“I would always try to write songs like her,” he’d later say. “I was never that good.”24
Distractions flew thick and fast. There were press duties to perform to mark the January 20 release of Blood Bank for a start, and the inevitable questions about the pressures of following up For Emma…. “It does feel good to get something out, because it’s been awhile,” he told about.com. “But it had nothing to do with pressure, because the only real pressure comes from me, really wanting to do it. People will have expectations, I know that. But I won’t hear them, and won’t allow them into my, um, ‘worry centre’. I just don’t think that’s a good way to make music, with that sort of stuff in mind … A really powerful thing to do, if possible, is to not care about that; to go to a mental place that’s only about making the music you want to play. I plan on shutting down that more ‘aware’ part of my mind … as my first album shows, a lot of it’s about being in the right environment. I’ve got a house in the country, now, and out here I’ve got a little room set up, and I’ll probably make it down there. I haven’t thought about what’s going to be on it, or what it’s going to sound like. Eventually, I’ll just sit down and fire off an album.”25
“I was cool about it,” he’d say of the pressure. “It didn’t get to me. I just knew that I couldn’t fail myself, that’s all. I felt happy with For Emma … personally because I’d worked so hard on it and I let so much of myself subconsciously sink into it. I knew that I couldn’t do anything less than that this time. That was the only pressure. I didn’t feel any of the other stuff.”26
Then there were more, ever greater numbers to digest. The Blood Bank EP hit the Top 40 in the UK and an incredible number 16 on the US Billboard chart, the same week that, on January 26, it was announced that ‘Skinny Love’ had hit the upper end of the countdown for the best 100 songs of 2008 on the Triple J radio station in Australia. A success cemented by Justin’s first Australian tour that January, beginning (as his next album would) in Perth before wending across the country for a week, climaxing in four nights in Sydney, one of which was at the renowned 1,200 capacity City Recital Hall. The tour supplied at least one bizarre ‘fan’ encounter, as Justin described on his Blobtower blog: “A man just walked out of a coffee shop I am sitting outside of in a town at the eastern most point in Australia. A place of healing. He looked nervous, and came up to Nate and started to say something; I assume something like ‘tell your friend after he takes his ear things off, you tell him….’, I could tell the way he was pointing at me and talking to Nate. So I took my headphones off and he said to me, almost as if he had a lump in his throat; this man was notably normal, ‘just take it for what it’s worth. im telling you. I don’t want to clean up any body else’s messes in this life. Okay?’ Why did he tell me that?”27
And, most vitally, there was April Base’s community of creative musicians to cultivate and encourage. Remembering his summers at jazz camp, he likened April Base to “a summer camp for friends that believe in the same stuff I do. We’re these adults who get to continue living those weird childhood dreams of staying in a place and making records. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It just makes sense.”28
Between the end of Bon Iver’s Australian tour in January and the start of their scheduled summer dates and festival slots in May, Justin had four months to work on his own material, and collaborate with the Eau Claire music community, both home-made and external. On April 19, for example, Justin donned a white suit to join his old school jazz band once more, at a fundraiser for the Eau Claire Memorial High School Jazz Ensemble I’s forthcoming trip to New York to compete in the Essentially Ellington Competition. The focus of the evening was the music of Duke Ellington and his peers, which the ensemble performed in their own early set – songs by Ellington, Juan Tizol and Benny Carter – before Justin joined them for the second half. Teasing the crowd with an instrumental take on ‘Lump Sum’, Vernon crooned through Ellington’s ‘Rocks In My Bed’, Nina Simone’s ‘Since I Fell For You’ and Ella Fitzgerald numbers ‘Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered’ and ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ before pulling out one of his own songs, a rapturously received jazz take on ‘For Emma’. By the end of the night he was dropping the falsetto and finger-snapping through Sinatra’s ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’ and strapping on a guitar to play Mahalia Jackson’s ‘Satisfied Mind’. A live album of the event, titled A Decade With Duke, would be released in December, but it was a night that vibrated through the memory of anyone who saw it all year.
As did the pummelling African drum troupe who marched in front of Bon Iver and across the front of the stage as introduction to the rousing and ecstatic cover of Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ when Justin took the stage alongside The National, David Sitek and, centre-stage, David Byrne at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on May 3 during the Dark Was The Night AIDS benefit show organised by Red Hot Organization. The show was the culmination of Justin’s involvement with the accompanying Dark Was The Night compilation album*, a collection of songs and collaborations donated by a plethora of alternative superstars including The National, Grizzly Bear, Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Byrne, Feist and Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard.
Justin’s contribution was two-fold. First, he gave the charity a brand new Bon Iver song for the album, ‘Brackett, WI’, a denser, grungier track than the For Emma … and Blood Bank material, all deep, distorted electric guitar thrums, Springsteen organs and a basement aesthetic lifted by Vernon’s trademark angelic bursts of lush layered harmonies. The title directed us to the song’s meaning like a rusted road sign: Brackett is a town just south of Fall Creek of just a few houses, a bar, a post office and an abandoned school – so small the roads in and out were ripped up to widen the highway into Eau Claire. Just the sort of place Justin might drive through and see as a metaphor for an abandoned and wasted love, and so the song went: “Here we are rebuilding roads/Right by roosting towns/It’s just like the love/The one that’s never been enough”. Peppering the song with images of the abandoned town – the first verse describes swings with their “bending ash”* seats worthy of old photos –and its mourning residents undertaking “the business of sadness” that’s now the town’s main trade – “And Fred had it wrong, Macy/Hon, he had it burned/now the curve in the county/Is Nana’s urn” – Vernon conjured a place of loss and decay, but one he was “rebuilding roads” to, as if the “love that’s never been enough” was worth revisiting. Indeed, having returned to it the chorus suggested Justin never wanted to leave – painting himself as a horse being held in sway by his lover’s “twitch”, he swore he’d “die along the ditches” if set free.
Vernon’s second contribution was the track he’d written with Aaron Dessner especially for the project, ‘Big Red Machine’. The track marked Justin’s first chance to get fully orchestral, merging his wintry atmospherics with The National’s knack with a keening chamber orchestra, welding together around insistent stabs of one-note grand piano. A delicate and elegant piece, its indistinct and impressionistic lyrics could be read to refer to sex, love, death and AIDS, as many other songs on the compilation did; the big red machine of the title representing the human heart beating its sorrow for “so many killed” by the disease and learning to endure the suffering of both illness and the fleeting nature of life – “the earth is only sand, fucked up and puked up in dismay”. ‘Big Red Machine’ was a vital stepping stone for Vernon as Bon Iver, a sign that he was shifting away from personal dissection and introversion towards tackling grander universal themes.
The first major influx of musicians into April Base, meanwhile, also occurred in the early part of 2009. Justin heard from Ryan Olson, who was working on a collaboration with two members of Minneapolis sadtronica act Solid Gold, Zack Coulter and Adam Hurlburt, their new band working out of Olson’s bedroom in Minneapolis. The idea of the band he was calling Gayngs sounded pretty intriguing – in love with Seventies and Eighties AM radio he planned to make an entire album of songs influenced by the layered synt
h choir of 10cc’s 1975 number one hit ‘I’m Not In Love’. “We just wanted to start playing some soft-rock music,” Olson said. “I’d been listening to a shitload of 10cc and I was just like, yeah, I want to do something like this. Zach [Coulter]’s always had just a crazy awesome voice … We came up with a band name, and then the Friday after that Zach came over to my house and wrote what would be ‘The Gaudy Side Of Town’, the first song. The only rule was, I just wanted every song to be 69 BPM, so it could be seamless.”29
It was just the sort of off-the-wall idea Justin was keen to explore, and when he heard that Brad, Phil and Joe from Megafaun had been roped in to contribute to the album, Vernon had all the more reason to get involved. He offered to add vocals to the songs and mix the record at April Base and by summer Gayngs had swapped their HQ from Minneapolis to Fall Creek and the halls of April Base filled with excited musicians and rang with soft rock cheese. Justin loved the chance to strap on a guitar and play squealing cock rock solos which Ryan would then drench in delay and drop into tracks in a cut-and-paste style that would influence Justin’s own writing process over the coming years. While working up the sonic palette for ‘Calgary’, for instance, he would record the keyboard parts and then paste them over and over again onto the track to get the required effect.*
“Deciding to mix that Gayngs project was probably like the dumbest business move I ever made on paper,” Vernon admitted, “but it taught me so much about how to mix my new record. Every time I’ve mixed a project, it’s always taught me a lot more about how to hear music. So doing the Gayngs thing and doing the Volcano Choir record, all that stuff equally shared in the current information going into the new record.”30
Plus, he loved the way Gayngs tackled such uncool music with a sincere love of the genre. “Gayngs is exploring this space that’s fun, and there is such a difference between fun and funny,” he said. “Olson is legitimately and sincerely into weird AM radio, and that was his whole idea with the project. I deal with the folk-singer, guitar-guy scene, and he deals with this sense that people think he’s a joke, which is much worse. Gayngs is not an ironic thing. It was in us.”31
“It wasn’t a joke for too long,” Olson agreed. “It’s definitely got a sense of humour to it, but it’s not a joke album. It’s not a Weird Al record.”32
Over the course of summer and autumn of 2009, more and more acts found their way to April Base* to add contributions to the first Gayngs album, Relayted. Before they knew it Gayngs was a collective of 25 musicians including Ivan from The Rosebuds, Mike Noyce, Har Mar Superstar, Megafaun and various members of Doomtree, Roma di Luna, Happy Apple, Lookbook and Leisure Birds. It was a dream come true for Justin, who’d always hoped April Base would be like one big free-for all creative party with all his oldest Eau Claire friends.
“It was like being back in high school,” says Solid Gold’s Adam Hurlburt of one particularly populous three-day recording stint. “None of us had been in the same room together since high school. So it was just this insane experience. The music is sort of tongue in cheek, in a way. You know how you’re not supposed to slap the bass, that’s not cool any more? It’s like just totally ignoring any social faux paus, slapping the bass and making it sound corny as hell. It was just this insanely fun three days, staying at Justin and Nate’s house and doing that record and having so much fun with it.”
“It’s the most innocent thing you could ever think of,” Vernon agreed. “There’s a bunch of people not trying to do anything to make you impressed. They’re doing it because it’s fun.”33 The sessions also brought the concept of the ‘guilty pleasure’ to Justin’s attention. “It made me realise how sounds had become political. It’s not cool to have certain sounds on your record and I had no fucking idea. Like, I didn’t even know that I was supposed to apologise for listening to Bruce Hornsby. It’s dumb to meddle in those kind of questions, like, ‘Is this cool or not?’ I really don’t give a shit about that stuff.”34
“Typically, what happens is,” Stef Alexander, aka POF, explained, “[Olson] has a skeleton of a song, which is a drum beat at a certain BPM, and maybe a couple little sparse synthesizer notes. And then, from there, he’ll invite like two or three different bass players to come and play on top of it. He’ll listen to it and go through and cut out the awesome parts, and then put them in where he thinks they should be. And then from there, he gives it to the vocalists to see what they want to do with it. And a lot of people came, and the same thing happened – they sang a bunch of parts, and they sang a bunch of words, and he cut it up and arranged them into what the song would end up sounding like. So a lot of people who are on this record didn’t know exactly what they did on the record until after – like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember doing that.’ “35
Relayted – essentially Olson’s baby – would take a year of recording and mixing from start to finish before being completed, but the result would be an edgy updating of AOR. That first tune, ‘The Gaudy Side Of Town’, opened the album, based around a fuzzed-up human beatbox backing, Sade jazz synths and sultry Eighties soul saxophones, Justin adding a slinky wail of the title. Polite bursts of rhythmic static and modernist electronic fidgets kept the track lodged firmly in the 21st century though, a distant, less cartoonish cousin of Gorillaz, and it drained away to a bleak metallic wasteland march that became the cracked and desolate soul pop of ‘The Walker’, a kind of Dire Straits mood piece being bombarded with firecrackers. Again, the closing minute of the track shifted mood; a warped deep-baritone rap bled into a sparkling icicle pop synth melody and Gayngs’ most blatant homage to 10cc, a cover of Godley & Creme’s 1985 hit ‘Cry’.* The Gayngs version was distorted into a more sluggish drawl than the original, but otherwise captured its widescreen anguish and multi-layered vocal miasma perfectly.
Swapping between brittle piano stabs, Seventies soul organ, flamenco guitar and Kenny G-style saxophone, ‘No Sweat’ was an ominous and inventive soul ballad that pasted the misty vocal choir of ‘I’m Not In Love’ to trip-hop atmospheres and a lusty soul bellow to devastating effect. Just as devastating, in a very different way, was ‘False Bottom’, which seemed to find all 25 members bashing, blowing and beating away at their instruments full whack for the first minute, before a tribal rhythm and stuttering mechanical wail took control of the melee and guided it towards a danceable coherence.
‘The Beatdown’ proved that Gayngs’ mission wasn’t just to emulate ‘I’m Not In Love’, they wanted to dive inside its rich sonic fug and frolic with wild futuristic abandon. The hyper-speed vocal Smurfs pioneered by Kanye West, the ethereal psychedelic world music of Animal Collective and MIA and the post-rock oceans of drone and distortion of Volcano Choir were all thrown into the stew, enclosed within a pulsating bubble of 10cc homage. This was exhilarating stuff, music focusing far beyond its quasi-comic concept, and as ‘Crystal Rope’ returned to the Eighties with its synthy slap bass and distorted cod-funk reminiscent of the yacht rock of Hall & Oates, Jan Hammer’s ‘Crockett’s Theme’ or Peter Gabriel’s ‘Shock The Monkey’ – albeit attached to a deliciously downbeat gospel glisten capable of tugging the tightest heartstrings.
Descending into a marching band beat, ‘Crystal Rope’ segued into ‘Spanish Platinum’, a laid-back track coming on like Chris Rea in a wind tunnel, all canyon rock riffs, undulating saxophones and whistling dust-land sound effects. An Auto-Tuned Justin showed up towards the end, lilting a languid verse of incomprehensible sweetness before giving way to backwards guitar solos and a coda of buzzing electronic entropy. Thankfully ‘Faded High’ got the party started again, hitching itself to the Eighties revival bandwagon that had been gradually taking over electronic music for the whole decade in the wake of Daft Punk’s Discovery album. But ‘Faded High’ was rather more ambitious than the three minute electro rehashes of The Human League, Roxy Music and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Everywhere’ that were becoming the norm. Clocking in at seven and a half catchy-as-hell minutes, it began as a subterranean NYC post-electroclash party pop
tune full of amorphous she-bot vocal chants and wailing hair-rock guitar, and gradually pulled in more and more disparate influences: R&B, glitchtronica, shoegazing meanders and a sparkling psych-folk interlude led by Justin.
‘Ride’ took a more ambient hip-hop turn with its reverberating pianos, R&B clicks and galactic MIDI whines and the album wound up with ‘The Last Prom On Earth’, the smooch at the end of the universe. A futuristic prom scene full of romantic phase washes and Auto-Tuned backing singers, smacking of Psychedelic Furs, Billy Ocean, Barry White and a glitterball-speckled slow dance at the end of a Brat Pack flick, it included a spoken word declaration of undying love worthy of the cheesiest R&B and an air of ultra-fresh nostalgia. It closed an album which would eventually garner Album Of The Year plaudits* and be described as treading the “line between schmaltz and sincerity, between parody and earnestness”36, although you suspect the fact that they managed to persuade Kevin Godley to appear in their recreation of the original face-morphing video for ‘Cry’ when it was released as a single was a far greater validation for Gayngs. A band that might have started life as a heartfelt homage from a dedicated trio to the MOR mush of their youth, but ended up as a gang-handed invigoration and celebration of lost AM arts, remoulded for the Animal Collective generation. “The most scintillating and daring record of the year so far,” wrote NME’s Anthony Thornton, “Buy it. Play It. Get beaten up for being different.”37
With such crazed larks and inspired music emanating from April Base, it must have been a wrench for Justin to drag himself away. But, come May 2009, The Road called again. Twenty-nine dates starting with some warm-up theatre shows in the US and a smatter of shows in the UK and Germany – one at an indoor festival called All Tomorrow’s Parties held at a tacky Butlin’s holiday camp in Minehead – before the festival season kicked off in earnest.
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