Bon Iver

Since then, I keep trying to catch up with it. I try to get in tune with it, to feel convinced about this thing, at least a little, but that's probably actually a good thing. That way, I'm still coming to understand it, sort of. If I fully knew what was going on and understood these songs, there'd be no point playing them live anymore. They're still a mystery to me. I'm still searching for the essence of the songs. That's been the most fun part of touring, that there are still so many caves within the songs where you can go hide on different nights.

(Justin Vernon)

This is partly why writing for the third (or fourth, or fifth) time about "For Emma, Forever Ago" isn't a waste of time. On July 8, 2017, it will be ten years since the first CD was sold at the House of Rock in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I'm not afraid to say that if I'd been shipwrecked on a desert island ten years ago with only this record for company, I wouldn't have had many regrets (musically speaking, that is). How many records can you listen to for hours on end without getting tired of them? I bet there aren't many more than one.

"For Emma, Forever Ago", even before its "historical relevance", is this: a desert-island record. There are plenty of records in the history of music, many even more beautiful and important than this one, but few are desert-island material. Every song, with its refractions, its echoes, its sonic undulations, captures like nothing before it the essential core from which the myth of the cave is born: mystery as a fundamental feature of human experience.

All the mythology surrounding the record, so prosaic and human (and also largely the product of misunderstandings and, indeed, mystifications), amplifies the transfiguration present in its songs: to sum up, let's say that Justin Vernon's life had, up until this release, been a string of artistic failures and false starts, months spent working the grill at a small-town diner and couch-surfing at friends' and acquaintances' places, until a bout of pneumonia forced him to quit the job (which he hated anyway, of course). Then came the winter spent in his father's cabin in Wisconsin, after leaving his girlfriend and band behind.

The perfect anticlimax for an Oscar-worthy screenplay (and who knows, maybe this easy prediction will come true), because in that cabin Justin doesn't end up putting a bullet through his own head, but instead, after a few weeks of booze and TV, goes back to writing and playing music (as well as chopping wood and hunting). The first batch of songs that came out of it probably still wasn't the right one, because his laptop suddenly stops working, wiping out all that early material (another scene straight out of this true story: Vernon burying the laptop in the snow). This is where "For Emma, Forever Ago" begins.

The conditions under which the album was made are anything but secondary: Vernon believed he was recording a batch of demos that might never even see the light of day. Only later did a friend from Rosebuds, with whom he was on tour, tell him: "This is your record." And indeed, the songs on it have nothing unfinished about them: they possess the silence of a hibernated life, both literally (one of the most wintry records in history) and figuratively, in the existential "position" they represent. A half-battered acoustic guitar, a drum kit: that's more or less the entire instrumental credit list of the album. The tingling, background-hum orchestration of the arrangements was suggested to him by one of his favorite cult bands, Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, and it also flirts a little with the masters of compositional minimalism (the hallucinated boy-scout march of "Team"), points of reference dating back to his college years. The spirit of the record is captured by the central chord running through many of the songs, C major, with its sly, purring-cat sound, but also a chord that is fragilely major, the chord of a muffled hope.

Vernon worked feverishly, twelve to fourteen hours a day straight, losing track of time and of himself, pushing past the "safe" ground of self-awareness to the point of recording as many as eight vocal tracks for a single song, letting some tracks end in a sonic free-for-all ("The Wolves (Act I & II)"), or, more simply, cutting them off abruptly ("Creature Fear"). A bit like a kid fumbling around for the first time in his bedroom, in the artistically positive sense of the phrase (which is indeed how he himself remembers those months, and it's also how the use of AutoTune should be read, coming from someone who is hardly a natural-born singer). If anything, it's an expressive primitivism rooted in what he'd absorbed during his time in DeYarmond Edison, in Appalachian music, in spirituals (evident in the "protest" spirit of "Skinny Love," and in the stark essentialism of the guitar lines, as if designed to be replicated by others). Even the record's somewhat improvised but unmistakable falsetto betrays the Justin Vernon of that period in full: half tinkering kid, half seasoned musician trying out new paths to ward off the specter of failure — a natural register you reach for when you want to experiment with melodies without embarrassingly shouting into the silence.

Many people (or at least those who stopped at the title) have always pegged "For Emma, Forever Ago" as the break-up record par excellence: "young man gets dumped by his girlfriend and shuts himself away in a cabin to cry it out: listen to this record," as some magazine headline might scream. It is, instead, probably "the" record of introspection: every track, every note sounds like something that only makes sense in relation to oneself, and much less so in relation to others (except in its more confessional moments, as in "Re: Stacks"). Apart from the most obvious case, "Flume" (the only song that already existed before those months), which is scattered with signs of self-psychoanalysis and seems written on the walls of the house (a practice Vernon has claimed, which will surely turn up in his biopic), this quality is subtler, manifesting itself in the record's aesthetic rather than in its surface-level expression.

It lies in its meditative pauses, in its "electronic" cadences ("Lump Sum," "Blindsided"), but also in its sly fullness ("For Emma"), and above all in a construction that seems to simulate brain activity itself, made up of conscious and unconscious activity, of obsessive thoughts and distractions: a series of moods reflecting an inner dialogue, or, more vividly, the flickering on and off of areas of the brain, of synapses — so much so that it sounds like a sound coming from within oneself, purely imagined. This is how even the spikes of self-pity that flare up here and there ("Blindsided") take on depth and meaning.

"For Emma, Forever Ago," thanks above all to its run of great songs, became the symbolic record of the rebirth of singer-songwriter music, and the Walden-esque story of its conception (together with the reference to the poetic small-town charm of the Alaskan town that gives the project its name) resonated perfectly with the somewhat idealistic "return to nature" of the contemporary youth zeitgeist. Many would go on to try to remake that record, borrowing its style, wholly or in part: the first to want to distance himself from it would, naturally, be Vernon himself, the first to be aware of its unrepeatability — not only because of the existential conditions under which it was made, but above all because of that element of chance, or fate, that turned nine demos into one of the defining records of its time.

A year later, in 2008, "For Emma, Forever Ago" was officially released by Jagjaguwar, and alongside "Fleet Foxes" it came to be seen as the founding record of the folk revival — even though, in substance, it had nothing to do with it. And indeed Vernon would go on to become something else entirely, the true deus ex machina of the sound that "matters," at least on American soil.

No other record, however hard it tries, will ever be able to reproduce the sound of that guitar, at one point repaired in exchange for game meat, and any attempt to recreate that solipsistic chorus of falsetto and natural voices counterpointing one another can only ever sound fake. That's why it's almost as if a piece of the music world came to an end that July, ten years ago: "For Emma, Forever Ago" is one of those records that, rather than opening up an era, killed it in its cradle.

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01/07/2017