There was a maturity to the lyrics here too as if, after gushing out his growing pains and teenage party songs throughout the album, Vernon had reached a fresh plane of wisdom. The story, swapped between Justin and Sara, smacked of fantasy – a character known as Black Pirate “rides his black horse out of the moonlight”, watches a tornado brewing in the distance, considers “the monsters he has slain and the ones left to be done” and then races into the very heart of the chaos, “into the core of the horror, right into the eye of the storm”. But come the chorus the artifice dropped and Justin, accompanied by Sara and another male voice, seemed to sing from the heart: “Alone is not a word, it’s just a reconciling herd that seems to run us down when we’re sleeping”. It was an abstract concept that seemed to say that loneliness is an unconscious human impulse, suggesting Black Pirate was a metaphor for our innate compulsion to race towards emotional catastrophe. But crucially, it was open to multiple readings, a first tentative hint of the intangible sound-built imagery to come.
Today, ‘We Can Look Up’ sounds like what it was, an album-length demo tape showcasing the raw talent of a songwriter still deeply in thrall to the standard practices of jazz, ska, world music and other traditional formats. But throughout you can hear Vernon learning how a song should work and beginning to find his musical footing, explore his own voice and ingenuity. You sense him trying to weave into these fixed sounds and structures elements of his post-grunge rock tastes, classic US folk songwriting and explorative lyricism. Firm – but brief – flickers of his future direction sporadically rise out of the melee, in the choirs of ‘Sprinkler’, the crescendos of ‘So Red’ and the folk lope of ‘Black Pirates’, as if daring him to snatch at them and run.
As they completed mixing on the album though, Mount Vernon could hear nothing but its flaws. They already hated their old sound and knew they could be fresher, more inspired. Still, they set about sending CD copies of We Can Look Up to the local press and, since actual albums from semi-professional local bands were few and far between, they made a small splash. In 1998 the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram sent a rookie journalist called Ken Szymanski to conduct Mount Vernon’s first ever interview, all nine members and Ken crammed into Gil and Justine’s living room. The newspaper filed a photo of the band* posed on a wooden balcony overlooking frozen fields on the outskirts of town, all flyaway hair and geeky grins. They looked like the archetypal backwoods hobby band overjoyed at feeling their first hot flush of flashbulb.
Little did the photographer know he was snapping history; the roots of a future Eau Claire scene, and a burgeoning love affair that would beguile a generation.
* With Neutral Milk Hotel’s In An Aeroplane Over The Sea and the first albums from Bright Eyes.
* One of his high school reports was on the basketball history of North Carolina, where he’d eventually move to seek his musical fortune.
* The copy sent to the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram was unearthed in a forgotten cupboard 14 years later and formed the basis of a news article describing it as ‘Vernonabilia’ in April 2012
* In the shot they numbered nine, but their live line-up rotated to include up to 10 members at some shows.
CHAPTER THREE
A Towering Love, A Thundering Wave
ON the widening banks of the Chippewa River, separated from the water by the red brick edifices of Governor’s Hall and Horan Hall and the green expanse of Putnam Park, the Towers dominated the skyline. Two imposing grey slabs, more sprawling residential estate blocks than vaulting spires, that sat at the hub of the University of Wisconsin’s Eau Claire campus, home to almost 1,300 students and the beating, rutting, puking heart of UW-Eau Claire.
“They’re pretty iconic if you go to college here,” says Justin. “Everyone barfs at Towers. Everyone studies at Towers. Everyone has to see those, if you go to college here for four years.”1 Many students also lose their virginities at the Towers including, by his own admission, Justin.
“It’s made up of these two towers – North and South,” he later explained when describing the meaning behind the song he’d come to name after the buildings. “My girlfriend lived in one and I lived in the other. [‘Towers’ is] about falling in love, but also about what happens when you’ve long fallen out of love and those reminders are still there. You drive by them, these two buildings, and you look, and you realise that we really built that up. That we really built that love into these things, and for a long time afterward looking at them really made me feel sad; to see these empty buildings that I don’t go in to any more. But then, as time goes on, they start to become kind of joyous in their own way: you can look at them and think ‘that love was great and these buildings still stand tall’. But there’s also an element of the fact that they’re just buildings – they’re gonna fall down one day, and they’re not that important because there’s new love in your life and you’ve got to break things down that get built up.”2
All that heartbreak was still to come the day in the fall of 1999 that Justin, then sporting Vanilla Ice dreadlocks, and other members of Mount Vernon arrived wide-eyed at UW-Eau Claire to launch their college careers. The band had built up such a following around town, graduating out of school hall shows into local venues such as The Metro even though none of the members were yet old enough to get in for anybody’s gigs besides their own. Their rambunctious, open-hearted sets had helped them become one of the most popular bands in the city, and no-one wanted to split after graduating high school. The University was famed for its impressive jazz programme* and played host to the Eau Claire Jazz Festival every year, drawing such greats as Gary Burton, Rufus Reid, Charlie Byrd and Ira Sullivan to town, so it seemed a natural home for Mount Vernon, sat right there on their doorstep.
Justin had signed up for four years majoring in Religious Studies and minoring in Women’s Studies. It was an unusual combination for such a musical soul and he did try his hand at studying musical theory but, he claimed, “I didn’t want to be proficient … It seemed like other people were valuing things that were more about technical ability and not, like, feel.”3
“Even now I’m not completely done with the idea of going back to school to study music, or even film,” he told his university newspaper, “but when it came time to decide … you know, I wasn’t a great reader, and I wasn’t a great practiser, and I didn’t have great theory, and the music programme at UW-Eau Claire is very difficult.”4
It was perhaps Justin’s familial make-up, or maybe his Indigo Girls obsession, that prompted him to minor in a course studying the philosophy of feminism – he certainly claimed not to have chosen the course in order to meet girls. “It sounds like the stereotype of the one guy sitting in a class full of women,” he says, “and sometimes I was, but I really didn’t do it to try to pick up girls or anything. It was just after I took that first class, it was like alarm bells started going off in my head. It just seemed so obvious that our society, at its really deep core, is so patriarchal, and it seemed so important for me, and everyone, to understand that something is really wrong with that.”5
His parents certainly had an influence on his decision to study religion, however. “He talked a few times about the influence of his parents on his decision to study religion and philosophy in college,” his tutor Charlene Burns says. “They apparently told him they didn’t care what he majored in, as long as he was passionate about it and got a degree … Justin was a real delight in the classroom, very smart, great sense of humor and personal humility, engaged in getting the most out of his educational experience and always looking to be challenged. He cares deeply about the meaning of life and struggled with the genuinely difficult questions, like how to make sense of the reality of evil and suffering. I recall his becoming intrigued by things like the powerful expressions of suffering and hope in African-American spirituals and the implications of the Dead Sea Scrolls for understanding Christianity.”6
“The world of religion resonated for him,” she said. “He’s a really deep think
er and very caring. He’s very compassionate.”7
“I was always kind of a spiritual kid,” Justin adds, describing Burns as his “guiding light” through university. “I was always real interested in people and why things like love and memory or any of those things are important. I wasn’t an A-plus student at all, but that was one of the reasons why I appreciated Charlene so much. She knew that I wasn’t an academic; she knew that I wasn’t going on to graduate school. And even though she never let up on me, pushing me to do the right things academically, she allowed me to study what I wanted to take away for my life, and the whole experience was just very good for me.”8
He’d be more dismissive about the subject itself. “All it taught me was that [religion is] a pile of garbage. People need to think more and pray less,”9 he’d tell The Times, and by the time he came to compile his senior thesis he would see his studies shift back towards music, basing a paper on ‘The Problem Of Evil’ around the question of why artists suffer while bad people thrive.
But this question had a deeper drive. By the end of his course Justin was an artist who had done his fair share of suffering. He’d lost his formative band, split with the love of his life and fled the country to lick his wounds. He was beginning to question not just who he was, but where was ‘home’ …
In Justin’s sophomore year of 2000, reduced to a solid seven-piece*, Mount Vernon set about recording the follow-up to We Can Look Up. Ascribed to Move Music and assigned the catalogue number movemusic1† to give the recording more credibility despite its very home-made feel – the sleeve was another nature painting, this time of a tree leaning in the breeze across a summer field – the six-track mini-album All Of Us Free was a leaner, brighter and far more accomplished undertaking than its predecessor.
Opening with a brazen double barrel of Joe Jackson/Ben Folds bar-room piano and saucy E Street horns, it took only a few seconds of ‘Sandlot’ for the listener to realise that this was a far more confident band than that which made We Can Look Up, and one far more in control of its talents. Brad’s five-string bass filled the space, Justin’s guitars sounded full and alt.folk rich; engineer Scott Sugden had done a fine job in velvet-cladding their sound. Here was Mount Vernon reaching a peak.
Just like the first, the second Mount Vernon started full of the flush and thrill of life. His voice maturing into its husky timbre, Justin sang again of idyllic summers “bumming around”, spinning images of the same sort of laid-back boho living that had characterised the likes of ‘High Five’ on ‘We Can Look Up’. “Morning time, dry sun, waking up next to a good friend, start out with bowls of cereal, then video games,” he sang, with only the merest hint of any conflict to come – “I never began to see the end.” Again, there was a strong sense of contentment in his surroundings, a feeling of belonging as he wailed “Slammed on my baseball cap, shut the door and head out into the world, the neighbourhood is bumping with the sound of summer … To this love, this world, I am forever bound/These dusty afternoons tucker me out but I feel found”. For all the ice and dislocation of Eau Claire, as ‘Sandlot’ built to a double-tempo crescendo of hazy trumpet solos, funky bass, chiming piano chords and rampant cowbell abuse, Vernon again made his hometown sound like a dream community of perpetual summer.
The smoky summer vibe continued into the second track, ‘Morning’, the closest yet to the soulful folk sounds that would make Justin famous. At least, it was for the opening two minutes. A solo Vernon strummed and slapped his acoustic guitar with a funk flourish, recalling the likes of Joan Armatrading or Jackson Browne and revisiting his recurring theme of romantic and easy-going starts to immaculate days. “I wake up in the morning time with the sun breaking in my bedroom,” he sang, “let joy rush in when I open the scene and that’s when I know all the angels are here with me”. He sang of “bright new tune”s and rural peacefulness: “The sun’s coming up, the wind is blowing through the trees, my country road is quiet now, as quiet as it can be”. Had he added a falsetto and some surrealist lyrics oozing heartache, he might have found his ultimate calling seven years early.
He didn’t quite have the courage to venture into a full song alone though. One hundred seconds in Mount Vernon struck up some drowsy horns and a breezy harmonica and Justin embarked on what can only be described as a pastoral rap. In the vein of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Justin rhymed about the liberating effects of nature, dreaming of leaving behind all of his worldly possessions and losing himself in the countryside. “I’m bleeding because I miss the country wind,” he rapped, enthusing about the “sacred bees” and how “the folks out there are so kind, where time isn’t money, time’s a place”. He painted nature as a place of spiritual purity and freedom from mental constraints – “we all got to shake down the baggage and bend those bars of those mental cages/And then one day everyone knows everything’s alright and everything’s okay/And if our fear becomes our courages then that day I hear all of the beautiful people say/It’s alright, it’s okay, nothing wrong with today/And I don’t need to find out what I’m afraid of”.
It sounded a glorious utopia indeed, and Justin found philosophical nourishment there too, an unlocking of life’s mysteries and a – rather hippified – emancipation from materialism. “Out the window I can see all the key to human simplicity,” he claimed, “I said ‘burn all your money and you can finally feel free, compassion heals thee’.” There was a real idealism at work, but despite its affecting gospel chorus refrain and sweet whistling interludes, this was one track that Justin would later look back on with a certain embarrassment. “Out of all the songs, ever, I think I might have been a little off my rocker because it’s like a rap song, or whatever,” he’d say. “That’d be one I’d wanna re-think a whole lot.”10
Re-think it he would, only the following year, but more immediately the mid-paced blues of the next track ‘Feel The Light’ rethought Justin’s attitude to nature. This time it was destructive rather than regenerative; the leaves were burning in autumn, the wind blowing the smoke away, the fire sucking the heat into the ground against the chill of the nights descending into icy stasis. Yet here too Justin found contentment. “The moon is almost warming us and there is an absence of sound,” he sang, “peace on earth tonight, let the stars shine bright/Let our souls feel high, come on feel the light”. By verse two he was transmogrified into the city of Eau Claire itself (“I know that this valley that I live in will hold me safely in its keep, rivers run right through me”) and while he felt the presence of people “making the best of their day” he was constantly aware of the land the city was built on, thrumming with energy beneath the foundations.
So the themes of All Of Us Free were set; finding yourself and eradicating your fears through the psychological freedoms inspired by nature and community. It was a philosophy carried right through to the end of the mini-album and arguably Mount Vernon’s melodic high-point, ‘Breathe’.* Built around an effervescent folk twangle, dense bass, warm piano and horns that may have been nudged a little towards a tone of strident disharmony by the cult success of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea album in 1998, it was once again imbued with the atmosphere of antique coffee-house comedy shows as Justin and Sara swapped verses of escaping the weight of city life into the golden fields and windswept country roads. “You pass through my heart like a ton of steel,” sang Justin, finding solace in some lonesome retreat, possibly the cabin on The Land, “here I’ll never feel alone because here is a place called home, I’ve made this drive up to heaven so many times … where the soul feels no cold”.
Crucially, the lyric, if taken at face value, suggests the possibility of a disruption in the pair’s relationship, a realisation that their personalities were beginning to clash. Sara’s verse speaks of two different kinds of people, those to whom “a face of a planet breathes … more sorrow” and those who “laugh free”. She casts Justin as the former and herself as the latter, singing “with a darkened light … I asked you to come in and balance me”. Yet, by th
e end of the song they’re unbalanced and dislocated, singing entirely different lyrics at the same time, both singing of the sun’s harmony with the earth but from different rhythms, cadences and perspectives. It sounded, in retrospect, like a sour break-up set to sweet, sweet music.
An interpretation tempered by later events perhaps, but one thing is certain. Before many copies of All Of Us Free could be sold or much promotional live activity undertaken, Mount Vernon had been scattered across the globe, like seeds in the wind.
“There is an Emma,” Vernon admits, but he is reticent about offering up anything but the sketchiest biographical details about her and their time together. He alludes to their being together for years, going their separate ways and leaving the country to get away from each other, resisting the urge to start the cycle over again no matter how tempting, and regret over that decision that lingers in his heart to this day. “It’s obvious there’s this long-lost love of mine,” he says. “Doesn’t everybody have them? But the majority of the record isn’t about this person, it’s about what happened to me afterwards and the long years that followed.”11
Winter, 2000. His relationship in tatters and his band hanging in the balance, for the first time Justin Vernon retreated to the wild unknown. And this time he fled halfway across the world.
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