Sharon Van Etten penned a whole album about the trauma of touring.

So we should have expected she might not have been wholly there at St George’s Church.

But instead of pining at the pain of a lover being miles away, as she does on recent album Are We There, she mourned for family and friends in New Jersey celebrating Thanksgiving.

“I know you don’t give a f***,” she said, flicking her Audrey Tatu-esque bob. “But thanks for spending it with me – and thanks for listening.”

It wasn’t always easy. The trouble with a church show is it really only suits delicate arrangements - at times her intimate ballads seemed to disappear up into the gods at the Kemp Town church and her words got lost beneath other instruments.

Once she’d settled into the surroundings and opened her lungs on Break Me, its Wurlitzer keys and Omnichord fizzing, Van Etten’s voice sparring with her keyboardist’s perfect backing lines, things cracked up a gear.

She closed with the sumptuous ballad You Love Is Killing Me, but the best came last when half the audience had gone home.

In a genuinely unplanned encore (oh, for a few more of those), we saw the real Van Etten.

She sat alone at a piano, welcomed the remaining few up close and poured out I Love You But I’m Lost, her crystal clear but slightly cracking vocal filling every icy heart in the sacred room.