Aged 19, in the second semester of his sophomore year, the rural backwater he chose was on an entirely different continent altogether. With his university career put on hold for a year and a limited working visa in his pocket he arrived in Galway in the windswept west of Ireland, looking for a small chunk of a new life to help him forget his broken old one.
“I always wanted to go to Ireland,” he later told Irish newspaper the Sunday World, “so, at the age of 19, I came over to check it out and stayed until my work visa ran out.”12
In Galway, Justin took a temporary job selling mobile phones at an Eircom shop in the picturesque open expanse of greenery that was Eyre Square, and supplemented his income by busking around town and entering local open mic nights. “I was pretty much a nobody down there at the time,” he said, “but I did win an open mic night in The Cellar pub. My prize was a 30 gift voucher for a local music store; one of the albums I bought with it was The Pogues’ If I Should Fall From Grace With God. I’m a big fan of Shane MacGowan.”13
Drowning his sorrows in Murty Rabbitt’s bar by night and licking his wounds between securing 24-month contracts by day, Justin’s months in Galway were a means of physically separating himself from facing up to his split with Sara after several years together. It was just the start of a long recovery process. It would be some years of mourning, soul-searching and exorcising his loss on record before he’d finally come to terms with it – enough, at least, to dedicate his most famous record to Sara Emma Jensen in the wake of another break-up, as if finally laying his memories of his relationship with Sara to rest.
The clearest insight we have into the workings of Justin’s heart during his time in Ireland came with a song he wrote about the period called ‘West Coast Of Ireland’, released on a self-burned CD of one takes of tracks he began playing solo around Eau Claire on his return.* Accompanied by a plaintive acoustic guitar and singing with a damaged depth of feeling unheard in his Mount Vernon recordings, Justin’s cracked soul husked through tear-strewn lines, the spaces between the words taut with devastation: “sitting on the west coast of Ireland looking out onto the ocean, knowing you’re looking straight on back, feeling that same wave of emotion”.
Yet the song doesn’t wallow. Though Justin here found that his emotional turmoil made it “hard being spiritual”, he was saved by the three core stalwarts of his life – home, nature and music. He sang of kissing the sand, tasting the salt water of the Atlantic, of the sun shining “right on through to the core of my bones”; he dreamt of the day he’d land back at Minneapolis International to be met by his entire family and his plan to immediately “lay right down in the cool April sun, gonna lay in the grass until I start itching and I’ll find I’ll probably mow the lawn a few times”. Having reconnected with his homeland earth, he’d reconnect with the city he loves, “watch another Wisconsin sun go down, have dinner with my parents, then head on in to my small, small enough town” and if that wasn’t enough, he could tour the country to lose himself in its music – “I can get out to California, I have San Francisco on my mind, I can get down to New Orleans and have that music knock me to the ground.”
By the end of this lament of heartache and hope, he was grinning into the face of death and declaring “I wanna be able to feel the air and be where the river meets the sea, where the sky meets the ocean and where space meets the sky, I’ll be singing ‘all of us free’.” For all the reputation he may one day earn as a clinger to old, lost loves, here was an artist determined not to let his misfortunes drag him down.
When he did return to Eau Claire in April of 2001*, it was to tidy up business. Mount Vernon, the band decided, was no longer viable; besides the issue of Justin and Sara’s fractured relationship, the band felt they’d begun to stagnate. From working in the University of Eau Claire’s Media Development Center Justin had learnt much about electronics and had started to gain an interest in the electro works of Steve Reich, David Tudor and Brian Eno, fresh influences he wanted to put into practice. What’s more, just as Justin had run off to Ireland, the other various members were scattering too. Keil, having never been that interested in studying at UW-Eau Claire in the first place and only signing up because the rest of Mount Vernon had enrolled, headed to England, giving up his studies in Eau Claire for good. While Phil remained in Eau Claire, Brad left for Minneapolis, where he spent four months living with a married couple who turned him on to Brian Eno and “totally blew my mind”14. Trever, after completing his course in sociology at UW-Eau Claire, also moved to England to study music sociology at the University of Exeter, eventually earning a PhD and going on to teach in Prague and Japan. Justin has never spoken about what became of Sara†.
Joe, meanwhile, had skipped town to Vermont, where he was busy studying jazz at an arts school called Bennington College, taught by the legendary free jazz drum pioneer Milford Graves. Graves, having played with the likes of John Coltrane and John Zorn, had some unusual and outlandish techniques for improvisations that he’d developed around the practices of martial arts and cookery. “Milford opened my eyes to a different set of values in music altogether,” Joe said. “He’s an artifact, and it got me excited about jazz again, having contact with someone who had looked up to Elvin Jones not because everyone said he was good but because he was the guy to go to in New York at the time … It felt like I was taking something from a pure source.”15
It suited Justin at that point in his life that, musically speaking, he was largely alone. After years of open-armed collaboration, he now felt most comfortable expressing himself via an acoustic guitar and his own voice, it felt like his time to get introspective. Yet he was invigorated by his trip to Ireland, warmed to be home and keen to get creating again. He struck upon an idea of artistic consolidation, of marking his progress in music up to that point at the same time as edging into the future. He decided to select the best songs he’d recorded with Mount Vernon and re-record them solo alongside other tunes he’d come up with in high school and the best of the songs he’d written since leaving for Ireland. By doing so not only would he compile his best material to that point in his life and stamp his individuality and spirit on his songs – explore them within the freedoms of a new, more personal solo identity – he’d uncover fresh emotion and meaning by separating them from the context of the full band. It was as if the adult Vernon, in the midst of the hardest period in his life so far, wanted to devour, dramatise and demolish the naïve pleasures of his teenage self.
One third old material and two thirds new, Feels Like Home opened with its six-minute title track, and immediately we were thrust into the sparse and intimate folk world that would eventually make Vernon the darling of the alt.folk universe. You could practically hear Justin hunched over the belly of his guitar, plucking and strumming at his pains with a new-found virtuosity. “It’s a little overt at times for me to listen to now,” Justin said, perhaps acknowledging that the track reverted to his well-worn lexicon of idyllic pastoral imagery – country skies, passing seasons, breaking mornings, homebound roads, fields, leaves and trees, “but it is everything this record is about.”16 It was a paean to security, safety and the comfort of familiarity in a lost and lonely world, marking the point where Justin shed much of his youthful jazz obsession and embraced the homely sounds of mournful folk music. The timbres of Justin’s debut solo album-marked once again with the Move Music label and released under the moniker JD Vernon – echoed space, depth and intensity, its stark and impassioned guitar solo reverberating as if through the shell of a broken man. Bruised and yearning for home, Justin Vernon had come of age.
To prove it, he next tackled ‘Feel The Light’ from All Of Us Free, reimagining it as an upbeat folk-country swing imbued with a timeless sepia hue that smacked of alt.country maturity, all harmonicas, slide guitar flourishes and wooden porch clap-alongs in swing chairs. Here, a third verse about a long plane journey seemed particularly fitting after his jaunt to Ireland, the wonders of nature gleaming through even when stuck in a
metal tube for 13 hours – “the morning when you’re flying is night, the dawn and sunrise all at the same time/The orange blanket that is the white clouds below, the blue and black horizon that bruises and glows/And in the middle a single star overhead is where resides my fear”. Even 35,000 feet of empty space couldn’t separate this earth child from the comfort of the elements.
And there, in the final verse of ‘Feel The Light’, a familiar female vocal. It’s uncertain if Justin’s duet partner singing “peace on Earth tonight/Come on, feel the light” is Sara, but this would certainly be in keeping with his tendency to stay loyal and close to those that have meant something to him. Perhaps as a result of coming from such a close-knit community, Vernon would never shut anybody out; he’d remain friends and often perform with the various members of Mount Vernon over the coming years, and he and Sara stayed friends too. As late as 2008, in the wake of the success of the album that bore her middle name, Justin told the Observer Music Monthly, “She’s fine with it. Now she just makes me pay for breakfast.”17 *
The same stripped-down folk treatment was afforded to a more delicate and defiant ‘Breathe’, which grew a lo-fi beat like a battered bucket, double-tracked vocals, a shrill harmonica and a whispered coda without losing any of its irrepressible joie de vivre, and ‘We Can Look Up’, which here ran to a full seven minutes full of impassioned howling, multi-part harmonies, Celtic arpeggios and the sort of artful, skilled flamenco and C&W guitar work worthy of the world music concert hall. His years with Mount Vernon had clearly refined Justin’s guitar playing to impressive lengths and his time in Ireland had tenderised his spirit.
For further insight into his frame of mind, though, you turned to the new tracks. Slotted between these re-recordings was a swampland Mississippi blues called ‘Leave It Alone’, again featuring a female vocalist plus a brittle New Orleans jazz trumpet alongside brushed orange-crate drums and trembling harmonica. It marked Justin’s first song about politics, referencing Kenneth Starr, the lawyer behind the investigation into Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky culminating in the impeachment of the President and arguably tilting the US against his re-election. Critics of the Starr Report into the affair argued that Starr had overstepped a line from his original remit to investigate the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, becoming a ‘political hitman’, and Justin was clearly amongst these liberal objectors. “Kenneth Starr, you go around snooping on your other people’s chief of staff,” he crooned. “I tell you one thing about Mr Clinton, he’s a good man/You just make me laugh, why don’t you leave it alone?”
The rest of the song may have been an attack on Starr too, but sounded more like an assault on the integrity and self-serving nature of politicians in general, including Clinton: “Where are you Mr Powerful?/I can hear your high chair creaking from way across the room/I know I might be insane but I aint never seen someone as weak as you … hey Mr Politician, where have you gone to?/When we all know that your money, your money bought your name/Why don’t you leave it alone?/You can’t seem to keep your hands off of other people’s things/When you say you’re going to go out, go out and save everything”. Maybe as a result of his trip across the world, for the first time Justin’s lyrical vista expanded beyond Eau Claire and its surrounds, beyond his social group, his personal relationships and the world he can see around him, to take in global and national concerns. He was realising that songwriting was a platform with clout and the best practitioners used it to explore other topics than their introspective angst, the laid-back serenity of their hometown and the friendliness of their friends. By the end of 2001, in the wake of 9/11, a song chastising Ken Starr would seem like a trite political slash from a naïve era, but ‘Leave It Alone’ was a pivotal step in Vernon developing a wider, socially conscious perspective in the vein of his protest folk heroes.
And in the vein of his Deep South blues heroes, the next track ‘Trainyard Blues (Live)’ was exactly that, a playful duet of slide guitar and harmonica like a hobo’s mail-train blues in which Justin tipped his cap to the delta blues legends Robert Johnson and Willie Brown while simultaneously impersonating them. As a reconstructed tribute to the blues it felt throwaway but sincere, but Justin had fresher fish to fry.
‘Jefferson St.’ was a contemporary folk number that syphoned some of Bright Eyes’ tremulous emotion into a tender, spacious recording of Justin spinning funk riffs out of his acoustic guitar, so sparse you can hear the creaks and echo of the room.* Besides his guitar, a sultry bongo and a backing choir of double-tracked Justins, his solo voice, quivering and on edge, wove a wintry scene on Jefferson Street over Thanksgiving and Christmas, a backdrop to his musings on a life gone awry. “Something terrifies me,” he sang as if grit-toothed in the face of his trials, “the world ain’t so simple, you see/The riddles are the same but the answers change/Why does it cut me down to size?/Why do the leaves inside me die?” He seemed resigned and philosophical about it all but the tsunami of emotion soon overcame his mask of restraint. The climax line “I am a lonely boy with my cover soaked with rain” began breathless, the tension of losing his grip, and ended with an almighty, anguished wail that felt like tear-strewn catharsis, Justin warbling “why are you crying? Why aren’t you flying?”. It was the first real sign that Justin was using the Feels Like Home album as a sort of self-therapy.
And just as when the floodgates opened midway through ‘We Can Look Up’, there was more to come. Bedecked with mournful guitar strums and pining violin, the nine minute epic ‘When It Rains Down Here’ was Justin’s attempt to paint Chippewa Valley in the same mythical folk colours with which Springsteen painted Nebraska two decades before, in the hope that by being the man that seals Eau Claire’s place in eternal Americana folk legend he’d somehow heal himself: “before my arches are rebuilt it must have a song”. Realising that to do so meant imbuing his imagery with a sense of the history and hardships of the people who inhabited his homeland, he switched his scene from dreamy summers to “the grey background” of the desolate rainy season, “floating in an atmosphere of truth and hidden lies”. He trained his eye, characteristically, on the soft-focus beauty of the scene, on the “silver mountains and blue streams … those moss-green pines, heavy raindrops clinging to electrical lines”, yet his words were weighty, sodden with unspoken tragedy both personal and political. The rain held two metaphors: of Eau Claire’s political isolation (“the rain is so quiet it’s sad and the liberty rings so loud we can’t hear/It’s so hard to see outside when it rains down here”) and of Justin’s downpour of personal miseries stifling his life (“I can’t proceed until the rain is gone”).
Ultimately, the rain metaphor couldn’t contain Justin’s pain. Listening to Louis Armstrong “play his horn on the short wave radio”, Vernon’s overwhelmed by the sadness in the music – “his sound breaks my heart with a stone in my throat, like a sword through a heart, leaking tears onto the ground”. “Alone is where I’ve been needing to be,” he admitted, and as a crashing piano stirred the mood grander he took the watery imagery a step further, imagining himself as a ship’s captain on an ocean of troubles, besieged by beating waves of woe but fighting through: “the wind can blow me wherever it needs to take me/The skipper taunts the sky/A thundering wave crashing into the side/It will never break him, it will never save him”. It was the testament to staying unbroken by it all that was the key. Justin was a survivor, not a sinker.
His steady march to maturity continued with ‘May 27th, 1999 (5.23 a.m.)’, a contemplative travelling folk tune that saw Justin start to recognise the transience of youth and friendship. It was set at the point where high school ends, social groups dissipate, adulthood stretches ahead like “a long highway with nothing ahead but the red sun” and you realise that “everything good must have an end”. His “endless childhood nights” blown away, Justin found himself aged “eighteen, wondering where all the days have gone” while a friend called Kate was packing up her things and moving away, tears running down her
nose, leaving her old friends with a final message, “‘laugh while you can, you’re never gonna see them again/Hold their hand as tight as you can/I say to you, if you can never look down you’re never gonna land’ “.
Having watched his band ricochet off around the country and the world, Justin had seen that family is the only true, dependable rock in life and expressed here a sense of regret that he hadn’t appreciated them enough: “mother’s love and father’s hand can always pull you out of the quicksand/But you get up and you just dust yourself off, when you’re walking away all they can do is cry/And hope maybe that they’ll catch your eye”. It was an idea that flew in the face of Mount Vernon’s songs waxing lyrical about a communal unity that would never end, and something that Justin would endeavour to fight against within the Eau Claire musical community, striving to keep everyone playing together in one form or another. But he couldn’t ignore the shifts and fractures of human nature and, as the song reached a noble roar of defiance, he saw a fatalistic heroism in the death of his childhood. “Forget all drugs and leave all rock’n’roll aside, you aint helping us get through,” he bellowed in the face of age and decay, “it’s love that gets us through, it’s time that makes us doomed, we’re all leaving soon/Who needs a grave? Who needs a tomb?/But for now I am gonna miss you, let’s all lock arms and shout to the sun, hey look at what we have done/We’ve finally come together just in time to come undone/Even if victory isn’t written in our stars, boy, we’ve still won”. In the end he’d come to terms with his fading youth, seeing childhood as all part of life’s schoolyard game, a barrier to bounce off on your way to somewhere altogether more exciting – “we’re gonna touch the wall of our childhood and then we’re gonna run”.
Justin’s lyrics were developing a poetic adult complexity, but it was his stylistic dexterity that he showcased over the next two tracks. ‘Lullabye Of The 3 Dancers’ was a virtuoso, Iberian-tinged flamenco flourish on the solo acoustic guitar, interrupted only by a silent interlude of Justin lilting “little baby sleeping”, and then came the album’s big folly, a reworking of ‘Morning’ from All Of Us Free. This time, over seven minutes and now called ‘Morning (AM)’, Justin wholeheartedly embraced the soul and hip-hop vibe of the original, free-forming brand new lyrics alongside an appearance from his brother, Nate, rapping in the guise of his hip-hop alter ego I.D.E.A.
Bon Iver Page 5
