There’s buzz, buzz, buzz about Brooklyn singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten. She performed her self-described “sad prarie folk music” last week at The Rock Shop in Park Slope and I decided to download, Epic, her new CD. Sure am glad I did.

According to the Ba Da Bing Records, the Brooklyn company that released Epic:

“Sharon Van Etten came to Brooklyn via Jersey via Tennessee via Jersey. Along the way, she sang in choirs, rejected her school’s music program, worked at an all-ages venue, trained as a sommelier, and got a full time job at a record label. She also had some bad experiences in relationships.

OK, more than some.”

There’s also a lot of well-deserved buzzy buzz buzz about Mary Gauthier’s new album, The Foundling, a profoundly moving and artful cycle of folk/country songs about the facts of her own adoption and her  attempts to find her birth parents as a middle-aged woman.

Gauthier explains via her website: “the songs tell the story of a kid abandoned at birth who spent a year in an orphanage and was adopted, who ran way from the adopted home and ended up in show business, who searched for birth parents late in life and found one and was rejected, and who came through the other side of all of this still believing in love.”

Suffice it to say, I am now a fan.