Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  Over the crackle of vinyl, the trickle of a waterfall, synthesised bass, beats and xylophone and a jazzy Seventies early-Jay-Z sort of organ groove, Justin riffed around the images of the original track, clearly having fun messing with the rap genre. After an earnest Seventies soul introduction from Justin, it sounded like two brothers making a home-made Soul II Soul spoof and one that flew in the face of the aggression and violence that inhabited most Nineties hip-hop. Alternating lines, like the small-town nature boys they were they rapped about their warm-hearted friends (“we don’t need to fight, the message seems clear/When you steer away from fear/We ain’t got nothing but lovers up in here/Beautiful people equals good cheer”), their love for Eau Claire (“we have a home that we’ll forget never, may the love flow and keep us together … Home is what I praise when I raise to the sunlight/I comes into my place, I embrace the good life”) and their childhood family memories (“we’ve got John Prine blasting through the house, making us feel we can’t live life without”). On the rare occasion they tried to assimilate some of rap’s confrontational imagery (“you’d better detach, reattach and blow up like a bomb”), they couldn’t help ruining it with a rhyme lifted straight from a Sunday School jamboree (“you can help straighten out the world by being a good mom”). When they cast a shout out to inspirational rap troupe Jurassic 5, it was virtually in the same breath as a reference to San Francisco bluegrass combo The Bay City Ramblers.

  Justin and Nate were too awkward and way too nice to convince as rappers, but ‘Morning (AM)’ was notable for its brief acknowledgements of teenage years fading (“green grass, basketball, long summer days/But now I’m getting packed up for the next phase”), a philosophy of selflessness that was largely unheard of in hip-hop (“strive to think about yourself a little less, give back to the world”) and, crucially, the way Justin constructed his words. For the first time, when scrambling for rhymes that seemed ungrammatical or nonsensical in lines like “I keep absent of things applicable to my mind/I try to form a clean river free of pesticides”, he was forming his lyrics around the sounds of the words rather than their meanings. And that was a technique that would one day bear him solid gold fruit.

  Rounding off with a tinkle of Bontempi jazz piano, ‘Morning (AM)’ was the album’s novelty burst of light relief, a sign that Justin’s bright soul hadn’t been entirely shrouded. The final track, ‘Home Is …’, bridged and unified the two opposing frames of mind of the record. An experimental mood piece with no words or melody, it juxtaposed dislocated, melancholic piano notes and the sounds of torrential rainfall against the giggles and chatter of friends huddled against the elements claiming “we just laughed for two hours straight” and watching TV news reports. The atmosphere was one of oppression and sadness, but filled with a real warmth; ‘Home Is …’ was the sound of love and friendship getting Justin through a storm.

  He acknowledged as much in his self-written liner notes for the album. “I feel I need to sketch, emotionalise, thank and play to the people and places that have shaped me,” he wrote. Eau Claire didn’t return the love in equal measure though. Despite playing solo shows around town he sold few of the 100 copies he printed up and to this day owns an unsold box of the CDs. Hence it’s understandable if, from that point on, Vernon saw his self-recorded solo albums as recordings he was making largely for himself, therapeutic exorcisms that he expected no-one else to hear.

  No, it would be a far more upbeat country rock noise that his Eau Claire public would come to love him for. And to make it, he’d recruit some familiar faces, carved forever into the side of Mount Vernon.

  * UW-Eau Claire’s Jazz Ensemble I has received two Grammy nominations and been voted Best College Big Band by Down Beat magazine six times.

  * The line-up that recorded All Of Us Free was Brad on bass, Phil on piano, Justin on guitars, Joe on drums and percussion, Sara on saxophone, Trever on trumpets and Keil on trombone and djembe.

  † Since no official record deal was signed for All Of Us Free, it’s likely this was a label invented by the band in order to release this album.

  * The two intervening songs, ‘Here I Go’ and ‘Back Down’, are the closest Justin Vernon has to ‘lost tracks’: unavailable to anyone who doesn’t already own All Of Us Free, currently changing hands on auction sites for upwards of £110, and unrecorded for later albums.

  * The seemingly home-made CD was titled with the hand-written legend In The Room – Live – 2002.

  * If ‘West Coast Of Ireland’ was accurate, Justin spent around three months in Galway at the very start of 2001, returning in April; although some sources claim he stayed in Ireland for a full year, returning in 2002, this is unlikely since he released the solo album Feels Like Home in 2001, featuring his Eau Claire resident brother Nate as well as other Eau Claire musicians.

  † A Facebook scour does uncover one Sara Jensen living in Eau Claire with her young family and, whether the ‘Emma’ in question or not, not inclined to reply to requests for interviews from members of the press.

  * It’s also possible that Justin and Sara were still entangled in reconsidering the status of their relationship at this point, that it wasn’t an affair that ended with a clean break-off. In the quote from Mojo above he’s credited as “resisting the urge to start the cycle over again”.

  * An effect Justin would develop over the years to create a famously intimate effect that would contribute greatly to his breakthrough.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sparks Of Edison

  JUSTIN Vernon wasn’t the only Eau Claire musician messing with hip-hop in 2002.

  After eight months living in Minneapolis, Brad Cook arrived back in Eau Claire with his head full of beats. It wasn’t just Brian Eno he’d been turned on to in the big city, he’d also learnt about an experimental rap collective releasing music under the banner of Anticon* in California. Described as “the hip-hop equivalent of post-rock”, Anticon developed into an alternative rap label for avant garde hip-hop artists such as Alias, Doseone and Jel, acts bringing drone and electronica elements to the rap form. It was something Brad was itching to explore himself, so he hooked up with Joe to form a left-field rap group called Mel Gibson & The Pants, working around Joe’s course at Bennington. Brad was fascinated by Joe’s course, often ringing him in Vermont to find out what Graves had been teaching him, while Joe would send him back interesting oddities he’d unearthed in the college audio library.

  “Playing in Mel Gibson was weird without Phil,” Brad says, “but, without him, I definitely developed my own confidence apart from him and my own musical voice.”1 And Mel Gibson & The Pants wasn’t Brad’s only foray into off-kilter sonics. He’d met a guy in Chicago called Thomas Wincek who was making a name for himself as an experimental electronica pioneer, having created a glove made out of needles from record players for his senior thesis at Chicago’s Art Institute. After college Wincek moved to Eau Claire to live with his wife, and Brad would come over to immerse himself in Wincek’s music collection – John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Jim O’Rourke – and create esoteric soundscapes of their own.

  Brad hadn’t abandoned the simpler rock thrills though. Hooking up with Justin again, he found Vernon boasting a raft of 50 new songs and unhappy playing them solo. So Brad and Phil rejoined Vernon alongside Joe’s younger brother Danny on drums. The four-piece once more took on Justin’s name, this time his two middle ones – DeYarmond Edison formed with the intention of playing rock music with what Justin called “a certain kind of tenderness”.2

  “It felt so right, the three of us,” Justin said. “And Danny was the closest we could get to Joe. We had this really intense emotional connection from high school. But in Mount Vernon, we were still reacting to this post-Phish kind of thing, complex music. It felt really good to get back to being OK with being really rootsy.”3

  Concentrating on the best 25 of Justin’s new tunes, DeYarmond Edison’s debut show saw them augment Justin’s songs with two covers, one of New Orleans funk rockers The
Meters and one Grateful Dead number they’d heard Bruce Hornsby playing. At first DeYarmond Edison was little more than an excuse for the three friends to play together, but a healthy burst of friendly competition soon spurred them on.

  Dinner With Greg were an alternative C&W band that had filled Mount Vernon’s vacant slot as the biggest group in Eau Claire. Watching them, Justin, Brad and Phil were stunned at their professionalism, amazed that their town had produced a band that, to them, sounded like world beaters. Brad considered them the best band he’d ever witnessed; Justin was inspired by their shows to seek out the works behind their sound, classics by Neil Young and Paul Westerberg. And, most importantly, it made him realise that, in songwriting terms, he had to up his game.

  The gang of four set about honing their set in earnest, Justin determined to focus himself as a professional tunesmith. Investing in instruments and equipment, they tried out an array of new techniques, Brad’s new electronic drone tendencies underpinning the solid Midwest rock howlers that Justin was writing to create an intriguing stew that critics would come to align with the likes of alt.country legends Richard Buckner and Sun Volt.

  For two years, DeYarmond Edison ploughed the Eau Claire clubs and bars, building an awestruck fanbase of their own. Before long they’d reached the same level of local success as Dinner With Greg*, and had gained a slide guitar player in the shape of UW-Eau Claire graduate Chris Porterfield.

  “I was playing in a different band at the time,” Chris says, “and then those guys had already been together playing music for several years. And then I joined them and played pedal steel guitar for a few years. Eau Claire was sort of … the scene was really close-knit, and there ended up being a lot of collaborating and sharing of players and different projects and stuff, and that’s how I got to know the guys in DeYarmond Edison.”4

  Chris recalls the writing process in the band. “It was mostly just sort of a fleshing out of the ideas. Justin Vernon was the primary songwriter in that band. Occasionally we worked on lyrics together, but primarily he would bring song ideas to the table, and then everybody else would flesh them out.”5

  Chris wasn’t the only new musician Justin was playing with at the time. He was earning spare cash giving guitar lessons at a local music store and for four years one of his students was a school kid named Mikey Noyce. Over their first two years of lessons Justin’s tutoring of Noyce would turn from intense guitar study to sessions of merely listening to music together and picking out the parts on guitar. Eventually Noyce began writing his own songs and playing them to Vernon and, by the end of their four years, the ‘lessons’ would simply entail Mikey turning up at Justin’s house and talking all day; they’d become close friends. And it was a friendship that would one day produce powerful music.

  By 2004, DeYarmond Edison were playing packed shows to enthused crowds around Eau Claire, and sounding like real local hopes. Their gigs were a flurry of intriguing instruments – blues harp, vibraphone, banjo, pedal steel, organ and an old Thirties drum set, their photo shoots ranged from candid dressing room lounges to shots of them in suits and ties on the steps of grand derelict buildings. Simultaneously, MySpace was just building steam as a platform for bands to promote their music to a potentially global audience. Now all the band needed was some music to invade the internet with …

  “This was like a re-beginning of something for us. It was our first glance at Eau Claire from an adult sort of standpoint. It was sort of one foot in the past and one trying to figure out what the present was … and not having any clue what the future was.” – Justin Vernon on DeYarmond Edison, 2008.6

  Brooding piano notes. A faint lilt of what sounds like a violin played backwards. Then chiming chords, the heavy beat of drums, stadium guitar strikes and a Springsteen highway charge. This was ‘Leave Me Wishing More’, the opening track on DeYarmond Edison’s self-titled debut album and, on its self-release in 2004*, the first recorded introduction to the band’s sound. Fans of Mount Vernon would have been stunned by Vernon’s dramatic transformation. Gone were the jazz and world influences; in their place a sturdy American rock adorned with freewheeling guitar solos and thundering piano, redolent of sweeping canyons and wide, windy plains. The three years since Justin’s last release had also seen him find a more settled emotional footing; here he sang of a secure, serious and comforting relationship and difficulties overcome – “the boat I’m in/It’s capsized, it’s good again” he sang, “the target’s a bended knee”.

  ‘As Long As I Can Go’ was a more familiar sort of tune, a mid-paced acoustic country folk number akin to John Prine or Jackson Browne that built to a stirring climax, with Justin basking in the glory of an Eau Claire sunset and spinning another paean to his home town. “In my future I hope there’s no other place,” he crooned, wishing for little more than a dog to share it all with. It was a vein the album would continue in, with ‘Dusty Road (So Kind)’ coming on as a low country rattle, the distant drums beating out a soft railroad beat, Phil’s piano drifting as if through a rich fog and Justin, to warm arpeggiated guitar, turning his emotive husk to a story of a summer’s day spent driving with his partner, the two of them brimming with love and assurance. “I know I never ever had the blues,” Justin sang, lifting his hushed tone to a joyous bellow, “But the man says that a whole lot of rain is gonna fall/But down my country road/No rain, no rain’s gonna fall at all”.

  From this opening triptych, with Justin sounding like the polar opposite of the devastated 20-year-old that had recorded Feels Like Home three years earlier, you might assume that his life had taken a major swing for the positive. ‘There Is Something’ was the first hint that some anguish still lingered. A slow, funereal ballad with a mild jazz bent, it found Justin wrenching his way through lyrics about a relationship cracked at the centre. “I leave, you enter … I awake, you go to sleep … I begin, you end,” he whispered, a fractured affair that left him “falling down to a shattering, deafening sound”.

  One of their most popular tunes at the time, the next track ‘The Lake’ was a moment of raw intimacy, the brushed drums, a marimba melody and sparse guitar adding weight to Justin’s musings on death and the afterlife. Yet despite its grim theme ‘The Lake’ had a surprisingly upbeat mood, Justin’s “grieving” was “not sad, it’s more of a longing that comes for the season that I’m in” and his dream of his soul staying put in Eau Claire and living in the memories of the city’s inhabitants rather than ascending to any sort of Heaven was warm-hearted and full of hope. Restrained and artful, the song was a fan favourite, but a source of frustration for Justin. “Even though I like what that one’s about,” he said, “we could hardly ever play that song because we couldn’t re-create that moment. The moment was tied down to this recording.”7

  At over seven minutes, ‘Conquistadors’ was the album’s centrepiece and its most intriguing lyrical work. A glowering ballad of piano and ethereal background warps, it appeared to concern the historical connection between religion and imperialism, referencing not just the Spanish and Portuguese colonists of the title but also mentioning Pope Pius XII in the same breath as Hitler – the head of the Catholic Church during WWII has long been criticised for remaining silent about the Holocaust as it was happening. It was almost as if the song was narrated by a Jew who had died in the Auschwitz atrocities (“I was killed by my own kind in a Holocaust … My blood has been spilled/Henceforth, the Catholic guilt”) and this, along with ‘The Lake’, marked the first signs of Justin’s study of religion creeping into his songwriting. Where ‘The Lake’ explored the sense of security and belonging that can spring from believing one’s soul or memory will live on, ‘Conquistadors’ tackled the reality of organised institutional religion, its inhumanity and failings, with chilling condemnation. At last Vernon was starting to prove that, when necessary, he could hit hard.

  DeYarmond Edison was transforming into a dark and haunting beast, and the swirling textures of the instrumental ‘Jackson And David’, building from a ghostly hu
sh of guitars plucked and treated to sound as though they were playing backwards to a chug of wordless elation, was a fitting atmosphere piece, bridging to the album’s final third. It gave way to the subtle, downbeat ‘The Unseen’, a quiet ode of self-assurance with all the trademarks of Feels Like Home – the essence of Springsteen’s Nebraska and Bright Eyes, the background shuffles and creaks of chairs, floorboards and instruments – but none of its desolation. Flooded with the sort of surrealist imagery that would ultimately serve Vernon so well (“the landscapes unravel/And I’m on that train they call time/And I take the words that come to me/And fire them from the tops of trees”), the sense was of a man who was shored up and fulfilled by the simple knowledge of romantic fate. “I’ve never watched your face,” Justin mumbled, “and I’ve never felt your embrace/And maybe I never will/But at least I’ve had them with me to keep me filled”. It was an ode to a future love that, for the moment, was intangible – he felt it in the gold hue of the autumn leaves, heard it in the whoosh of passing cars – but somehow he knew it’d eventually find him. It made for a deeply touching tune, tapping into the fundamental hope and belief in us all that we couldn’t be alone forever, that fate would find us The One.

  As heartfelt and honest as ‘The Unseen’ was, it wasn’t the song that Justin felt the most personal connection to on the album. That was ‘My Whole Life Long’. “I’m still in that song,” he’d say of the seven-minute ballad some years later, “that was a rare moment I think where a song peeked through in this sort of overt writing style.”8 You can see why; more than any track in his canon thus far, it consolidated his core concerns into a cohesive, affecting whole. The first verse alone linked images of the natural world (a lush lawn “under a mist”, the rain “pounded the ground”) to the apprehensive uncertainty of young love (“now I’m old enough for a kiss/So I’m headed for your tongue/It’s gonna burn”). Subsequent verses brought in his religious learnings, from images of a hanging Rabbi in a tree, “blood running to his feet”, to the resurrection myth hinted at in the line “Mary roll away the stone”. Lushly crooned, it was a song bathed in peacefulness, a summation of Vernon’s life as a universal free spirit: “in a starry map I swim” he sang amidst references to breezes, blood, time, bones, rocks, ravines, the elemental building blocks of life. His meaning was amorphous and far-reaching – love, religion, history, nature and music all merged into a mesh of imagery that seemed to suggest a need to find comfort and satisfaction from the simple act of living. But he’d never sounded so poetic or at one with himself as when he sang “You got your whole life long/To live your whole life long/And when your whole life is gone/Your whole life’s just a song”.