“I think in that way I was emboldened by seeing how Bryce and Aaron [Dessner] work in their life and also how Kanye worked: ‘I want that – get that. I want an 80-piece orchestra – get it’. And I guess I was just like: ‘Oh, I can see now! I know my two favourite saxophone players in the whole world, so why don’t I get them in the same room?’ “23
“I brought in a lot of people to change my voice,” he’d tell Rolling Stone, “not my singing voice, but my role as the author of this band, this project … I built the record myself, but I allowed those people to come in and change the scene … I always had a dream to be that sort of student of Neil Young, one of those people who can sit down and write a song and have it be this full statement and sound good. I just don’t think I’m as good at it as those people, frankly, and over the last few years, I’ve adapted.”24
“I like getting other people’s brains in the process,” he added. “I’ve brought other people in to help me try to change the landscape. I already knew what I wanted from them – it’s more like me trying to author or direct.”25
In all, over the course of 2010, Justin would work with 10 other musicians: Leisz, Stetson, Lewis and Sufjan Steven’s brass player, C.J. Camerieri, added musical passages; Noyce, Carey and McCaughan provided vocals, Wincek and Schoenecker from Volcano Choir did the ‘processing’ and The National’s orchestra guy Rob Moose acted as string arranger. Vernon flew musicians in to Eau Claire from around the country to help him work up the sounds in his head – the warm Neil Young distortion fuzz he wanted for ‘Perth’, redolent of the sounds he’d helped Land Of Talk construct, or just letting the pleasure of making music with the best players in the world sweep through him. “It was more about just exploring feeling in general rather than some specific hook-up that I had,” he explained.26
“Bon Iver is often equated with just me,” he’d say, “but you are who surrounds you, and for [the second album] I wanted to invite those voices as musical catalysts.”27
The big name collaboration offers didn’t stop pouring in either. In February 2010 Peter Gabriel had released an album of orchestrated covers of songs he admired on an album called Scratch My Back, the concept being that he would ask the acts he’d covered to cover one of his songs in return for an accompanying album, I’ll Scratch Yours. One of the songs he covered, with immense opulence and grace, was ‘Flume’, and Justin was accordingly invited to cover one of Gabriel’s songs in return. As the likes of Radiohead, Neil Young and David Bowie dragged their feet over recording one of Gabriel’s songs, he instead decided to release double A-sided singles on every full moon in 2010 as the covers came in, and on March 30 Gabriel’s lush version of ‘Flume’ hit independent record stores backed with Vernon’s gorgeous take on Gabriel’s ‘Come Talk To Me’, a six-minute slab of glorious bombastic pop full of bagpipes and tribal drum cavalcades that Justin had brilliantly reduced to banjo, synth and glacial harmonies without losing any of its powerful melodic impact, adding muffled drum circles, Soweto guitars and strings to create a sepia memory of the original. Despite being so busy with his own album and side projects, Vernon simply couldn’t turn down the chance to work with the true legends.
There was one megastar Vernon very publicly declined to work with though. On May 14, shortly before Shouting Matches performed another rare show in Altoona, Wisconsin*, the entire cast of Gayngs gathered together for their first gig, the CD release show for Relayted at Minneapolis’ First Avenue venue, billed as The Last Prom On Earth. Ramming the stage with contributors to play the entire album in order, plus a final cover of Howard Jones’ ‘No One Is To Blame’, it was like the indie psych circus had come to town – balloon drops, prom decorations and a free-for-all, punch-drunk atmosphere. It was “more like a play than a regular show,” Olson exclaimed.28 “We’ve got a shitload of balloons, a shitload of gossamer, a shitload of streamers. We’re just going to try to make it as gaudy as hell. Try to fuck that place up.”29
Throughout the carnival show, diminutive local Eighties funk superstar Prince stood in the wings, angling for an invitation to join the band onstage. But Justin, and the rest of Gayngs, simply ignored him. “I’m a huge Prince fan,” says Justin. “But I’ve never told anybody this. When I heard he wanted to come, I thought, ‘fuck that’. Like, he doesn’t know how to play our songs. He’s a good musician. He’s probably the best guitar player ever. But Gayngs is already hanging on by a thin thread, and this was Gayngs’ ‘Last Prom on Earth’ show. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t matter who you are. I just didn’t want our time to be eclipsed. And, like, everybody’s gotta suck Prince’s dick, because he’s Prince. We didn’t need Prince to be there … He was standing right next to my brother on the side stage. Mikey, who plays in Bon Iver, too, talked to him and said, ‘Hey, man, use my amp. Plug in.’ I was just drinking Pabst. I was indifferent. It’s not my show to run. We definitely didn’t tell him he couldn’t come up there. But I think we fucked up and didn’t roll out the red carpet or something.”30
And with the music now pouring out of Vernon at a far more tumultuous rate, he sure didn’t need Prince piggybacking on his talent …
Fast-forward, as so much of Justin’s life had, to winter. Alone in an empty studio room at April Base, Justin listens to the playback of the last vocal take, hangs up his headphones and weeps. Bon Iver’s second album was complete, ending as it had begun, with ‘Perth’. Once he’d regained his composure, a more celebratory stamp would be put on the finishing of the album: a cork-board was hung on the studio wall pinned with Polaroids of everyone who’d worked on the album, in the centre a piece of paper with a lyric from Lucinda Williams’ ‘Fruits Of My Labor’ scrawled on it: “I FINALLY DID IT. I GOT OUT OF LAGRANGE”.
“She sings this line ‘’cause I finally did it baby, I got out of La Grange, got in my Mercury and drove out west’,” he’d explain. “She’s actually explaining the end of something which is actually the beginning of her life. When Lucinda got into the Mercury and drove out west, she was burying the stranger inside her.”31
Vernon’s own road had been long. Three full years since he’d first immersed himself into ‘Perth’, his alchemy of soundscapes honed and heated in snatched days, weeks and months between his vast array of offshoot projects. The final months of the album’s creation, over the second half of 2010, had been no less busy. So busy in fact that, in the summer of 2010, it was clear that Bon Iver had gotten big enough and global enough to need more hands on the management decks, to bolster the organisational and decision-making end of the project. So Nate, who’d now moved out of Eau Claire to Minneapolis, stepped up to a co-manager role alongside Kyle.
Nate had had a formidable swathe of projects to oversee. In June, Vernon contributed a cover of ‘Bruised Orange (Chain Of Sorrow)’ to a John Prine tribute album, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs Of John Prine, for which he also wrote sleeve notes; his cathedral choral effect slipping effortlessly onto Prine’s misty mountain folk in what Justin would describe as “top of the list” of his life’s ambitions. In September, with just a week’s rehearsal, Justin was invited to join Megafaun for a series of three shows at the converted church venue Hayti Heritage Center at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to cover songs from a series of 1959 field recordings of classic blues and folk tunes by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax called Sounds Of The South. Backed by the jazz big band Fight The Big Bull and accompanied by folk chanteuse Sharon Van Etten, the shows – all recorded for an as-yet-unreleased live album – were a richly rewarding chance for Justin to play with old friends and honour the American roots music he loved, as well as further proof that collaboration was now his most comfortable form of musical expression. “Vernon took a soulful lead vocal on Fred McDowell’s ‘When I Get Home’,” wrote one reviewer, “backed by a heavily bearded trio of R&B-style backup singers who might consider a side career as ‘ZZ Pips’.”32
Then there was the chaos of Gayngs’ first ever tour that September, to mark the release of Relayted; 10 da
tes over September and October, a touring dervish of clashing and merging musical tastes that bowled its way towards disaster. After nine successful shows straddling the States from Chicago to Nashville via Boston, New York, Washington and Toronto, it was due to wind up with a celebratory set at Austin City Limits festival on October 10. But at 4.20 a.m. on the morning before the Austin show, the band noticed that their tour bus had gone missing, along with all of their equipment and on-the-road personal possessions. The driver was out of contact; they reported the bus stolen. But the next day the truth emerged; since the band were a few days late in paying the $6,000 bill for hiring the bus, the owners had told the driver to bring it back to base in Nashville*, where all of their stuff was now being kept. Feeling, as they put it, “insanely bummed out”, Gayngs cancelled their show at ACL and Justin flew to Nashville to settle the bill.
“While it is totally ‘Gayngs’ to not pay bills,” Justin wrote on Blobtower, “we were given no warning of our gear being taken and it was absolutely our every intention to pay our bill. Matter of fact, me and Lewis just paid it. In person. In Nashville. Flew there this morning. None of that changes the fact that our gear WAS stolen. And taken hostage. And caused us not to be able to play. Gayngs’ feeling were fucking totally crushed; and tears were shed when we had to cancel what was possibly our last show ever.”33
More successful was Volcano Choir’s first ever tour, in the wake of Justin guesting on a track set to appear on the debut album of Wincek’s latest band, All Tiny Creatures. ‘An Iris’ featured Justin’s electronically treated, lower-register vocals careening over a math-pop swirl of chopped-up guitars, itself inspired by the Volcano Choir project. “Volcano Choir was kind of a catalyst because I saw how well those songs were working with vocals,” says Wincek. “I started thinking about vocals and began asking my friends, who happened to be great vocalists, if they’d be down with recording for the album. Sometimes, I’d give them a little direction and say where I wanted to go with it. Or other times, I’d just let them go off. Justin was one of those people.”34
The Volcano Choir tour of 2010 would frustrate US fans of the band since, for their first outing, they opted to play only in Japan. Arriving on November 5, they performed four rammed shows, two in Tokyo’s O-West club in Shibuya and two more in Nagoya and Osaka, with Volcano Choir billed as support for Collections Of Colonies Of Bees. Their set consisted of seven songs from Unmaps and an encore of Collection Of Colonies Of Bees’ ‘Flocksill’, played by Wincek triggering his loops live onstage. “With Volcano Choir, we really had to think about how to pull that off,” he said. “In Volcano Choir’s live set, I’m actually playing loops, triggering them on the keyboard. I couldn’t do that in Creatures.”35
Back from Japan*, November 2010 saw Vernon thrown back into the hip-hop big time. With New York abuzz with rumours, on the morning of November 23, previously unannounced, tickets were put on sale for a tiny show at the Bowery Ballroom by Kanye West taking place that very evening. Within minutes the tickets were gone and, come sundown, the queue to get in snaked around the block. Those with tickets faced a three hour wait to get inside, and some were even turned away as the monumental guest list – major celebrities like Spike Lee had to queue an hour or more; only P Diddy was swept past the queue without a pause – supplanted their spaces.
Running on hip-hop time, the crowd were kept waiting until way past midnight for the show to begin. When it did, with Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, John Legend and Kanye himself in the wings, the first voice through the speakers was the unmistakable Auto-Tune trill of Vernon hovering over the spoken-word intro of ‘Dark Fantasy’, the opening song on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, sounding nothing short of gargantuan. As the show wound its way through the entire album, Vernon was a regular presence. “Time and again, the stage belonged to Vernon, whose eerie falsetto ran through song after song,” wrote the New York Times. “Vernon was transformed, supremely confident alongside a multiplatinum superstar, sometimes even eclipsing him … Vernon began [‘Lost In The World’] a capella – for more than a minute it was a pure cyborg hymn, with Vernon, the self-described ‘introspective, emotional country kid’, singing about being up in the woods, while the crowd hooted and whistled. After the song, Justin Vernon, the pride of Eau Claire, Wis., and Kanye West hugged and walked offstage together.”36
Of all the disparate tours, gigs, recording sessions and projects that he embarked on in the latter half of 2010, though, three were particularly close to Justin’s heart. First was the burgeoning idea of his own record label imprint, funded via Jagjaguwar, that he was planning to call Chigliak. Initially he’d use it to release albums that he’d loved through the years but had been lost through the cracks. And one in particular stood out.
“There’s this band called Amateur Love from Eau Claire,” he told Pitchfork, remembering the album that had so moved him back in his DeYarmond days. “They put out a record and it probably sold like 500 copies – it was like this electro-pop thing with a Neil Young or Paul Westerberg-quality songwriter, I shit you not … Amateur Love is going to be the first record I put out. It’s like a ‘lost records’ thing and I’m encouraging other people to send in records of their local heroes – totally unsigned shit that never went anywhere but is incredible.”37 “There will be cool bonus material, songs never released, videos,” he added in Eau Claire weekly music magazine Volume One. “But mostly that fantastic album on wax. As a whole.”38
“[The] objective of that label is to put out unreleased or recorded but lightly distributed local music,” Justin’s dad, Gil, said. “I think that’s neat to see. There’s great fortune and wealth involved. I think he’s looking back to music that inspired him or [through] lack of better luck didn’t find its way to broader exposure so he’s reaching back.”39
And second, an email exchange that, for a time at least, got him the woman of his wildest proposal fantasies.
In Autumn 2010, a mutual friend played matchmaker. They suggested that Justin and Kathleen Edwards might make sweet music together. Emails were swapped, the suggestion of Justin producing Kathleen’s fourth album dropped.
At their first sessions in November and December, at both Edwards’ studio in Toronto and at April Base, the pair found they were musical soulmates.
“I was talking to Justin about the direction I wanted to go in fairly early on in the recording process,” Kathleen said. “He was somebody that was able to finish my sentences when I was trying to describe what I wanted to do, and for the times that I couldn’t articulate it, he really helped … There was never a shortage of ideas with Justin. He was quick at throwing down four or five parts and tinkering with them in a way that really allowed me to produce the songs while he produced some of the musical ideas based on stacking and creating sounds on two or three instruments at one time.”40
Whether he wooed her with ‘Calgary’ or not, within weeks of meeting Vernon and Edwards were a couple. Though Edwards lived in Toronto and Vernon in Eau Claire they vowed not to let more than a fortnight go by without seeing each other, and recording for Edwards’ album Voyageur shifted to April Base to help the relationship run smoother. Kathleen, it transpired, found Vernon’s work just as alluring as he found hers.
“You can place yourself inside his songs and his music, because he leaves space for you,” she said. “I mean this respectfully, but most of the time I have no idea what Justin’s songs are about … This intense connection people have with him, I’m deeply, deeply jealous of that.”41
And finally, around Christmas 2010, his parents moved out of Eau Claire, shifting out to Hudson, a 60-minute drive west. His brother, Nate, had already moved to Minneapolis and his sister to St Paul’s so, just as everything in his life appeared to be reaching a satisfying cohesion, he felt suddenly unsettled.
“I’m the only one left in Eau Claire. And I know that I have roots here now with this place, and I know that I can come back here, but I wonder, am I supposed to live here? And so in a way it feels kind
of late, but I think that I’m ready to have a stare in the face of me and this place and wonder if I should be here still.”42
That winter’s night that Justin laid down the final track on the new Bon Iver record*, the array of dizzying achievements he had to look back on made him break down and cry. Although he would delay mastering the album for a fortnight more in order to make it as perfect as possible, he certainly felt he’d finally put a full stop on his grandest work yet.
Through the studio window and Justin’s teary eyes, a snowstorm was brewing, readying to bury Eau Claire in another glistening winter.
For the first time since Bon Iver was born, his back had stopped hurting.
* Coincidence or not, in keeping with the place name theme of Justin’s songs at this point, Roslyn is the town in Washington where Northern Exposure was filmed.
* Also on this European jaunt, Justin stopped off in Prague to visit Trever Hagen, keen to stay connected with his oldest musical collaborators no matter how big he got.
* Whose debut album Beachcomber’s Windowsill Justin’s blog claimed he’d had on repeat for days at a time.
* On May 29, rumoured to be the band’s last ever show.
* The owners, CJ Star Buses, claimed to have given the band 45 minutes to remove their gear from the bus before it was driven away, and said that none of the band took them seriously.
* Having filled his Blobtower blog with pictures of the strange things he saw there, including a Terminator eating spaghetti.
* A post to his Blobtower blog featuring a snapshot of a microphone and the legend ‘the end of a very long, good chapter’ suggests this was December 22, 2010.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bon Iver Page 23
