Bon Iver - The oracle of 2000s folk

“The biographical details behind the creation of a record shouldn't matter when it comes to listener appreciation, but For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon's debut as 'Bon Iver', exudes such a sense of loneliness and distance that you might be able to sense some tragedy beneath it”

(Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork, 10/04/2007)

“The story of Justin Vernon and how his record came to be is almost too perfect to be true, and yet, after a few listens to For Emma, Forever Ago, it quickly becomes obvious, despite the effort, that this is not someone putting on an act”.

“I truly apologise if the backstory of this record has been somewhat overplayed but, without it, For Emma, Forever Ago would never have existed, and it's probably fair to say that a large part of it wouldn't make sense without an explanation. A thorough account of the events surrounding the record could hardly be called excessive”.

(Dom Gourlay, Drowned In Sound, 12/05/2008)

These are the moments in which a myth is forged, the freezing of a precise span of time and a place, a space-time hypercube bounded by the walls of a cabin outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the winter months of 2006-07. As if struck by some primordial spark, the American collective consciousness — and then the world's — celebrated the emergence of a new piece in its own pantheon, adding to it a bizarre fragment given its insignificant appearance: a wooden shack.

Do we need to know the Walden-esque events of Justin Vernon's life to appreciate For Emma, Forever Ago? Of course not. But it's just as natural that, in the story of the record's gestation — not entirely tied to that “good winter” — so many artistic clichés condense explicitly and tangibly, making isolation the preferred habitat of human inspiration — something probably true, moreover, but here made evident and perfectly reproducible. At the same time, there's perhaps a comforting illusion that all it takes is a guitar and something more or less painful to tell in order to make a work of art: the all-too-often abused fallacy of singer-songwriter music in recent years.

More than the confession, more than the expression in another language of seven years of Justin Vernon's life, the truly important thing about For Emma, Forever Ago, even for the songwriter himself, is the search for his own way of writing music, his own path to art. Vernon didn't retreat to his parents' cabin to put his love life in order, to flee from the world of relationships. He had already abandoned that world by leaving Durham, the Eldorado of alternative music, and DeYarmond Edison, the band with which he'd sought his fortune after leaving the barren Eau Claire scene behind. It's this rupture that pains him, certainly not the one with Christy Smith, his girlfriend at the time (nothing more than a “Skinny Love”), and even less the memory of his ex Sara Emma Jensen, the one who appears in the title.

The turning point in Justin Vernon's existence of pure asceticism isn't the moment he finally comes to understand some past behaviour or situation: it's the moment he unloads the car trailer containing the recording and mixing gear he'd brought with him from North Carolina, in order to record one of the album's choral parts. It's perhaps hard to admit that life and art often follow different trajectories, and that the former is merely a pretext for the latter. The impulse to create something beautiful, something meaningful for others, often transcends and overshadows the accidents — the facts, the people — that make it achievable, tangible. This doesn't diminish the purely emotional impact, the spirit of overflowing emotion — that, indeed, is indestructible — of For Emma, Forever Ago: rather, it broadens its scope, freeing it somewhat from the constrained, stereotyped image of the “confessional” record, from the sloppily arranged container of breakup songs of every era.

For Emma, Forever Ago is indeed far more than the sum of its parts. The falsetto, Vernon's unnatural way of aping the icons of black music and mimicking the white voices of the Vienna Boys' Choir, to the point of recording almost always at least two vocal lines; the guitar, you can almost picture it: the body chipped down to bare wood by pick strokes, a missing string, the edges battered after countless falls, recorded just inches away, so that it sounds like a self-built instrument or a carpentry tool, a steel Frankenstein that needs to be struck just to work; and finally the distant sounds of creaking floorboards, clinking dishes, of entropy slowly growing larger.

Chance insights: the falsetto is an extreme, desperate way of abandoning the darkly singer-songwriterly register used with DeYarmond Edison, in an attempt at a wholly personal path; the guitar recorded on four tracks stems from the goal of putting together demos to send to labels, and certainly not of releasing those recordings as they were (it would be the first people he played them for, musician friends from Durham, who convinced him that this was in fact his record, done and finished).

“I look back at the other record again, and I really like 'Re: Stacks', of course, but it's more of an explaining song, and every time I play it I feel like I'm explaining the same thing again, and again and again. Not that it's so bad — I think that song means a lot to a lot of people, but the song from that record I still respond to is 'Flume'. 'Flume' was the catalyst for the whole thing, and I still feel it that way. I can really still embrace that song, and what it is: it's the first thing this band ever did and it really feels like it can feed itself forever. Because, whatever is happening in that song, it makes sense to me, and it's still revealing itself”.

(Justin Vernon)

This is where some of the magic of For Emma, Forever Ago lies: its tireless poetry, a constant calling to the soul. That naturalistic, primitive religiosity (“I am my mother's only one/It's enough”; “Sky is womb and she's the moon”), which in the opening “Flume” takes the shape of a magic ritual, where reality is a play of shadows cast by fire on a cave wall. Here Vernon's lyrical style also finds its fullest expression, born of a compositional process that leans on the subconscious — he would first build the melody by humming various versions of syllables that fit well with the song's flow, then reassemble it all with words and phrases that made sense — and with which the Eau Claire songwriter seeks to set himself apart from the towering shadow of Springsteen, Dylan and Young, invoking instead Richard Buckner (one of the few comparisons not pinned on him). The result is a set of still, unnatural images, almost Dalí-esque visions of lunar worlds and warped bodies of water: “Only love is all maroon/Lapping lakes like leary loons/Leaving rope burns – reddish ruse”. But isn't the “best” art, the kind most true to itself and to its own experience, precisely the kind that “sees but doesn't understand”, or at least not entirely?

But For Emma, Forever Ago never falters either in conjuring up full-bodied images, raw experiences, even tactile sensations: you don't need to know the backstory of its creation to appreciate the place where it unfolds. The Wisconsin frost bites through the metallic shiver of guitar strings; tiny, tingling arpeggios seem to evoke the imperceptible, insignificant life that alone seems to withstand the winter; the crisp air of full-moon nights is the evident medium carrying Vernon's harmonies; and whatever the sounds don't do, the silence does.

Beyond this, it's the songs' imagery that suddenly turns vivid and tactile, as in "Blindsided", a cry for help (with a fatally touching refrain, "Would you really rush out/ for me now?") from a spirit dragging itself through the snow; "Re: Stacks" feels like the gradual, slow unveiling of a cathartic, epiphanic reflection on a morning spent snowed in during a winter storm.

And in all this, there's no real urge to break with the past: "Skinny Love", however much it's become one of the hits of the 2000s, could pass for a recording by some distant Appalachian bard, with its barely-there stomp and Vernon's gut-wrenching, spine-tingling delivery. Then there's the big pop of "For Emma" – one of the few songs to have horn parts added after Justin returned to society – and of "Lump Sum".

The moment Vernon puts For Emma, Forever Ago up for streaming on his own website, it takes on a life of its own, spreading through the blogs and sparking a viral storm (which even includes a Top 30 placement on Stereogum) that leads Bon Iver to sign with Jagjaguwar in October, just a few months after the album's self-release. The subsequent release in February 2008, and the further reissue under the 4AD banner in May, will go on to create what is perhaps the only truly "popular" singer-songwriter figure of this new third millennium, in that strange overlap between mainstream and independent music that clearly represents a transitional state.

Far less "transitional", however, will be the record's staggering effect on other artists, and perhaps on listeners too, and therefore on the music world at large. For Emma, Forever Ago becomes the album everyone wishes they'd written: its sounds, its emotional and spiritual charge at once, its ability to portray states of mind and physical landscapes with the same intensity. And Vernon will take on, with a certain satisfaction, the role of a new "oracle"…

A gradual metamorphosis: from singer-songwriters' "éminence grise" to iridescent pop star

Hailed, thanks to the masterpiece For Emma, Forever Ago, as the flagship artist of that folk revival which swept through late-decade indie rock with its spare acoustic ballads, woodland imagery and beards, the Bon Iver of 2009 is already a songwriter eager to look beyond, intent on cross-breeding his winning debut formula with new solutions. Aware of his own talent and fascinated by the multitude of shades a recording studio can lend to his songwriting, the man named Justin Vernon thus prepares to face a two-year transitional period (a thaw?) amply documented by releases that, while serving as precious testimonies of a new musical quest, often reveal peaks of inspiration jaw-dropping enough to leave you stunned.

That's the case with the title track that opens the Blood Bank EP, inevitably a child of "For Emma", but also of a new desire to foreground a melodic gift capable of blossoming without losing itself even when laid over more immediate structures. Still bare-boned in its voice-and-guitar arrangements, Bon Iver here allows himself a vocal line that would make Chris Martin of "Parachutes" blush, and cracks open his shell as a tormented folksinger over a brief ambient coda that seems to slowly melt the snow evoked by the lyrics and the cover art. "Blood Bank is different from all the other Bon Iver tracks," its author comments. "It came about by chance, I was watching an episode of Northern Exposure about blood donation and I found out that Alaskan Native people can determine a person's identity by the colour of their blood. The idea fascinated me and right after that I wrote 'Blood Bank', but maybe it's more accurate to say it wrote itself."

The rest of the EP proceeds without a hitch, but without any sparks either, with "Beach Baby" fittingly bidding farewell to the acoustic balladeer of 2008 with a pedal-steel embrace courtesy of Gram Parsons, while "Babys" skilfully plays between a wintry stillness sketched out by obsessive piano chimes and an ethereal falsetto calling for summer to arrive. The closing "Woods", on the other hand, comes across as little more than a curious stylistic exercise, built solely on Beach Boys-style vocal interplay and vocoder experiments that showcase our man more as a skilled craftsman than as an inspired composer.

Almost at the same time as the release of Blood Bank, Bon Iver's name resurfaces among the elite roster of artists chosen to contribute, with no fewer than thirty-one unreleased tracks, to the charity compilation "Dark Was The Night", put out by 4AD and curated by the Dessner brothers. The Wisconsin songwriter's two contributions are, specifically, a collaboration with Aaron Dessner titled "Big Red Machine" (admittedly a forgettable one) and a surprising little gem composed by Bon Iver alone, "Brackett, WI".

This is where the arid acoustic landscapes that once were Vernon's trademark definitively begin to shift, naturally absorbing sacred-sounding carpets of keyboards, suspensions bordering on ambient, and swampy guitar-and-bass vamps that, for all their obsessiveness, always manage to restore order even when a track seems on the verge of exploding.

It's clear, in any case, that what is truly making Bon Iver's artistic project so great is above all the sound of one of the decade's most recognisable voices, a falsetto endowed with an extraordinarily human fragility while at the same time able to cloak his compositions in an almost transcendental aura. The remarkable melodic power of Vernon's voice is also why his name starts cropping up alongside a seemingly endless list of artists, even from musical fields apparently far removed from his usual territory, including his friends Collections Of Colonies Of Bees (for the Volcano Choir project), The National, indie-pop's new rising star St. Vincent (with whom he duets on the ghostly ballad "Roslyn", included on the soundtrack of "Twilight"), and even the glitter-dusted pop star Kanye West.

From these experiences, it becomes clear that the Bon Iver about to release his hugely anticipated second full-length, in 2011, is by now on the verge of shedding the role of the solitary lo-fi singer-songwriter to immerse himself in a new, elusive, richly cross-pollinated formula. The album's title, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, is first and foremost an invitation to reconsider that very moniker, now clearly identifiable as a full-fledged band, if not an orchestra, given the sheer number of instruments involved.

The primordial folk of the early days certainly hasn't vanished, but it now seems destined to open out onto a gripping Babel of sounds that, amid soul-scented horns, cinematic string arrangements, radio-friendly Eighties-style keyboard beds and wistful glances toward the California of the most experimental Brian Wilson, takes hold of the boundless spaces of the American aesthetic and re-examines them through the lens of a meticulously detailed ambient-pop. And while the marriage of multicoloured arrangements and instant melodies seems to pay heartfelt tribute to the art of Peter Gabriel, the minimalism of the instrumental touches and the skill in honouring silence point straight back to the never-praised-enough Talk Talk.

The result is a plurality of voices that induces a reassuring sense of getting lost amid undefined landscapes, and which, through its many references to places both real and imagined, traces an itinerary whose geographic coordinates turn into states of consciousness. "Some way baby, it's part of me, apart from me," runs the opening line of the hypnotic "Holocene", as if to underline the presence/absence of spaces that populate the world of memory, which the music of Bon Iver, Bon Iver tries to bring back to life through a collection of evanescent snapshots.

"Michicant" is perhaps the most precious of all, cradling childhood memories over an equally memorable vocal melody, but they're certainly matched by a sumptuous post-modern country-song for romantic souls called "Towers", and by the first single "Calgary", masterfully suspended between a synth-pop exoskeleton and the heart of a wide-open-spaces folksinger that has never stopped beating.

Unfortunately, though, this last track turns out to be the only real peak in a second half of the album where compositional effort gives way to mere formal flourish: "Hinnon, TX" and "Wash", while blending well into the whole, flow by as diligently arranged as they are impalpable in their writing, while the closing "Beth/Rest", awash in auto-tune and fragments of guitar solos, tries to add more fuel to the fire, but ultimately leaves you more disoriented than satisfied.

Still, while it's true that by the end of a listen to Bon Iver, Bon Iver there remains a sense of unresolvedness over the masterpiece it could have been and unfortunately isn't, it would be ungracious not to highlight its merits: with this album, Justin Vernon not only opened up a new, seductive path in his musical journey, but also gave life to an extraordinarily distinctive formula, elegant and accessible at once, rewarded with excellent sales figures and ever-growing popularity.

An unexpected crowning moment of this run of success will be a double win at the 2012 Grammys: "Best Alternative Music Album" and even "Best New (?) Artist" — perhaps not the ultimate aspiration for an artist of "sound principles" like our man, but certainly a clear sign that the name Bon Iver is gaining considerable traction in the music business. "I'm following a path, and it's not yet fully defined, but it's taking me somewhere", Vernon recently reflected with striking clarity.

If we look at Justin Vernon's output as a life cycle, we can clearly see how the winter of the soul has gradually settled into postmodernity: it has soaked up and retained many traces of the influences encountered along the way, accepting the risk of compromising the purity that defined it at birth; nevertheless, the Wisconsin artist's "foreign" mode of expression has managed to blend into the chaotic, liquefied reality of our time without losing its singularity, without which it would be unrecognizable to us today.

22, A Million thus arrives, five years after its predecessor, as both the sublimation and the exasperation of a desire to depict an aleatory state of identity and existence. As for the sonic landscape, it picks up from the parting notes of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, namely that "Beth/Rest" in which his artistic territory already appeared shadowed by the temptations of cumbersome friendships. And it returns, more broadly, to the idea of a multicolored sound that devours multiple universes of American pop's past and present, only to render them back as a complex geography of the soul.

But while the 2011 album knew how to smooth its own heterogeneity into reassuring spaces, warmed by crystalline, soft melodies even in its most disruptive moments, the narrating voice of 22, A Million wanders lost through a Waste Land, whose expressive signature lies not so much in the songwriting as in the act of juxtaposing sonic debris. Rhythmic patterns, piano chords, countermelodies and sax lines follow one another in fragments, as if regurgitated in a digitized language that corrupts everything, from the deliberately "glitched" production to the indecipherable alphanumeric codes of the tracklist.

Of course, once the quasi-avant-garde mask is dropped, the substance of these songs turns out to be rather far removed from that of the two previous records. What you get, more than anything, is the sense of a lucid phenomenology of fashionable avant-pop solutions, presented with flawless craft, giving the illusion of shuffling the deck, so much so that attention tends to drift away from the true nature of these tracks, blown apart before they could even fully take shape.

As a result, 22, A Million works more as a game of packaging, as a mirror of a musical present that seems to exhaust itself in the cold X-ray of its own components. Each instrument identifies with the moment it enters, surprising simply by being there, but the effort to turn it into a vehicle for memorable melodies doesn't seem to have been a major concern for the Eau Claire songwriter. The path laid out by the 2016 Bon Iver therefore ends up excessively balanced between an admirable expression of the zeitgeist and the suspicion that stripping these tracks down to their compositional zero point might leave the listener holding little more than lesser cousins of the tracks on Bon Iver, Bon Iver ("666 ʇ", "8 (circle)"), if not an outright handful of nothing ("10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠").

Granted that Justin Vernon's vocal and compositional personality is more than enough to keep him from being overshadowed in his role as a most distinguished craftsman of contemporary pop, there remains a strong suspicion that, for this album, its impact on the present moment has more to do with social-media sensationalism, while the clear absence of a "Re: Stacks", a "Skinny Love" or a "Calgary" could cause this work to dissolve at the slightest change in the wind.

After stirring the most primal synapses by collaborating with Gayngs, Volcano Choir, Kanye West, St. Vincent and so on, Vernon dove into the "Big Red Machine" project with the complicity of some members of The National, putting together another piece of modern pop abstraction.

Despite this ongoing artistic synergy with other musical forms, with the Bon Iver project he has kept a steady course, drawing an ever-growing number of friends and musicians into his compositional machinery. I, I (2019) stays faithful to the interweaving of electronics and soul from the previous album, attempting to capitalize on its best ideas with a slightly more defined pop flow. The result is once again a two-faced record, split between moments of rare beauty in writing and arrangement and a few careless notes, dressed in ambitious sounds that, in the end, thoroughly capture the emptiness of our current times.

The surreal pop of "iMi", besides benefiting from the presence of James Blake, also flaunts the project's boldest sounds. A creative epiphany that renews itself with even greater vigor in the brilliant pop inspiration of "Hey, Ma", with Vernon seizing all of the song's lyrical and instrumental power. The solemnity of the previous album has been reunited with the melodic strength of his early work: tracks like "Faith" and "Naeem" merge the ancient, the modern and the contemporary, renewing the possibilities for pop music's evolution as a universal language — the very same doctrine that leads the artist to enlist a pop icon like Bruce Hornsby on "U (Man Like)".

Having laid bare the basic elements of American pop music (folk, soul and electronics), the American musician breaks them down and reassembles them with a wisdom that is akin both to the leanings of experimental music ("Yi", "We") and to the perfectionism of Steely Dan, scattering vocal/instrumental cacophonies ("Holyfields") and austere minimalism ("Jelmore") throughout an allegorical representation of a reality where opposites don't necessarily have to clash, with Vernon's voice serving as the expressive glue.

The bare, acoustic reminiscences of "Marion", the playful electro-soul geometries fleshed out by the horns on "Salem", the seeming triviality of "Sh'Diah" and the neoclassical references in the enchanting closer "RABi" are all part of a thrilling blend of conceptual art and popular music, one that fully realizes Vernon's creative effort to evolve his original solo input into a collective musical project (the very moniker Bon Iver today corresponds to a five-piece band), crowning I, I as his most complete album.

Lorenzo Righetto: “For Emma, Forever Ago”

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