Songfacts®:

• "Trouble" is a track from Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Van Etten's first record with The Attachment Theory, consisting of Jorge Balbi on drums, Devra Hoff on bass, and Teeny Lieberson on synth. On the album, she dives into the stuff most of us spend decades trying not to think about too much: family, aging, identity, and, in the case of "Trouble," the oddly contorted positions we assume to keep the peace with the people we love.
• Van Etten explained that "Trouble" is about the uneasy art of coexisting with loved ones who see the world very differently than we do. "Having to coexist with people you love who have opposing views," she said, "and not being able to share deep parts of yourself and your narrative based on someone else's beliefs."
• The song is about emotional tiptoeing; protecting the fragile structure of the relationship, like someone trying not to sneeze in a house of cards.
  
  "It's that same feeling of when you go back home," Van Etten told Billboard. "You're visiting family and there are things you just can't talk about. Things that in my past define the experiences I've had in my life that I'm not able to talk about with people that know me better than anyone. It's like this burning hole."
  
  And honestly, who among us hasn't felt that burn? That sensation of sitting at the family table, spooning mashed potatoes while carefully avoiding the conversational equivalents of landmines?
• Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory was recorded at London's Church Studios, once owned by the Eurythmics. The production was led by Marta Salogni, whose résumé includes Björk and Depeche Mode.
  
  When the demos arrived, Salogni was driving through the Black Forest in Germany. She particularly remembers listening to "Trouble" and feeling that something in the music seemed to match her surroundings. "I thought, I can't wait to deconstruct it and reconstruct it," she told Uncut magazine. "It's a delicate balance to the percussive elements that gives it that groove. It was the reverb coming in at the drumbeats, to open it up and close it down again to give it this push-and-pull feeling within the beat. And that's what expressed in their lyrics. That duality."
• "Trouble" shares some DNA with another track on the album, "Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)." The two songs are like companion pieces: "Southern Life" takes a zoomed-out view of generational and cultural fault lines, while "Trouble" zooms in, microscopically, on the quiet, unspoken gulfs that can open up between even the closest of people. Together, they form a kind of emotional geography lesson: the big picture and the street view of how we relate to each other in a world where agreement is rare and understanding is often partial, at best.
• There's a live video for "Trouble" directed by Susu Laroche that was filmed during the album recording sessions at The Church Studios.