Sharon Van Etten, Kevin Morby, and Jordan Patterson: Secretly 30

Intimate, up close, and personal solo performances by Sharon Van Etten, Kevin Morby, and Jordan Patterson — celebrating Secretly Group’s 30th Anniversary in Bloomington.

SHARON VAN ETTEN

Growing up in New Jersey, Sharon Van Etten found her way to the Brooklyn indie rock scene of the mid-2000s and steadily became one of the most beloved voices in independent music.

Rooted in rock and folk, she’s spent her career crafting deeply personal songs about love, loss, and the complicated terrain of being human. Her lyrics have an uncanny ability to articulate emotions that are hard to put into words. Since her debut Because I Was in Love (2009), she has released seven albums, each one an evolution in sound. For her seventh, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, she stepped away from writing alone and brought her band—longtime collaborators Devra Hoff, Teeny Lieberson, and Jorge Balbi—into the creative process. So moved by the energy in the room during rehearsals, she knew she had to capture it together. The result is her most alive-sounding record yet: a gorgeous mix of shoegaze, indie rock, and country-soul with real groove and warmth running through it. From sparse folk to lush synth-pop to band-driven rock, Sharon has evolved her sound across every album, cementing her as one of indie rock’s most enduring voices.

KEVIN MORBY

For Kevin Morby, the “little wide open” is the big sky, the small lives, it’s his origins in the Midwest, and every duty and modesty and familiarity and isolation: the land, the people, and the parts of that inside him. “There’s something unintentionally musical about the Midwest; cicadas chirping in the trees, a train passing, a tornado siren going off,” explains Morby. “If you listen, there are these almost ominous sounds taking place beneath the wide-open sky—its ugliness and its beauty and how the two are often working together simultaneously. And while the Midwest isn’t technically the badlands, it’s my badlands.”

Little Wide Open is the title of Kevin Morby’s eighth studio album, produced by Aaron Dessner. In the summer of 2024, Dessner had asked Morby to support The National at their London show in Crystal Palace Park. Shortly after, Dessner—who was on a hot streak, having produced albums for Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Gracie Abrams—reached out to Morby to say he’d love to produce his next album. They began recording at Aaron’s Long Pond Studio in Stuyvesant, NY, early in 2025 and finished in September of that year.

The album, which includes a host of contributors such as Dessner—who plays multiple instruments across it—Amelia Meath, Andrew Barr, Justin Vernon, Katie Gavin, Lucinda Williams, Meg Duffy, and more, has been described by Morby as the third in a trilogy of releases, following 2020’s Sundowner and 2022’s This Is a Photograph, which catalogued his time in the Midwest after moving back to Kansas City. This time out, Dessner’s production elevates Morby’s recordings while never losing focus of the songs themselves. There’s a newfound confidence and clarity in both Morby’s writing and Dessner’s production that recalls Tom Petty’s 1994 classic Wildflowers.

Now primarily living in LA, the atmosphere that runs through Little Wide Open has changed somewhat from its predecessors. As Rachel Kushner writes of Morby in the album’s accompanying essay: “It’s about time, about feeling like he has shifted from nostalgia and the losing game, losing but beautiful, of holding onto the past. He has accepted that time is ceaselessly flowing, and you can’t stop it. Instead, he feels like he’s riding it. He’s riding passenger with time.”

JORDAN PATTERSON

North Carolina-born and LA-raised, Jordan Patterson is a 23-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer creating catharsis from an alternative landscape. Blunt, raw, and decisive, Patterson is crafting a world through her music by inviting listeners to absorb the depth of her humanity and imagination. She is perfectly and imperfectly human; her music is a direct reflection of her experience, leaving listeners with a peculiar familiarity and unidentified nostalgia.

Patterson began writing in elementary school, writing what she now describes as “poems that want to move.” She attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts as a theater major but was exposed to new forms of artistry that expanded the scope of her creativity. In 2020, she moved to New York to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts but moved back to LA in 2021 to pursue music full-time.

In January of 2023, Jordan began recording her debut project, The Hermit, with Eric Van Thyne and Jacob Johanson (AKA JEHU). Patterson calls this album a “family project,” as she collaborated with dozens of local LA songwriters, instrumentalists, and vocalists in the process of creating the body of work. Collaborating with so many people shifted her process as a solo artist, as she began to view the craft of musicianship as a gift, both in practice and in play. The Hermit is genre-less by nature, as Patterson tiptoes around a plethora of different styles, sounds, and emotions to reflect her experience as authentically and as holistically as possible.

The Hermit draws its name and quiet power from the archetype itself—a solitary figure carrying a lantern with the sun’s light inside. Patterson relates deeply to the image: “The hermit can’t always feel the sun on them even though they carry it,” she says. “It’s beautiful, but sad at the same time.” This sense of paradox runs throughout the project. On tracks like “Jim” and “God,” she explores the distance between fantasy and reality in love. Other songs unfold like dream-journal entries—introspective, surreal, yet precise in their emotional truths.

Known for her magnetic and deeply cathartic live performances, which have earned her attention from artists such as Cameron Winter, Patterson balances raw vulnerability with a studied attention to detail. Her voice, often described as “melodic, then suddenly unsettling,” evokes both softness and strength—what she calls “a metal plate with grass on top.” It’s an apt metaphor for her music as a whole: a fusion of organic soulfulness and experimental edge, built from Ableton drum loops, layered guitar lines, and vocals sometimes tracked using only a headphone mic and family desktop.

Following the release of The Hermit in September of 2025, Jordan has quickly become a rare and special voice. The record earned the young songwriter national attention by outlets such as Pitchfork, The Guardian, Stereogum, KXSC, Nina Protocol, Rolling Stone, The Fader, The Line Of Best Fit and more as well as Spotify’s Editorial curators who included the song across various playlists including Editor’s Picks: Best Songs of August, Lorem, Juniper, New Music Friday, All New Indie, Fresh Folk. The Hermit’s roll-out also saw Jordan grace the cover of Spotify’s Fresh Finds, feature in the new weekly video series The Drop Weekly where editor Lizzy Szabo described Jordan as a “generational talent,” and saw Jordan spend a week as the face of their Penn Plaza Billboard in late September.

Patterson continues to tour and record both throughout Los Angeles and nationally. She has supported artists such as Cameron Winter, Open Mike Eagle, Folk Bitch Trio, Jens Lekkman, and more alongside various headline gigs in NYC and LA. Patterson is now based in LA and continues to collaborate extensively with other artists in developing her newer projects.

At its core, Jordan’s music parallels her individual experience and the relationships that ignite her. Jordan is eternally dedicated to being an unadulterated novice, creating music that reflects her role as an artist who is perpetually “in progress.”