When Dessner was producing the album, he said, he and Van Etten would take breaks from recording and go for drives. He could never figure out why she had so much stuff in her car. “Finally,” he said, “I realized she was sleeping on a different couch every night.” After Van Etten finished touring for “Epic,” she faced the choice of getting a job to pay for an apartment or, as she put it, “keeping my band.” She spent the next year bouncing around Brooklyn, writing and recording songs without a fixed address. “I stayed at Katherine’s, I stayed at Jen’s,” Van Etten told me. “I stayed at Sean’s, I stayed at Taylor’s, I stayed at Ben’s.” She got up to nine places, including the occasional sublet. “And 10,” she added, “if you count my parents’.”

Van Etten’s friends tend to go out of their way for her. “Anything for Sharon Van Etten is my motto,” Dessner cheerily told me. Doug Keith, her touring guitarist, said the same thing, adding, “A lot of people feel that way.” Both Keith and Dessner are protective of her, and there is an undeniable vulnerability to her music. This might account for why so many different people seem to believe she’s speaking directly to them. On tour, Van Etten has found herself cornered by bearded guys who want to read her poems, teenage girls who simply need to be close to her and at least one lesbian who was outraged to discover that Van Etten isn’t gay.

Van Etten’s way of connecting with her audience is unusual. Not many rock musicians use harmony the way she does. Today every chorus of every radio hit seems assaulted by glee-club backing vocals. But on “Tramp,” the songs are sung in close harmony practically from start to finish. These harmonies do more than sweeten a melody. Van Etten doesn’t even really consider them harmonies. “I just hear two notes at once — I just hear two melodies.”(On tour, she shares the singing with an especially attuned backup singer, Heather Woods Broderick.)

Having found some financial success, Van Etten has put down roots in Ditmas; she rents a tiny attic apartment in an old house. One freezing Sunday, she gave me a tour of the neighborhood. She pointed out the liquor store with the ridiculous clerk and the flower shop that serves alcohol. We passed a guy huddled outside a bodega, drinking a 40-ounce beer in the early afternoon. He looked like somebody you’d want to leave in peace. He gave Van Etten a hesitant look of recognition. Van Etten stopped and threw out her arms. “Hey, man!” she said brightly, recognizing him as a landlord from a few sublets ago. “How ya doin’?”