isn't breaking — it's about to repeat. The song ends without resolution, which is itself the point.
Craft
- refrain as stasis
- The repeated admission of having taken chances doesn't accumulate meaning so much as wear a groove, formally enacting the emotional rut the lyrics describe.
- abstraction
- Lines about love, emotion, and combination read almost like aphorisms detached from a specific scene, universalizing the speaker's private dilemma into a general statement about intimacy.
- unanswered rhetorical questions
- Questions about plight, about leaving, and about who breaks for whom are left hanging, reinforcing the speaker's paralysis rather than driving the song toward resolution.
- threshold imagery
- Porches, doors, and the phrase about being on the way out recur as liminal spaces, positioning the speaker perpetually between staying and going.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about the gap between recognizing a relationship's toll and being able to act on that recognition — the speaker keeps naming her own risk-taking almost as a way of processing it, without it translating into a decision to stay or go. An alternative reading could hear the song more affirmatively, as a statement of commitment despite risk, with 'chances' framed as an act of faith rather than regret; the lyrics' ambiguity supports both readings, and the flat, unresolved ending leans toward the more uncertain interpretation.
Context
I don't have reliable specific information about the writing or recording context of this song beyond its appearance on Are We There (2014), an album generally noted for exploring difficult, asymmetrical relationships and emotional exhaustion. I'm cautious about asserting more than that.
Listen for
- how the refrain's melody does or doesn't shift across repetitions, since the lyric barely changes
- the tension between porch/threshold imagery and the recurring idea of leaving
- the shift from direct address to more abstract, aphoristic language mid-song
- whether the vocal delivery on 'even' carries surprise, resignation, or both
- the lack of musical or lyrical climax at the song's end
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