Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  “I still don’t expect anything to happen,” he told one such writer that November. “I feel so fortunate. So lucky. In so many ways. But if it just petered out tomorrow, I’m too small-town of a person, I feel, to feel bad if I just disappeared. I’ve already received so many letters and such, enough for a lifetime of artistic fulfilment … I can’t even measure it. I knew that when I finished making these songs up there, that I had done something that was more current and pure and honest than anything I had done to that point. I thought it was special in that way. The fact that others seem to understand, from different places all over the world makes me feel … well, like something good is happening in general.”20

  Ed Horrox saw the nascent Bon Iver line-up play an early show in Chicago that December. “I think, [they were] playing a place called Schubers,” he says, “which is about a 200 capacity venue. This was the first time I’d seen him play, we were still working on the deal at this point. [It was] incredible. That was another moment where the significance of him as an artist and of the career he was going to have became clearer, as clear as it’s possible to be. When you’ve got the record and then you see the live show and it’s as good as that was – I guess it was still relatively early stages – it was fantastic, the musicianship was incredible. He had Mikey Noyce with him and Sean [Corey] and it was the first time I’d seen those guys, they were fantastic musicians, and his voice live was fantastic. They were all sat down, on that first record, for most of it. Until ‘Blood Bank’ came out, everyone sat down for every gig, which was interesting. It was different, there was something about that. There were people in the audience who were singing the songs. I’m not talking about when he asks the audience to participate, I’m talking about looking around me and, it tended to be young women, there were quite a few young women singing the songs. That was quite an eye-opener, like a ‘there’s something happening here’ moment for someone at such an early point in the life of a record, to see people so into the music.

  “I remember coming out of that gig and making a call to one or two people back in the UK, knowing I’d get their voicemails, but I had to tell them at that point when you’ve just seen the show and you’re as excited as you are, sometimes you want to just share that, so I did.”

  Horrox’s enthusiasm was part of the reason that his deal with Bon Iver was settled in double-quick time. “It all happened pretty quickly,” he says. “Hearing it first in September, realising how good it was and making an offer within weeks, in October, meeting Justin in November and seeing their first gig in December. It was a pretty swift thing, the way those things unfolded. It wouldn’t usually happen like that.”

  Hence, as the whirlwind of 2007 drew to a close with two record deals in the bag, Justin suddenly found himself relatively monied. His first cheque, at least, was enough for a deposit on a modest house of his own, firmly back on Eau Claire soil. On Boxing Day, after 18 months of sofa-hopping, sleeping on The Rosebuds’ couch or up in the cabin, Vernon completed on a $76,000 bungalow a mere 80 yards from where he was born, which he decked out with a flat-screen TV and a PlayStation to spend the post-Christmas lull playing Call Of Duty.

  “I buy records and play them in my house and I have a nice bed and that’s about it,” he said. “It’s a huge thing, though, just to have some sovereignty and a roof over my head. It makes me feel almost like a real person at last.”21

  “My mortgage is less than half of people’s rent,” he’d claim. “I want to be able to write on my walls. I think that’s the big thing … Just like quotes and stuff. Something I want to see every day.”22 Writing out quotes had become a big thing for Justin – in his pocket he carried with him a line from a Johnny Cash song, written for the veteran country star by Tom Waits: “I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth down there by the train”. “You have experiences with art or phenomena that supersede your simple relationship with them as just a piece of art. They’re more than that. That’s just what those quotes are for me. They’re big, they’re important.”23

  And as the maelstrom of 2007 shifted into the January calm of 2008, rounded off with the major ego boost of having For Emma, Forever Ago listed amongst the Top 50 Albums Of The Year by Pitchfork, Justin needed to reconnect to his own phenomenon.

  Over his best winter yet, the music of Bon Iver was calling.

  Settled into his new home at the start of 2008, Vernon would have felt a million miles from the desolate dislocation of a year before. Within a year of his entire life falling apart, all his wildest dreams had come true. But it had also been a year since his creative impulse had been fully indulged, and his musical interest was freshly peaked by listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ song ‘The Horses’, Steve Reich and Thomas Wincek’s post-rock band Collections Of Colonies Of Bees. Indeed, the show he would play in Milwaukee that January with COCOB, who’d started life as a band called Pele on the Polyvinyl label, would be as pivotal to him as the Indigo Girls’ gig he’d seen as a teenager. “They’re just amazing,” he told Pitchfork. “Their ‘Customer’ record that came out on Polyvinyl is … just noise manipulation, acoustic manipulation, but it’s not tired like everything else you hear in that genre, in my opinion. It’s just really beautiful. And then their new record [‘Birds’ is] super smart and textural and manipulated but it’s got this soul in it. It’s really, really brilliant … Their show in Milwaukee was just life changing. I literally told the promoter I had to wait 15 minutes before I played because … I just didn’t want to play. It was just too good. Their live show for their new record is unreal.”24

  With such inspiration driving him, some material left over from the cabin sessions and new tunes whirling around his head, Vernon sat down once again to revisit the mindset he’d found up at the cabin, worried that he’d simply forgotten how to write songs any other way.

  “I became very eager to explore what Bon Iver meant to me in the life of this project,” he said. “I wanted to move forward because I knew it was about more than the one record I made. This was the chance to break out. I had the golden opportunity to make the record of my dreams.”25

  “When I sit down now and work on stuff,” he continued, “I’m drifting toward the place that allows me to be more honest. And I think the way I did this is The Way – it’s like a path or something. I don’t want to re-create [For Emma …]. I just want to re-create the path and get into a place where I feel comfortable, and not think too much about what the lyrics sound like, or ‘I better make this record sound very Bon Iver!’ So many people’s sophomore records sounds like that.”26

  What’s more, he was acutely aware that the location of For Emma …’s recording was a vital part of its atmosphere. “The opportunity to create something like this,” he said, “for a lot of people, only comes when you have nothing but time and you’re by yourself. The longevity of the ideas –the way they came out in an intact manner – I probably only could get from being isolated.”27

  Knowing he wanted the second Bon Iver album to be a bold departure from the first, one of the first tracks Justin set to work on early in 2008 was a snippet of what he considered “a Civil War-sounding heavy metal song … sort of chaotic, dense, jarring.”28 He was intent on opening the next Bon Iver album with it in order to prove the project wasn’t cemented in minimalist miserablism. “It’s saying ‘you will not tell me what to do, you will not dictate what I do as an artist’,” he said, “I needed to thrash and chaotically deconstruct things that had become too plastic in my life. That’s why it’s called ‘Perth’, it’s like beginning, it’s like birth. There’s a chaos to that and there’s also a beauty.”29

  Though the song would hardly end up resembling Megadeth, retaining a certain gentleness even in its chaotic attack, it would be a bold, brazen blast of brass, military drum rattles, electric guitar splashes and choral soul screeches. The intensity of ‘Perth’ was such that just setting up the drums to record the initial takes took Justin five hours, at the end of which his hands were bleeding.

>   Characteristically, ‘Perth’ grew out of loss. On January 22, 2008, Justin was in the middle of three days of filming his first ever music video to accompany the release of ‘Skinny Love’ as a single that April. Typically, Vernon wasn’t the star of the video; nature was. Heading out into the crisp winter scenes around Eau Claire, Justin and director Matt Amato set about filming lapping lake shores, icicles dripping from branches, rushing rivers, swaying grasslands and fields drenched in snow. A peaceful and idyllic three days that were shattered in the ring of a cellphone.

  Amato’s best friend, Hollywood actor Heath Ledger, had been found dead, accidentally overdosed on “a toxic combination of prescription drugs”. Amato went to pieces.

  “So I’ve got this guy [Matt Amato] in my house whose best friend [Heath Ledger] just passed away,” Justin told Rolling Stone. “He’s sobbing in my arms. He can’t go back to L.A. because the house is under siege. Michelle Williams is calling my parents’ phone. All this stuff.”30

  “We sat with bottles of bourbon around the fire and he grieved,” Vernon recalled. “It was the strangest and most intense three days of my life.”31

  The trauma of the experience gave Justin not only the idea for the song but also the theme for the next album, and the fact that Heath Ledger was from Perth provided the opening track with its title. “It just sort of became the beginning of the record,” he said. “‘Perth’ has such a feeling of isolation, and also it rhymes with birth, and every song I ended up making after that just sort of drifted towards that theme, tying themselves to places and trying to explain what places are and what places aren’t.”32

  It would be some years before ‘Perth’ was finally completed however. And, in the meantime, there was a whole new storm coming.

  We’re gonna need a bigger cabin … Justin jamming in April Base studios. Note the markings from the school gym flooring. BILL ALKOFER/POLARIS

  Upping the head-count, Bon Iver’s new nine-piece line-up premieres at the Celebrate Brooklyn show, 2011. RYAN MUIR

  Don’t stay in college, kids: Mike Noyce, 2011. RYAN MUIR

  DeYarmond Edison reunite to dazzle Fader Fort at SXSW, 2011. ROGER KISBY/GETTY IMAGES

  Making molten harmonies with Volcano Choir, (L-R): Thomas Wincek, Justin Vernon, Chris Rosenau, Jon Mueller, Jim Schoeneker, Daniel Sack, CAMERON WITTIG

  The Shouting Matches in a more harmonious moment. GRAHAM TOLBERT

  “A photo shoot walking in the wood? If you say so …”, May 2011. TURE LILLEGRAVEN/CORBIS OUTLINE

  A shouting match in progress onstage at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in California, April 2012, (L-R) Brian Moen, Justin Vernon and Phil Cook. KARL WALTER/GETTY IMAGES FOR COACHELLA

  Hep-cat shades a-plenty for Vernon at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in April 2012. LEON MORRIS/REDFERNS VIA GETTY IMAGES

  Who the hell is Bonny Bear? That’ll be this guy, at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, LA. PICTUREGROUP/REX FEATURES

  Waving farewell to Bonnaroo 2012, (L-R): Michael Lewis, Justin Vernon and Colin Stetson. FILM MAGIC/GETTY IMAGE

  Bon Iver using Mike Joyce as a human banjo in NYC, September 2012, (L-R): Matt McCaughan, Colin Stetson, Sean Carey, Reggie Pace, Justin Vernon, Mike Noyce. ROGER KISBY/GETTY IMAGES

  Shrouded in arena theatrics in Berlin, November 2012. ANNE-HELENE LEBRUN/REDFERNS VIA GETTY IMAGES

  * Frenette also made spare cash working behind the counter at an Eau Claire coffee shop, Racy D’Lene’s.

  * Frenette would claim that of all the labels chasing Vernon, Jagjaguwar most closely shared their ideals.

  * Justin was keen to make sure any potential band profits benefited his friends and local community as much as possible, even going as far as to hire an accountant in nearby Osseo rather than any out-of-town big-shot firm.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In Demand

  THE bigger the crowds got, the quieter they became. Mid-January, 2008, Bon Iver played at St Paul’s tiny Turf Club, performing For Emma … in its entirety, in sequence. Though the record, having sold out, was available only as an online stream, the crowd knew every word, mouthing along in a rapt hush, only bursting into full-throated song when ‘Wolves …’ reached its chant-along crescendo of “what might have been lost”. As Justin finished ‘Re: Stacks’, solo and sublime, the room was thick with held breaths.

  When he played Eau Claire’s 100-capacity Nucleus club to launch the Jagjaguwar US release of For Emma, Forever Ago on February 10, sitting behind two microphones and playing a bass drum as he strummed, he faced a sold-out crowd that had queued around the block to get in since, as a café with a venue attached, the Nucleus didn’t sell advance tickets. Justin was so excited by the turn-out he Tweeted a picture of the queue; before long he’d have his fill of queues.

  When For Emma, Forever Ago hit the shelves just over a week later on February 19, wrapped in a sleeve of ice and mystery – a stark woodland scene obscured by a fine film of frost – America was as charmed as the Nucleus. Reaching a modest 64 on the Billboard Chart it was an Independent Albums Chart hit, hitting number four. The critics gushed: Rolling Stone and Spin magazine both reviewed the album warmly, and Stylus magazine described it as “an album possessing Elliott Smith’s folk-tinged starkness and the analog-tape warmth of Samuel Beam … Vernon’s music is stripped-down, uniformly quiet, and confessional, his clipped, cracked, Will Oldham-inspired lyrics not evidence of cabin delirium, but the work of an artist warmed by a creative glow that only pure isolation (read: freedom) can fully render.”1 When the album was released on 4AD in the UK on May 12, when it would reach a highly respectable number 42 aided by iTunes making ‘Skinny Love’ a free download around the release, reviewers were even more enthused.

  Uncut’s John Mulvey ranked the album a maximum five stars, dedicating its Album Of The Month slot to the release and calling it “a hermetically sealed, complete and satisfying album … a record entirely predicated on isolation … so securely and so intensely in its own world –a world of snow and silence and long-percolated memories – that listening can seem like an intrusive act … a magical, hyper-real experience.” Hearing echoes of Fleet Foxes, Dawn Landes, Band Of Horses and Howlin’ Rain, Mulvey also appreciated the background noises of Justin moving round the room, the weather outside, even a police siren in the distance in ‘The Wolves …’. “He seems to capture the performance with a forensic intimacy,” he wrote, “while imbuing it with an extra, ethereal dimension.”2

  A Mojo review by Victoria Segal also gave a maximum five stars and Album Of The Month status and the accolade Instant Mojo Classic. “If you were told that it had actually been found by some folks from town who rode over to the cabin to check on its occupant after the spring thaw and found nothing inside but dusty wax cylinders and a note with the title scrawled on it in sooty ink … well, it wouldn’t be so hard to believe,” she wrote, praising songs “of rediscovery and redemption, of coming to terms with the past and getting to grips with the future … the quiet excavation of a painful past unearthing songs of stunning beauty. “This record wears its gloom very lightly indeed,” she continued, likening the album to Elliott Smith, Iron & Wine, Smog, Tortoise, Calexico and R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur. “It’s easy to imagine him playing back the tapes and jumping at what he heard … the liquid imagery coalesces into a remarkably powerful whole … 37 beautiful minutes far away from the everyday. Isolation doesn’t get more splendid than this.”3

  The Sunday Times review was another five-star ranking, relating the record to Willard Grant Conspiracy and praising it as a “minimalist masterpiece … the songs are relentlessly simple, sometimes barely there, and the meaning of the words is often similarly elusive until the vocal suddenly focuses round a burst of anger or frustration.”4

  Over the course of 2008 For Emma, Forever Ago would grow in critical stature. In the end-of-year round-ups the Observer Music Monthly would award For Emma … its Album Of The Year honour, writer Gareth Grundy describing it as “an uncanny snapshot
of its creator’s turmoil … the pitch might’ve been backwoods primitive but the sound was contemporary, all magisterial drones and vocals tweaked until they became spectral choirs.”5 Uncut also listed it amongst its albums of the year, commending its “insidious power … a suite of songs that had both a raw, immediate integrity and a ghostly experimental dimension.”6 Mojo’s albums of the year list claimed it had “become the album of 2008 that everyone felt they had discovered for themselves, adding an extra magic to the listening experience … something beautiful and true that will last for ages.”7

  Uncut’s Bud Scoppa would pinpoint the moment Justin became an important musical figure, during ‘Flume’. “His double-tracked falsetto abruptly multiplied into a celestial choir … in that moment, Vernon touched a nerve”, the people moved by it “making the connection between this stunningly personal work and their own inner lives.”8 Later, some critics would suggest the album itself was a turning point in alternative culture, the moment when gender barriers in music blurred and sensitivity, delicacy, insecurity, emotional complexity, tenderness and vulnerability – everything the traditional rock’n’roller might consider un-masculine – became celebrated virtues.

  Ed Horrox considers the reception of For Emma … to have been “‘of the decade’. I think it’s certainly top ten of the decade, one of the best records the label’s ever released. I was thrilled, but the record was so good it started to become clear that people were feeling the same way you were feeling. Sometimes when you come across something that good you don’t have that uncertainty that you sometimes feel when you’re sharing music and hoping people like it. It’s like ‘if you don’t like this, you’re crazy’. You get that confidence with certain records, certain artists. I remember sharing the music with Laura Barton at the Guardian who wrote a think piece about music and how it can affect you and her life over a few days or a week and how obsessed she was becoming with this record. It wasn’t a review as such, it was about the power of music, it was an amazing piece. I remember Justin once saying he doesn’t read his press, he doesn’t read his reviews. I think his dad did keep up with the press and did read the Laura review and did send that to him and said, ‘You’ve got to read this one, I think it’s a bit special.’”