His rounding up of the more theological themes of the latter part of the album was even more simply spelt out. For just over 12 minutes at the end of the album a slide guitar and doleful trumpet slowly waltz over a buzzing background tone. As a final comment on his ideas of an earthly, humanist spirituality, Vernon titled this elegant piece simply ‘We Will Never Die’.
In all, Self Record was a huge artistic leap for Vernon, both in his sonic explorations in search of a new sound that gelled with his immersive folk and country roots to create something uniquely his, and in his artful tackling of grand themes and the development of cryptic images, open to the listener’s interpretation but always underpinned with a firm philosophical reasoning. It was the sound of a talent blooming, and one soon to outgrow the very town that had so inspired it.
In Eau Claire, there’s only so damn big you can get. Like Dinner With Greg before them, DeYarmond Edison had reached the town’s limits, and there wasn’t any stretching them. Off the local buzz around their debut album they were regularly ramming the clubs in town, but they’d never garner enough local support to make the leap to the 3,500 capacity Zorn Arena on campus, and no major label A&Rs were trawling the clubs of Eau Claire looking for the next world-beating rock band. They’d outgrown Eau Claire, yet no-one beyond its city limits knew who the hell they were.
Come the March thaw of 2005, as they looked out on another enthused, packed and sweaty local crowd full of the same faces that already owned their record, DeYarmond Edison felt utterly empty. They were going nowhere*, reaching no new people, stuck in their small-town rut and several of their closest friends from college were leaving town, chasing their own dreams around the country. What’s more, Vernon was becoming frustrated at the limits of his own songwriting. Over the past two years he, like many of Eau Claire’s music buffs, had grown more and more obsessed with It’s All Aquatic, the 2003 debut album from Amateur Love, the ex-Dinner With Greg band with whom DeYarmond Edison had shared houses and bandmates for several years. Listening to it spurred on, thrilled and niggled Justin.
“They were really my favourite band,” he told 89.3 The Current. “Which was distracting when I was trying to write songs with the other guys in the band, because Josh, the songwriter in Amateur Love, was better than me.”12
One weekend, in a break from recording their second album, they split town – Phil and his girlfriend of eight months, Heather Williams, headed to Nashville for a 48-hour visit to catch three gigs by Americana bluegrass string band Old Crow Medicine Show at a venue called Exit/In. Brad and Justin, meanwhile, struck out for Minneapolis, where they ended up hanging backstage with Wilco. Both pairs saw the same light at the same time. There was a huge country out there, a widescreen world, and it wasn’t going to come to them. They’d need to go out and shake it by the shoulders until it knew their name.
Most bands would hire a van, load up on beers and hit the road, playing tiny clubs across the country over and over again until their local fanbase was replicated nationwide. DeYarmond Edison, reconvening after their eye-opening weekends away, decided on a different approach. They’d conquered Eau Claire by focusing intently on one town, why not just do the same in a bigger city?
They considered their options. Chicago? Too close, too intimidating, too passé. California? Too far away. New York? Too full-on. Minneapolis? Too chilly, even for a bunch of Eau Claire kids. Nashville? Austin? Too scene-centric, the sort of places a new band arriving in town would just get buried in the drifts and pile-ups of hopeful young bands clogging the club circuit.
They focussed in on either Colorado or North or South Carolina. Colorado was known for its snow which, although smacking of home, was something they fancied a change from. But North Carolina piqued Justin’s interest. The area had been called home by some of his greatest jazz heroes, including Nina Simone, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. Justin had written a high school report on the basketball history of the area and was intrigued by the Appalachian musical heritage of the mountains of North Carolina too, the bluegrass and folk that had taken on a particularly localised twang. They began to focus their search for a new base around the Research Triangle area, the corners of which were in Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh. The area appeared to be developing a vibrant new scene, with labels springing up and a strong musical community thriving and, most importantly of all, the cities and their climates were 1,100 miles away and complete new worlds to the entire DeYarmond crew.
“We basically picked it because we wanted to have an adventure and move someplace that was different,” says Phil. “In our mind, the difference was moving to somewhere that was warm and with mountains and ocean, which we didn’t grow up with.”13
“We thought they were kind of stuck not getting anywhere when they were here,” says Justine.14
“We just wanted an adventure,” Justin adds. “We had been in Eau Claire, what we called ‘incubating’ for too long. We were like chicks under the light for years and years.”15
That March, in the decrepit van that Keil’s dad had purchased in order to ferry around a high school golf team, a five-strong scouting team of Justin, Brad, Phil, Heather and Keil hit the road to the Triangle. The dusty road wasn’t so kind to them; by the time they’d reached the one room they were all sharing in the Garner Holiday Inn Heather had fallen out with both Justin and Brad, in turn, for practically the length of Interstate 94, leaving Phil somewhat stunned, and the van’s brakes had damn near given way. They finally went the very next day, causing the group to embark on a dangerous, brakeless drive 15 miles to Cary, where they could rent a Crown Victoria to replace it.
“The only thing that worked was the emergency brake,” said Keil, “and it was one of those foot ones. So if you started it, you had to kick it really hard to get it back out.”16
Having finally found working wheels, they set about a five-day exploration of their potential new hometowns. They quickly ruled out Durham as a possible HQ, the rundown shop fronts and caved-in windows of the downtown area giving the impression of a town drifting towards dereliction. At the other end of the scale, upmarket Chapel Hill was just too pleasant and edge-free, reminding them of the Eau Claire they were there to escape. But when they hit Raleigh, something about the place – the fact that it was a hub of roaming musical outcasts from Iowa, Philadelphia, Michigan and Wisconsin – felt like home.
“Everything seemed really even about Raleigh,” Phil said, “and it wasn’t like a flash-in-the-pan thing. There was a lot under the surface. Raleigh seemed like it would unfold itself very gradually and steadily to us.”17
Immediately, the crew began house-hunting. Since eight of them were due to move down – the four band members plus Keil and several girlfriends – they needed somewhere large, at least four bedrooms, and the trip itself yielded no success, all of their enquiries coming to nothing. But back in Eau Claire they found the perfect place on Craig’s List, a massive four-bedroom 1,800-square-foot white house at 2209 Everett Avenue, directly opposite Raleigh’s first ever mall, Cameron Village. Lease signed, the move was set for July, shortly after the release of the second album they were currently recording.
The move would inevitably cause ructions within the line-up. Chris Porterfield decided to stay put in Eau Claire, for love.* “I was just about ready to graduate,” he says, “and I was dating a girl that I eventually married, and actually she was a Milwaukee girl, and that’s how I ended up [there]. So I had stuff going on that I wasn’t ready to uproot, and they were looking for a change of scenery … The actual decision of it wasn’t difficult. Like I never really considered for a second going down there. Bands, especially at that age like in college, band relationships really are like dating a bunch of people at the same time. So there’s a lot of emotions and all that stuff tied up, and there was definitely some weird feelings for a while as that particular chapter sort of got wrapped up.”18
And if the all-new DeYarmond Edison were really going to feel like a gang starting their career afresh, they
needed their old drummer back.
Standing outside a yoga studio in Manhattan waiting for his girlfriend, Carson Efird, to finish her class, Joe’s cellphone rang. It was Brad. “I knew when they proposed the idea of me moving to Raleigh and me joining them, it was something I couldn’t pass up,” he remembers. “It was exactly something I wanted to be doing because I trusted these guys to be dedicated and really work hard at it and not just get caught up in a scene thing.”19 Within weeks, Joe was back in Eau Claire adding drums to four tracks on the new album and DeYarmond Edison felt like a band on the verge of a bold new beginning. And with a bold new album to match.
A lull of meditative prayer in a Tibetan mountain temple. A ceremony of smoke and bells beneath a Mayan ruin. The gathering of tribesmen on an Antipodean plain. Whichever ancient soundscape it brought to mind, there was something primal and elemental to the drone and tinkles of the instrumental intro piece ‘Lift’, opening DeYarmond Edison’s second album, Silent Signs, with a sound drawn from Tibetan singing bowls and resonators. And there was something antique and classical too about the warm harmonic buzz of acoustic guitar, the blare of the fuzz-treated harmonica and banjo, the serrated shivers of the slide guitar that made up the album’s taut and downbeat title track that followed.
Just as Brad and Justin’s interest in esoteric electronics, world music and drones had expanded DeYarmond’s sonic palate to rival the emerging alt.country of Iron & Wine and Band Of Horses, and Joe’s free-form training was adding fascinating new percussive edges such as the 20 seconds of delicate cymbal and percussion work that ended the title track, the song saw Justin’s lyrics reach a fresh realm of sophistication. Surrealist and impressionist images began to take over his work; he sang of a girl’s “star-studded birthday suit” and how “the rivets in my past continue moving me”, using abstract objects and images to illuminate the lyric’s mood and meaning. Here the hints of nudity and sensuality – the “cold November hands” warmed “under your thighs” and the suggestiveness of the line “that’s me you hear roaring in your river/Like how you hold me deep inside when currents quiver” – have led commenters to suggest the song is about sex and its deep emotional connection, or a sweet memory of it. Vernon’s intimate delivery fits the reading, although it’s not without a sense of lost romance and the “rivets” of relationships faded “like the bellows in bag pipes still blowing melody”. His grasp on grammar and syntax was simultaneously slipping, no doubt purposely, as he began to prefer the flow and cadence of words in a line like “the pain is just a comfort gone from missing” to making a plainer sense with his lyrics. His words were now often more about the impressions they left, the echoes they made, the rhythms they inhabited than their strict definitions. “Lyrically, I think ‘Silent Signs’ was more advanced than anything DeYarmond ever did,” he’d later claim.20
When the subject matter required it, however, Vernon was still prepared to tackle a topic head on. The adorable country shuffle of ‘Heroin(e)’ was Vernon’s first reference to hard drugs in song, likening the rush of heroin to the rush of adoration and esteem but decrying the fact that he provided such a rush to no-one. Vernon has never spoken about taking drugs himself*, but the protagonist of the song certainly felt a need for and addiction to chemical fulfilment – “won’t you jam that needle, holder of my fears … won’t you put something in me, or else I might be sick” – although Vernon was singing as much of emotional sustenance as he was of narcotics. If Justin was venting his need to give anything up in the song, it was most likely Eau Claire, hinting at the band’s move to Raleigh in the line “we all have habitats to kick”. And if the song – a country rock standard – pointed his future direction in any way, it was in one of the first appearances of Justin’s falsetto vocals in the chorus, a result of his bandmates pushing him to change his singing style. “I was being encouraged by the guys (in the band) to challenge that voice,” Justin remembers, “because … in a way I was cradled so much by this Eau Claire scene and by the supporters that I just wanted to keep singing that to them and singing what they wanted to hear. But I wasn’t really there.”21
In an interview with internet music site The A.V. Club, Vernon expanded on his thoughts on his vocal technique. “For the most part, I’ve been influenced by black singers and singers I couldn’t sound like,” he said. “Whenever I tried to do a dark note or a bent note, I would just sound like Hootie And The Blowfish. I was really insecure about it, so I just ended up writing rock’n’roll songs where I didn’t have to do that. But I feel so much more comfortable being able to access painful melodies. I feel freer singing the high stuff.”22
His sense of resigned desolation returned for ‘Love Long Gone’, a suicidal tread of melancholy banjo and close harmonies from the entire band that had Justin repeating verses of lines that sounded plucked straight from a final note to a family: “tell my love that I’m gone … sorrow waiting a gun … tell my father I’m proud … I hope to leave half as much”. The tone was one of an alt.country Nirvana, the lowest Vernon had yet gone, unusually bereft of the hope that had even lit up the darkest corners of ‘Feels Like Home’. The sublime, loping country languor of ‘First Impression’ restored a certain normality, with Justin finding security “in the arms of kin” and a “new friend” of whom he claims “I’ve been feeling your hold for a week or so … there’s a train in my heart/That doesn’t seem to start/Unless you’re lying next to me”. Lovers and friends were carrying him through again, the deep despondency was gradually lifting. And ‘First Impression’, arguably Vernon’s most accomplished recording to that point, was awash with glimmering guitar mists, baritone croaks and unbridled nobility.
Suffering with honour; it was fast becoming Vernon’s trademark lyrical standpoint as he worked his post-college issues towards the fifth phase – acceptance – and it provided the marrow of Silent Signs’ sixth track, ‘Bones’, too, an elegy to his still having a long way to go to get there. Over a folkish chug reminiscent of R.E.M.’s more stirring numbers or mid-tempo Springsteen the impressionist imagery returned, a long-dead relationship represented by a collection of bones Vernon couldn’t throw away but kept “in a trunk at the foot of my bed … always open to show me that they’re still dead”. If ‘First Impressions’ spoke of the solace of a fresh romance, ‘Bones’ concerned the lasting ache of an abandoned one, as though time’s natural healing was failing him: “every day it’s harder still/I’m flooded and unfilled … how I long to be alone/How long will I carry these bones”. Describing the lengthy gestation of his sorrow in terms of a sunken ship finally rising from the depths and as a “bruise … coming to the surface … it’s been hidden so long” and frankly exposing it with the exclamation “this world without you is fucked”, Vernon brought his anguish to a rousing climax with the chanted harmonies of the band crooning “I’m so far from not caring”. A record of a pivotal stage of Justin’s emotional development towards coming to terms with the romantic setbacks in his early life, ‘Bones’ was a bittersweet venting of heartaches he still kept suppressed, but would ease all the easier for such open acknowledgements.
The sullen mood continued into ‘Heart For Hire’, a maudlin banjo ballad that cast Justin as a hardened emotional shell of a man warning a potential new partner about his damaged heart. “You should know that it’s cracked like thirsty ground,” he croaked, “you should know that I’ve hung it all around”. Leaving her before she can leave him, he hinted again at suicidal tendencies (“the way I held that kitchen knife/And the way I was fallin’ to the ground/You found out when you heard that ugly sound”) and closed with the eternal dilemma of the perpetually forlorn, “Have I loved enough?/Have I loved too much?” ‘Silent Signs’ was fast turning into a portrait of Justin as a young man resigned to a life of weary, relentless melancholia.
Thankfully, ‘Dead Anchor’ raised the pace and lifted the mood. “I’m on the rebound … youth is refreshing … I’ve learnt my lessons … never again will I be corrupted,” Justin declared as
DeYarmond Edison let loose a summery spring-step sort of tune full of breezy organ and sunny xylophone. At first it was a sunburst of recovery and rediscovery yet, as the lyric progressed, there were signs that Vernon’s upbeat new attitude might be skin-deep. “Spray on a coating/Then I watch it age/It crumbles relentless,” he sang before admitting to being “attacked” by a girl who was “on his back” and talking of feeling “paralysed and fake”. Still, the pivotal line was a note of positivity, “I’m getting free, see”, a rare and much needed glint of sunlight through ‘Silent Signs” deepening gloom. Justin, however, would come to think poorly of the number. “I would definitely take “Dead Anchor” off of this because I don’t think it’s a very good song,”23 he said later, and also said of it, “Man, have you heard ‘Dead Anchor’? I hate that song! No, I don’t hate any of those songs, but there isn’t a lineage that I feel connected to there.”24
With its lightly tripping, lo-fi pastoral folk rhythm, understated banjo, synth chimes and muttered, indistinct vocals, ‘Ragstock’ was the most modernist of all of the tracks on Silent Signs, predating the snow-flurry spectre-songs of Fleet Foxes by three years. ‘Ragstock’ was more cabin fireplace than icy waste, but held the same haunting quality, largely down to Justin’s whispered, half-heard lyrics of violence, demons being canonised and tongue-tied tapeworms, evading meaning and sung with a warmth belying their sinister nature. It may well be a drug song, since the only truly audible lines are the opening ones – “suddenly I’m worried/Times have passed to care/Alone and high/Mind gone bare”, after which the song descends into intentional incoherence. But if ‘Ragstock’ emerged from the haze of a high, it was a blissed-out trip, and one that Justin remembered fondly. “‘Ragstock’, to me, is the biggest bridge into Bon Iver-land because of the way it was recorded – sort of direct and quiet.”25
Bon Iver Page 8