Songfacts®:

• "Fading Beauty," the ninth and penultimate track on the Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory album, is a reflective, atmospheric piece that explores the passage of time, aging, and the shifting nature of what we find beautiful in life.
• The song is a collaboration with Sharon Van Etten's band, The Attachment Theory, comprising bassist Devra Hoff, drummer Jorge Balbi, keyboardist Teeny Lieberson, along with her musical director Charley Damski. The project was gently steered into atmospheric orbit by Italian producer Marta Salogni, who has also worked with Depeche Mode and English Teacher.
• Set against pulsing synths and a bass drum that sounds like it's thudding softly through three layers of wool, Van Etten sings:
  
  The inherent beauty of life
  The faded beauty of light
  
  Then, a few lines later, she flips the lyric:
  
  The inherent beauty of light
  The faded beauty of life
  
  The lyrics aren't just musings on prettiness or the ravages of age, though there's a bit of that. They're meditations on what we're born believing is beautiful, what we're taught to admire, and how - like so many other things, from eyesight to optimism - those perceptions shift as the years pile on.
• Van Etten, along with her bandmates, most of whom are either approaching or firmly lodged in their 40s, found themselves smack in the middle of what's known as the "Sandwich Generation." This is the phase in life when you're trying to raise a child while also helping your parents reset their email passwords. It's a strange, dizzying chapter of adulthood in which you're somehow expected to be wise and nurturing and still remember to buy milk.
  
  For Van Etten, this strange confluence of time and responsibility turned out to be fertile ground for songwriting. "It always tends to come from a deep emotional place that I don't always have the words for," she told Uncut magazine.
  
  Van Etten went on to describe "Fading Beauty" as an exploratory piece written in real-time as she tried to figure out what she was feeling by listening to herself feel it. "At the time," she said, "it was about my father-in-law. Then it was about my parents. Then it was about being a mum."
  
  In other words, it became a song about everyone, and also, quite unintentionally, herself.