Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  Eager to re-launch himself into the Eau Claire music community, Justin began playing with Brian Moen, the drummer with Eau Claire acts Laarks and Peter Wolf Crier, in a garage blues duo in the vein of The Black Keys or The White Stripes called The Shouting Matches. Giving Justin a chance to revert to his baritone blues bawl, they recorded a five-track EP called Mouthoil, consisting of raw battered drums, chunky blues riffage. Although they played no gigs and held on to the EP rather than release it, their cover of Son House’s ‘Death Letter Blues’ was rumoured to be a stormer, Moen revelling in the primal power of percussion and Justin growling and hollering like the hoariest old blues survivor: “I got a letter this morning, I packed up my suitcase and I went off down the road …”

  Over June and July, meanwhile, the Bon Iver snowball gathered momentum. As Justin began playing shows to promote the album the entire record was put up online as a stream and of the 500 copies of For Emma, Forever Ago that were initially printed up on Amble Down Records, only 17 were sent out to the press and radio, but these all made a splash. On July 27 two blogs tipped the record. Mere hours before going to catch Vernon support The Comas at New York’s Mercury Lounge, the influential Brooklyn Vegan site providing downloads of ‘Skinny Love’, ‘Blindsided’ and ‘For Emma’ and likened the sound to various folk heroes: “The ‘Skinny Love’ song especially reminds me of Tim Fite. He also channels Chad VanGaalen, Wolf Parade, TV On The Radio, Neil Young, and a few others I can’t think of. Mostly I just think it sounds pretty good.”10

  Simultaneously, Ryan Matteson’s Muzzle Of Bees site put a more personal slant on the story. “I came to know Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver while slightly drunk and in the front row of The Rosebuds’ blistering Hot Freaks set at SXSW,” the post read. “It was during said performance that Rosebuds frontman Ivan Howard introduced Justin (then holding down guitar duties for the band) as a native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. When you’re a long way from home, had your share of Lonestar beer, and with good friends, that will earn you some easy respect and admiration from my entourage and I. Since that time I’ve kept in touch with Justin, and … through the course of our conversations he mentioned his project, Bon Iver, and how much he thought I’d like it. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago beautifully packaged compact disc arrived in the mail. Through countless listens it was apparent that the music, not our mutual home state, was the important part of this story. This album is a little bit folk and, at times, hard to pin down to a specific genre or type – but that’s what I love about it. Expect this to be the release that takes everyone by surprise this year.”11

  Come October, it would be Vernon and Frenette that were taken by surprise. The local Eau Claire buzz around For Emma … and the trickle of online support had already made the record more successful than any of Vernon’s previous solo efforts, steadily selling 200 copies of the 500 printed over the course of three months. But on October 4 it got the push that would send it stratospheric: a review on influential alternative music website Pitchfork.

  “It came to my attention first,” says writer Stephen M Deusner of the album’s progress to the cult media big time. “I got an email from Amble Down in July and I really liked what I heard, so I pushed a few tracks forward and tried to push the album forward to my editors, who liked it as well. I thought [Vernon] was doing some interesting things sonically and especially vocally. It seemed odd to me at the time to hear somebody treat his voice that way, through all this distortion, and the lyrics I thought were very interesting. I’m kind of a lyrics person so that’s usually what I go to, so to have something that’s almost nonsensical and yet that evocative of this weird landscape, I thought was very interesting. Plus they were just really catchy, powerful and atmospheric songs so I fell into them from that point.

  “Now I look back and I can see that he was doing some very interesting things with American folk elements and especially to have come out of North Carolina, which now has this huge scene for that, and to have tweaked it even before the scene gelled that way is pretty interesting. It seemed a lot more eccentric than Sufjan and out of left-field, it did not feel like it was part of any larger thing. A big thing at that time was this super-orchestrated indie pop music and freak folk of Devendra Banhart was on the wane so I didn’t think it fit into that because it was much more textured and much less naturalistic. The thing that struck me was how close his voice sounded to the guy from TV On The Radio and nobody ever got that, it sounded a lot like him, that was my main point of reference.”

  Was it unusual for an album with only 500 released copies to get reviewed on Pitchfork? “Yes, especially for a debut. By the time we ran a review in early October it had gotten enough of a groundswell that a lot of other blogs and stuff like that were noticing it, so it wasn’t completely out of the blue but it is unusual.”

  The mark out of ten was mildly baffling – an 8.1, according to Pitchfork’s thinly-veiled out-of-one-hundred scale – but Deusner’s review on Pitchfork was emphatic in its appreciation. “A ruminative collection of songs full of natural imagery and acoustic strums,” Deusner wrote of the record, “the sound of a man left alone with his memories and a guitar … Vernon gives a soulful performance full of intuitive swells and fades, his phrasing and pronunciation making his voice as much a purely sonic instrument as his guitar … Rarely does folk – indie or otherwise – give so much over to ambience: quivering guitar strings, mic’ed closely, lend opener ‘Flume’ its eerily interiorised sound, which matches his unsettling similes. It’s as if he’s trying to inhabit the in-between spaces separating musical expression and private rumination,” Deusner concluded, “exposing his regrets without relinquishing them. His emotional exorcism proves even more intense for being so tentative.”12

  Though the Pitchfork review stopped short of foretelling the sort of impact the record would have on the alternative folk scene, which would surprise Deusner as much as anyone. “In retrospect, we didn’t even give it that high a grade. It’s an 8.1, which is good, but I think I’d give it a lot higher today, definitely a high 8 or a low 9 even. Most people would probably give it a ten. So for that reason I was very surprised and it’s odd what people catch onto.”

  The response to the review, back in Camp Vernon, was instantaneous and overwhelming. Justin’s inbox filled to bursting in a barrage of computerised pings. Frenette’s phone rang with the ferocity of hell hounds scenting fresh blood. By 6 p.m. on the day the review went live, all 500 copies of For Emma … had been sold and Bon Iver was the hottest name in the blogosphere.

  “That day was insane,” Vernon remembers. “It tipped things over the edge. My manager was taking calls in the shower. I’d go for a piss and come back to 50 emails in my inbox.”13 “It just snowballed, took off,” Frenette added. “I was fielding calls every day from interested people in the industry, wondering what was up, what our plans were, if we had signed a deal yet.”14

  Rather than leaping on the first offer to land in their lap, Vernon and Frenette decided to wait until the CMJ Music Marathon, an annual four-day industry conference event in New York City held each October, wherein hundreds of new bands play showcases in venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn while industry figures hijack cabs to race across town chasing the hottest tips and the coolest leads. Justin was busy producing the first Land Of Talk album that September anyway, and Bon Iver were booked to play one of the many showcases at CMJ 2007 – their iron couldn’t be hotter, so they’d wait to see what the showcase would bring, barely a fortnight away.

  Meanwhile, across the globe, one of the astute CMJ attendees was doing his research, plotting his route around the head-spinning plethora of potential new signings at CMJ 2007. And becoming one of the first to exhibit early signs of Iver Fever …

  “I was doing some homework for the CMJ music event 2007,” says Ed Horrox, head of A&R at 4AD Records in London since 2000, the man who’d signed the likes of TV On The Radio and Beirut to the label and worked with Scott Walker, Kim Deal
and Kristin Hersh. “When you’ve got something like that that you’re attending you usually do whatever you can in the weeks in the run-up to it to get your head around who’s gonna be there and what’s of interest. Whether it was on the CMJ player, they’d have an online jukebox or something or a track from everybody playing, I can’t remember [but] we came across the Bon Iver music and it was clear that it was pretty great.”

  After hearing one track, Horrox hunted down the full album stream and swiftly fell for For Emma…. “I think there was some kind of band page,” he says, “one of these online platforms for artists to get their music up and out there. Whether that involved making a donation or pay-what-you-want I’m not sure. I tracked it down from some website, whether it was his website or somewhere else. I heard a track or two, pulled it down, was listening to it within a week or so of coming across it, this was in September. Then obviously it became pretty clear pretty quickly that it was a very special record. What makes it special is the feeling you get from it. There’s a gut reaction that’s not cerebral, it’s like ‘fuck, I’m listening to this, I’m returning to it, I love it, I keep playing it’. Then you ask yourself what is it about it and try to understand it. For me, when I first heard it I thought ‘this is a singer-songwriter record, this is something there’s been a lot of’. There’d been a decade when there was a lot of singer-songwriters, from Will Oldham through Iron & Wine and on. There were many people who had been the singer-songwriter guy with the beard. So to a certain extent, when you do what I do, you’re always looking for someone who’s breaking the mould or doing something different, and in a way you thought ‘I think I know what this is’ and because of that you’re disposed to maybe dismiss it. But it became clear very quickly that it was more than that, it was something else, and it’s what makes music magical, that a person can re-invigorate a certain area.”

  Horrox was turned on by the soul inherent in Justin’s falsetto. “It wasn’t a million miles away from someone like Curtis Mayfield and he reminded me a little bit of Kip Malone out of TV On The Radio, who I was working with. I was hearing the soulfulness of those kind of vocals in Justin’s falsetto. His falsetto certainly set it apart and his voice was crucial to what made it very very special. Voices are what usually make an artist special and makes them connect, and a lot of the bands you don’t give a fuck about, it’s because of the voice. If you listen to his voice on ‘Re: Stacks’, that quickly became my favourite tune, his voice on that is incredible and his lyrics are fantastic. I guess I wasn’t asking questions about them, I was just enjoying them. Words and lines would float into your consciousness, something about that crow and ‘my keys’ in ‘Re: Stacks’. He’s imbuing this crow with human characteristics, it wasn’t easy to understand what he was talking about but ‘gluey feathers on a flume’, that’s describing the intricacies of a feather, it’s kinda fucking good. With the second record he definitely went down a very impressionistic, poetic road where it’s even harder to get your head around what he’s talking about and he probably just put it together because it sounds good. He talks about the way he writes being a phonetic thing where he’ll make noises and then try to find words from those noises. The first album, the words did rise up.”

  On the night of Bon Iver’s CMJ show, the A&R interest had turned into a scrum. Word had spread like wildfire; Mute Records was keen to sign Vernon and Indiana’s foremost indie label, Jagjaguwar, was hard on its heels. The industry interest at the showcase was intense and, juggling offers from a whole host of majors and independents alike, Frenette was beginning to see the benefits of having such a fascinating back-story to the project. “It always helps to have an intriguing and inspiring story to go along with a record,” he said, “one that fits the aesthetic and people can latch onto.”15

  Horrox, however, couldn’t make the show. “We had lots of artists playing at CMJ and our gigs fell at the same time he was playing,” he explains. “I hadn’t listened to it enough at that point to realise how important it was, so I prioritised our artists over him. So I missed him but while I was there I called his manager and said, ‘Hey, I’ve missed you but I think it’s great, I’m really very interested’, and we started talking about a deal.”

  After impressing Justin by phone Jagjaguwar would eventually secure Vernon’s signature for the US on October 29* but, in keeping with Justin’s homely nature, it was the fact that Horrox made the trip all the way to Eau Claire to meet him face-to-face that helped seal the UK deal for Horrox. “I went to meet Justin in his home town of Eau Claire,” Ed recalls, “which was a bit of a trek to get there, so I went. I don’t think anyone else did that. I went to meet him, because there were other people who wanted to sign him, two or three people who were very focussed on trying to do it. It was a very very stressful time because the more I listened to it the more I realised that he’d made a masterpiece, he was clearly the most fully formed debut artist. Obviously there’s a history leading up to that that’s the reason why he was as fully formed as he was at that point, but for a debut record it was as good as it gets. I was starting to think of him in the same breath as people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, I was getting carried away and thinking that’s how good he is, that this was going to be one of the best records the label’s ever released. So when you’re thinking that and you haven’t signed him, you’re thinking ‘I’ve got to sign him!’

  “We met, we sat down. I was excited about the conversation, with regard to the music. He took me to the bar, The Joynt. It’s a great old American bar. We went there and got a pitcher of beer for not much and drunk that talking about Jackson Browne. I’d had an obsession with Jackson Browne recently and it turned out he knew more than I did, which was great. Talking about music, having that sort of conversation, it’s inspiring, it’s exciting and it reinforced any ideas you had about the guy being extremely well-listened. He was a scholar, he was a student of everything and it was fun. The music conversation was brilliant, then he drove me back to my hotel listening to gospel, he was playing some incredible gospel music in the car. It was everything you would hope it would be about a musical conversation. He was friendly, an extremely friendly man.”

  Ed’s bold jaunt would endear him to the Vernon clan for some time to come. “I remember a night, I think it might’ve been his father’s sixtieth birthday,” he chuckles, “and we were at a gig in Dublin that he had played – it was a big gig, he’d grown quite big by that point, a few thousand people, and it was a bit of a party after the show for his dad or his mum, one of his parents, they’d travelled from America. He introduced me and his dad said, ‘Is this the crazy guy that came to meet you in Eau Claire?’ ”

  Meanwhile, Justin had been building a band for Bon Iver.

  “One of the big problems was when I made the record, part of the reason why I thought I wasn’t going to put it out was: how the fuck am I going to play these songs?” he said. “How is it going to sound good? How am I going to find people I can trust? … I was just like, ‘I better book a show and just see what happens.’ “16

  Luckily for Justin, the first piece of the Bon Iver live puzzle fell into his lap in the shape of a drummer and backing vocalist by the name of Sean Corey, a Lake Geneva native, top of his class in the EU-Eau Claire jazz program, alumnus of Jazz Ensemble I and the drummer in a band booked to support him at one of his first Eau Claire shows as Bon Iver. Corey cornered Justin backstage before the gig and practically blagged his way into the band, explaining that he’d met Vernon in passing before and had become obsessed with the online stream of For Emma … when his Jazz Ensemble bandmates Pingrey and DeHaven pointed him in its direction.

  “They weren’t just good songs, they were great, interesting, unique; it’s a beautiful album,” said Carey. “So I spent two weeks holed up in my bedroom with laptop, headphones and notebook, and I wrote down all the drum parts and learned all the lyrics, melodies and harmonies. When the band I was in opened for Justin at his first local show as Bon Iver, I told him I knew all his s
ongs and I wanted to play with him.”17

  Impressed by his skills and chutzpah, Vernon let Carey onstage to play three or four songs with him to a crowd of around 40 that very night, and by the end of the show Sean, having “nailed it”18, had become the sole other member of Bon Iver.

  With his mind set on a four-piece band to play the For Emma … songs, Justin knew exactly who he wanted on guitar. He called Mikey Noyce, his old guitar student from Eau Claire, then just 20 years old and 18 months into a course at Lawrence University. When Vernon called him out of the blue enthusing that he’d be perfect for Bon Iver’s guitarist position, Noyce was uncertain whether to drop out to go on tour, and Justin only gave him a day to make us his mind. “He called me the next morning and said, ‘Yes, I don’t know how thrilled my parents feel about it but I’m in.’ “19

  Completing his on-the-road line-up by hiring his brother, Nate, to be his tour manager, Justin told his band he’d be operating an unusually egalitarian touring regime. Although at some shows Bon Iver would also have horn players onstage, Justin would concentrate on acoustic guitar duties while the remaining members would take on a variety of instruments as needed and every band member, Justin included, would get an equal share of the live revenue.*

  The three-piece Bon Iver got to know each other playing shows around Eau Claire, including a Muzzle Of Bees showcase gig at the university’s music hall on November 10, alongside The Selfish Gene and Common Loon and a support slot at the Nucleus club for Land Of Talk, whose singer Elizabeth Powell Justin had started dating. As a sign that he hadn’t forgotten his old friends, Justin also played two shows with a reformed DeYarmond Edison that November at Eau Claire’s Nucleus club, opening the night with a set as Bon Iver. Then they ventured further afield, encountering not just awestruck crowds blown away by the soul-baring intimacy of the For Emma … songs but also hordes of bloggers waving Dictaphones, keen to get Justin’s views on the storm of hype building around him.