Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  And communal was the key word. A central tenet of the H.O.R.D.E. philosophy was the revival of the jam band. The bands would mix and merge onstage, improvising and jamming live, and would invite local bands to play at every stop on the tour, to leave a trail of collaboration and unity in their wake.

  Out in the crowd when H.O.R.D.E. hit Wisconsin, Justin Vernon took the tour’s collaborative ideals deeply to heart. Having sprung to a skinny six feet and boasting a shock of thin hair he was a natural focal figure, not just among the musicians he’d met at high school marching band and jazz band but in the shifting Eau Claire band scene and even in the sports arena – he was captain of the Memorial High School football team and a star of its basketball team.* He’d gathered players around him in various formations throughout his high school years, now he was about to become the focus of his first full-on music collective.

  It was at the 1997 H.O.R.D.E. festival date that the group of musicians who would come to form Mount Vernon finally cohered. To the core unit of Justin, Sara, Joe and Keil were gradually added Brad on bass, Phil on piano, a trumpeter called Trever Hagen and several other interested players. Becoming a close-knit group over subsequent jazz camps, the revolving crew of up to 10 players that made up Mount Vernon held their first rehearsals in Justin’s basement, necessitating Gil making a few home improvements.

  “We actually partitioned a room in the basement right below us with soundproof in the wall,” he says, “so we could actually sit in the room … and watch TV and have a full conversation in spite of the fact that we had nine kids down there with trombones, trumpet, two saxophones, three guitars and a keyboard all plugged in.”2

  “We always thought that he had talent,” adds Justine, “but we’re his parents, you have to take that with a grain of salt.”3

  Over 1997 and 1998, Mount Vernon grew into a solid fixture on the Eau Claire scene. A preppy-looking outfit, their unofficial uniform consisted of blue turned-up denim jeans, white promotional T-shirts, plaid shirts, the odd Hendrix-style hippy shaman smock and a smattering of caps – a blue baseball cap for Justin, a looser checked affair worn backwards for Sara. But their faintly dorky image as they trod onto school hall stages belied the communal sense of enthusiasm they exuded, infecting everyone who was caught in their sphere. Such was Vernon’s ethos of all-welcome inclusiveness, of building a widespread community of musicians and friends around Mount Vernon, that even their sound guy would eventually join the band.

  “Even in high school, his band had a lot of team spirit to it,” claims Christopherson. “It’s very easy for him to get people to feel connected. He played our graduation party in high school, and our whole gymnasium filled with the graduating class was practically up in arms watching him play these songs. Everyone was kind of tearing up.”4

  Their sound, at first, was heavily jazz influenced, emulating the funky swing and improvisational interludes of classic jazz and ska shows as Justin’s guitar, Phil Cook’s electric piano, Joe’s drums and the brass section’s array of saxophones, trumpets and flutes took turns occupying the eye of their six-minute Stax storms. They were the epitome of the accomplished high school jazz camp band, but one thing really made them shine – the vocals. In one corner, Sara Jensen’s luscious soul warble oozed a clean-cut classicism with hints of Dusty Springfield, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. Centre stage, Justin’s deep, husking rock growl was far more indebted to Eddie Vedder and Dave Matthews than any you’d find most trad jazz nights, although he’d later equate his voice to more credible reference points “like Waits or Springsteen. Over the years my fave singers have been more gospel singers, but every time I’ve tried to sing like that before I always ended up sounding like a complete asshole.”5

  When the two voices combined, backed by the full-throated choir of their Mount Vernon counterparts, they created a powerful, glacial choral shiver that predated the lush harmonies of Fleet Foxes by almost a decade. Together, Justin and Sara made a raw kind of magic.

  After a year of playing together, Mount Vernon did what came naturally to Justin. Obsessed with keeping a record of the sound of this ever-shifting band, in 1998 they travelled to Minneapolis and, over the course of a single weekend, recorded their debut album. Adorned with a mauve-tinged cover picture of three shadow figures on a lakeside waving to their two friends in the water – an image that reflected the themes of wilderness, community and chill that would come to define Justin’s later work – We Can Look Up was an hour-long collection of Mount Vernon’s 10 biggest showstoppers, few of them galloping in under the six-minute mark.

  Those that made the wise investment of buying one of the limited run of vinyl and CD copies of We Can Look Up at one of Mount Vernon’s shows, or received one of the copies hand-mailed to local newspapers and fanzines in the hope of drumming up a review*, may have been bemused by its ramshackle recording, its musical fumbles, its incongruous improvisational solo segments and its meandering mash of traditional jazz, folk, ska, prog, grunge and even hardcore punk. But within its eclectic grooves they’d have found formative glimpses of inspired new ideas and the origins of a stylistic approach that Justin would develop into a formula that would make the globe shiver.

  Justin Vernon’s first ‘official’ album release opened with one of its starkest pointers to the sounds that would ultimately secure his success. A lustrous choral harmony laced with falsetto, twice singing an aching three-note refrain. It struck a note of alt.folk credibility belied by the upbeat lounge-style track that followed. ‘Sprinkler’, the first song on We Can Look Up, swung into action bedecked with a cheery jazz-pop hook on flute and horn and a lilting springtime soul bounce that smacked of a Seventies New York sitcom theme. It was only when Justin’s gnarled voice enters two minutes in, singing of a summery weekend amongst the sprinklers, that the tune took on a grittier edge, even though his lyrical imagery was saccharine in the extreme. “I look to the sky and I see a rainbow swallowing my eye,” he sang, picturing children playing in the water sprays, idyllic as a Sesame Street segue. Though it ultimately dropped into a darker middle-eight of strummed guitar, bulbous bass and strident piano building to a crescendo, it climaxed with Justin bellowing “I can hear you smiling!” over the sort of flute flurry that Sufjan Stevens would soon make his own. For an artist whose currency would one day be in winsome melancholia, ‘Sprinkler’ was a surprisingly joyful and jubilant introduction.

  The second track, ‘High Five’, relaxed us into the upbeat mood. A twinkling flute, high-neck guitar and floaty piano convened over a spritely melody before the loping funk beat and prowling jazz brass introduced another sunny Vernon lyric. It found him wandering the streets with a gang of friends “looking back on a year that’s weathered like a pair of shoes”. The song’s opening verse gave Justin’s first hint of wintry reflection as “a cold Sunday evening hits me like the evening news”, but there was little lingering dislocation since, he continued, “a phone call means so much, I’ve got the dudes on the line … we’ll get together anytime”. ‘High Five’ developed this sense of community into one of communal living; the second verse found Justin “waking up in a cold room” in a large shared house on a hill in Chippewa Falls “looking out on Wisconsin’s land” as a jovial pancake breakfast was being prepared by his laughing band of friends, throwing his stuff into an “evening knapsack” and going about his day, whatever day it might be, the roving troubadour.

  Here was the core of Mount Vernon’s atmosphere of inclusiveness and ‘team spirit’ – “We are one, we are having fun, we are out in the sun,” Justin bawled, declaring that everyone was “welcome to our house”. It was another idyllic boho scene – the band of jazz rock brothers living under one “groove”, a girl so “funked out of her mind” that she’s passed out on the couch – and one that was close to his heart. One day, a decade away, he’d set out to recreate this environment in the form of a communal collective of musicians based in a shared studio complex.

  ‘High Five’ closed with Mount Vernon indulging
in a spate of trad jazz jams before coalescing into a sweet soul choir, and even featured Justin launching into a lengthy free-form scat of a brand you could never imagine coming from the inventive folk hero of 2013. But it also pointed to Vernon’s ability to build and then break a swelling wave of noise, as well as his growing tendency to ink himself. “I’ve got a koala tattooed on my neck,” he sang, precluding the appearance of Indigo Girls lyrics across his chest and the outline of Wisconsin over his heart, with places of key significance to him individually marked.

  The structurally focused but loosely recorded ‘Today Is Just A Day’ brought in the album’s catchiest hook yet, the backing choir lacing the song’s slinky ragga groove with an addictive but fairly surreal chorus line, reflective of the random wordplay Justin would adopt on his most famous albums: “It’s like kettles and pots, it’s like shoes and knots in my shoelaces.” Justin’s verses, despite a further bout of speed scat, were more direct, reflecting on an average summer day, possibly at summer camp (“all those sunny days … all of those days by the water”), spent “with the girl in the sunlight”. Justin is entranced by this unnamed woman, right down to the way she holds her phone – “I’m wondering why she shines so bright … I’m wondering why she’s so mysterious … I wanna know what makes her move, I wanna know what makes her groove.” Conjecture may point at the girl in question being Sara Jensen since, during Mount Vernon’s four years together, the band’s two singers became a couple.

  ‘Thompson’, the longest track on the record at over seven minutes, opened in a darker, rock-heavy mood. After an interlude of in-studio voices too quiet to be comprehensible, Justin’s guitar struck in with a glowering desert rock strum akin to early Pixies, albeit with a ska upswing. Joined by trumpet and drums, this furious opening proved a red herring; after one minute ‘Thompson’ switched to an urgent ska rock pulse, the vehicle for the album’s most extended solo interludes, Joe beating out a two-minute drum battery before handing the spotlight to Phil’s piano for the closing few minutes as Justin wailed Vedderishly in the background. But far more fascinating were Justin’s two anguished verses, the first sign of the broiling waters beneath his sunny jazz persona. Racked with stress and isolation, he roared about the loneliness and defiance of the performer: “Mellow lit room with four exit signs, four pathways home/When you’re in a room that’s full of people and you’re speechless, then boy you’re all alone/I found my way through the mikes and I am here and I’m not letting go/This is my stomping ground, I walk through the door, this is home”. His second verse broadens the theme to include a more general isolation, based on the fear that his warmth and friendliness tends to frighten people away. “Should I have acted a little less kinder?” he asked himself. “Should I have taken a step back, did I scare them away?… Now I’ve got an empty dinner table.”

  The mood suitably darkened, Justin passed the mike to Sara for the album’s central ballad ‘Alexander’. Her rich soul voice illuminated a Sade-style lounge song full of stuttering piano, sultry saxophone and poetic imagery of a dangerous and unpredictable lover: “Purple light painted on the eyes from a dim lamp, a street tramp in a faltering light/He breathes the smoke to ease his dancing mind … I have to wonder what can I mean, what can this be to a man whose soul is tamed to cloak his brain, insane, a spinning barrel part of the game?”

  Gradually, the strains of holding the relationship together despite Alexander’s distance and introversion got too much: “As the years unwind, a dying tear that I’d hoped I forgot how to cry … What I’d give to see his face unfold, to know his truths, to have and to hold/I’ve climbed inside his grand, built-up wall, I can tell by his trembling lip he’s ready to fall”. And this title character who “finds strength in strangers’ lives and from his own tries to hide”, could this, in turn, be a cypher for Justin, who’s already admitted on the album that his deep interest in others can drive them away?

  Unlikely given the timescale, and the next lyrical sidestep. This tense and downbeat segment of ‘We Can Look Up’ gave way to a stirring reveille of marching piano chords, delicate guitar and a drowsy duet of trumpet and saxophone akin to the brass swoons that would eventually become Beirut’s trademark, before ‘So Red’ took a sudden shift of tempo and picked up the pace again to a joyful ska skank. Vernon’s lyrics, though, remained downcast, bemoaning that he’d “never had to buy a wedding ring or any other sort of thing/Been a couple of years … since anyone’s looked in my direction”. By verse two the desperation reached critical: “sometimes my lungs cave in, sometimes my heart gets thin, sometimes I need to be with her”. It was as if, having brushed aside the album’s initial positivity and opened his emotional floodgates, Justin could no longer hold his murky waters back.

  These anguished revelations were by no means the only signpost to Vernon’s future as a craftsman of sublime, melancholic mood pieces. Four minutes in, ‘So Red’ dropped down to a near silent guitar refrain full of restrained tension, a bleak hopelessness and words unsaid. A rattle of snare drum and plaintive trumpets strike up, rousing an air of nobility to the struggle and, as more brass rallies to stir a sense of heroism in the face of emotional adversity, ‘So Red’ builds to a euphoric crescendo of a hue that saw far beyond the remit of traditional jazz and would eventually become the foundation stone of alt-folk. Though they were some years yet from emerging as a recognisable force or movement, Vernon was already thinking along the same lines as Band Of Horses, Fleet Foxes, Beirut, Iron & Wine and Bright Eyes: traditional instruments building grand swells of intoxicating noise.

  The album’s title track was the first recorded duet between Justin and the girl who’d give her name to his breakthrough masterpiece. Returning to a stoutly upbeat groove with an Afrobeat rhythm resembling Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ and the kind of frivolous Soweto guitar work that would come to characterise Vampire Weekend’s Afropop, the song found the pair ironically cooing to each other about a doomed affair: “Sweetly done wrong, singing lovers’ songs, we tried so hard, we tried to be strong.” Picturing bittersweet romantic images of “glossy beaches reflecting an orange and blue sky”, their affection has now cracked, sending the couple spiralling into a bleak wintry despondency – “Weeks fly by in timeless time, we’re just measuring seasons by the mind, leaves still die on Jefferson Street and winter’s a dark, dark time.” As the track progressed through a cheerful Afrobeat party section of bongos and breezy horns more suited to the Glastonbury World Stage than the icy Midwest – and entirely at odds with its lyrical fragilities – the duet became ever more spiteful and desperate, the pair barking “prove you’re more comfortable now with these people and with these friends” at one another, and “spill your guts out on the sidewalk, we can slip, slip around”. Their dissolving relationship clashed with their need for security with opposing reactions for both; as the song reaches its finale Justin is yowling “I don’t wanna stop talking to you” while Sara responds with a firm “I’m running away”. Though presumably not a song about their own relationship – after all, they were singing it together – ‘We Can Look Up’ arguably exposed a propensity for conflict and discord between the two. If not a public airing of laundry, then, certainly a premonition.

  After several tracks of heart-wringing and bawling out its troubles, Mount Vernon’s debut album needed a lift. ‘Happy Song’ was precisely that. “Life, it’s been good to me!” the choir chimed in a jubilant gospel swing that erupted in occasional bursts of handclaps and whistles, while Justin sang of nostalgia for his childhood toys and his idealistic dreams of racial integration (“I got brown hair, you got brown skin, we can spread the love together”), yodelling a heady chorus of “when we shine tonight, we will be so bright-lit”. A simple, throwaway three minutes of naivety, optimism and celebration, it stopped ‘We Can Look Up’ descending too far into darker emotional leagues.

  Any jazz/ska band worth its salt needs no excuse to wander off into free-form experimental interludes, and ‘Superstatic’ was Mount Vernon’s c
hance to meander through a variety of styles and genres in honour of keeping prog alive. A Ween-esque six-minute slab of very wonky jazz rock that shifted its perspective roughly every minute, it opened as a slinky jazz club saunter topped with serrated metal guitar chops and drowsy horns, became a spritely Twenties skat Charleston number for a few bars, then a sleazy striptease. From there it went medieval on your ass, slipping into a lyric-free madrigal choir version of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ complete with sleighbells, then a burst of double-speed Tudor Christmas minstrel song: “this is Christmas time and we travel far and near”.

  By now you had the tune pegged as a quasi-comedy caper of six or seven attempts at random genres strung together, and it didn’t disappoint from there on in. At the three-minute mark it turned into a nu metal chunder of spiked power chords and Justin grunting, goblin-like, over the top as if he’d just turned his baseball cap backwards and transformed into a proto Fred Durst. And from the ridiculous to the sublime; this gnarly chunk of rap rock gave way to a slice of rattling choral folk that was the closest the album came to envisioning the suave country of Bon Iver, with its lush harmonies and home-made tin-can percussion. Unfortunately it lasted mere seconds before the nu metal made an unwelcome return.

  After such a sprawling, schizophrenic splurge of styles, ‘We Can Look Up’ closed as it began, deep in NYC sitcom territory. A languid, autumnal folk pop ditty laced with flutes, piano and hushed-yet-passionate bar-room emoting, ‘Black Pirates’ was by far the most mature, natural and accomplished moment on a record that often felt like an amateurish first stab at making an album. There’d been bum notes, trad cheese, cornball playfulness, lengthy solos both fumbled and unnecessary and awkward teenage poetry by the gallon, but having succeeded in actually making a debut album speckled with flashes of true inspiration it felt that, come ‘Black Pirates’, Vernon was relaxed and confident enough to begin making the sort of music he heard in his head. ‘Black Pirates’ was a Lilith Fair-friendly brand of flute folk reminiscent of Suzanne Vega, sure, but it didn’t sound like a high school jazz band playing at being professional musicians, it sounded like, well, professional musicians. At times, it even sounded like his future.