“Watching those two is fascinating because there is such tension, but it’s always been super-productive,” said Brad at the time. “Joey is such a thinker, and Justin is such a reactor. They’ve always done this amazing job of challenging one another. I’ve never seen two people push themselves closer to the edge of letting go and quitting because of each other – and then grabbing on and completely letting go toward each other.”10
Anyone attending all four nights of the DeYarmond residency would’ve been forgiven for thinking they’d seen four entirely different bands. When DeYarmond self-released a 90-minute 2CD album compiling 16 tracks performed at their Bickett Gallery shows called The Bickett Residency, it revealed a band truly pushing their limits and boundaries to breaking point. CD1 opened with six tracks from Phil’s night including the entire band hollering out the raucous, intoxicated blues of ‘I Been Drinking’, and throwing themselves into antique travelling folk ballads like ‘Going To Germany’, Appalachian murder stories such as ‘The Banks Of The Ohio’ and ‘The Longest Train’ (about the slaughter of a girl on a train, whose “head was found at the driver’s wheel and her body I never did find”) and the Forties blues classic ‘Step It Up And Go’ all performed on harmonicas, washboards, banjos and other such mountain music paraphernalia, often boasting authentic multi-part harmonies, whoops and yodels. In among all the thigh-slapping references to rosy-cheeked girls, foaming beers, dark drownings in Ohio rivers, lonesome émigrés and southbound trains, some of DeYarmond Edison’s regular themes reared their heads: for all that ‘I Been Drinking’ was about being fleeced by no-good cocaine-dealing women, it was in essence about being stripped of all dignity and identity after a ruined relationship, while the idealistic visions of the Promised Land described in ‘No Depression In Heaven’* were, considering Vernon’s previous lyrics on the subject, being beautifully crooned with every tongue in every cheek.
The four tracks from Joe’s night, making up the rest of CD1, consisted of structure-free explorations of cymbal clatter, drumskin wave-rolls and extended silences that invoked a midnight sea swell (‘Sea Legs’), irregular bursts of formless folk noise, looping arpeggios and ramshackle grandiosity that repeatedly fell apart and reformed in search of a final coherent melody (‘Abel + Cain’), four-minute jazz meanderings (‘Visual Performance Str.’) and tribal psychedelic mania (‘Afro Blue’). CD2 was dominated by Brad’s 14-minute avant garde synth piece ‘Four Keyboard Phase In A’, played on four separate keyboards, before Justin’s segment dedicated to often a capella spirituals including a faithful rendition of Ada R Habershon’s ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ and a take on ‘Bones’. The crowning moment though, was Justin’s chilling version of the blues standard ‘A Satisfied Mind’ accompanied only by subdued electric guitar. Amid a release considered “too jam band” by some commentators and thrillingly challenging by others, the song stood out as a bold and shiver-inducing twist on DeYarmond’s rootsy alt.folk formula, and in the annals of modern alternative history it will go down in legend as the first recording of Vernon in falsetto.
The Bickett Residency album, on the other hand, would go down in infamy as the sound of DeYarmond being crushed beneath the weight of their own imaginations. If DeYarmond’s Raleigh experience to this point had been characterised by Justin and Joe ‘letting go towards each other’, the Bickett Gallery residency would send the band ricocheting away from one another. “The Bickett residency, ironically, was the most I’ve ever learned about music and simultaneously the reason we started to break apart,” Justin told Currin some years later. “We realised there were so many things we’d never explored as musicians. I had this intense friendship with all these guys, and it was like we had gotten divorced. We made all these life commitments to each other. I couldn’t imagine going through something deeper.”11
“The biggest change [in my musical education] was in North Carolina when my band DeYarmond Edison did a residency at this art gallery,” Vernon would later tell Uncut magazine. “We did four months. Each month was curated by a different member. We each tried different things – we had 20 minute keyboard phase pieces à la Eno, or we had nights where we played only Appalachian songs. Sometimes we did gospel stuff, sometimes freak-out punk. My residency was the human voice, so we did old slave spirituals. It was a weird concept for us to attempt, but you learn a lot about aches and pains and what pushing a voice can do. It was then that our band realised we needed to dissipate, but also during that time I started to sing in falsetto, doing Mahalia Jackson songs. That was when I started making demos.”12
The demos he began to make in early 2006 would become the last solo album he’d record under his own name*, and would lead him into his scintillating heart of darkness …
“I was deep heavy into about a five-year process of going in the tank. I wasn’t that happy. I was in Eau Claire, my home, and then I was in Raleigh. I was hoping the move to Raleigh would move things in my internal life around, but it stayed the same, and I stayed in the tank.”
–Justin Vernon, Laundro-Matinee website, October 16, 2008
Justin Vernon never settled well into Raleigh. When the lease on the Everett Avenue house was up in May 2006 the rest of the band were happy to move into various apartments around town and continue exploring and enjoying their new North Carolina home, but unlike his bandmates Justin had become deeply homesick and ached for the wilderness.
“It was a tough transition for me, and it wasn’t for them,” he said. “I can look back now and see that for the first time [DeYarmond Edison] were growing apart. But we’d known such happiness together, I was frozen by a fear of never having that again.”13
Justin just wasn’t made for the big city. “I couldn’t escape and be in the woods in 10 minutes if I needed to. I like that in Eau Claire, I can walk to a bar or a coffee shop and there’s city-ish things, but I can also drive and in eight minutes be at my parents’ land outside of town.”14
Plus, he hated his job working the grill at a local restaurant called The Rockford. “I was working in a kitchen. It really truly did suck the soul out of me … I was a grill person and it angered me. Every moment I was in there I felt I was defacing my destiny or something. Like I was disrupting the time-space continuum by being in that kitchen because I was so out of place. I wasn’t doing anything with my hands that I wanted to be doing. I would have anxiety so bad about it.”15 Justin despised the job so much he gradually filtered it out of his life – by the end of the year his initial 40 hours of work a week had dwindled to just eight, an income on which he struggled to survive.
Back home in Eau Claire his mother had little inkling of Justin’s feelings. “We’re a close-knit family so I was sad but I was also happy for him [to be moving away],” Justine said. “And in all honesty, I was not aware of all the difficulties. I knew things weren’t going exactly how he wanted things to go. It’s not like he called me crying every night to mom.”16
Indeed, from the outside Justin’s life in Raleigh appeared to be heading in the right direction. He had found a girlfriend there in the shape of Christy Smith, singer and songwriter with local Raleigh band Nola and, when the time came to leave the Everett Avenue house in May, he moved into her duplex apartment in a wooded lot on Fairall Drive, just off Wade Avenue. They shared an untidy back bedroom with a broken window, but it was home, and there was an uneasy sort of love there.
And he had a new solo album to show off too, the first results of his latest demo sessions.* He called it Hazeltons, adorned it with a stark sleeve picture of himself, hooded, at night, and once again printed up 100 CD-Rs to sell at shows, knowing all the while that it was another record he’d made primarily for himself.
Those that did splash out on Hazeltons† discovered a huge leap forward in Justin’s artistry. Largely gone was his rootsy country baritone that aligned him with Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen and Hootie & The Blowfish. Instead, over avant folk jaunts brimming with far more vitality, inventiveness and life than had inhabited his previ
ous solo albums and DeYarmond recordings, he favoured either his new-found falsetto or a mid-range choral effect of his own multi-tracked voice, as though he was finding support for his new singing style from a gaggle of clones.
The album – at seven tracks and half an hour little more than an EP –launched itself brightly. Hazeltons was Justin’s evolution into the fresh new folk sounds emerging in the mid-00s, a lustrous, rich acoustic lilt redolent of Sufjan Stevens whose Seven Swans and Michigan albums had been pioneering a new pastoral folk sound throughout the decade and whose fifth album, Come On Feel The Illinoise, featuring Steve Reich and show-tune influences, home-made orchestras and marching band styles, was lauded by critics as having crystallised the alt.folk genre. Indeed, Stevens’ dedication to Americana was such that he originally planned to write an entire album each about all 50 US states. In the spirit of Justin’s Bickett Gallery night when the entire band were encouraged to sing as powerfully as they could, the multi-tracked choir of Justins on ‘Hazelton’ belted out this nebulous tale of a woman being emotionally savaged by a man (“you came, you saw, you sawed her brain/Cut out all the parts that held your stain”), before drifting into a closing section of lullaby falsetto harmonies mingling with soft opposing melody lines that, in terms of sheer sonic wonder, surpassed anything he’d achieved on record before. The lighter tone also gave the tune a more objective slant; he was beginning to step outside of emotional situations and view other people’s relationships from a distance in the same way that he had commented on the clash of religion and homosexuality in ‘Sides’. It was a minor but crucial shift – Justin’s songs were no longer so deeply personal, his lyrical world had widened.
‘Frail Sail’ saw him taking on some of Joe’s improvisational experiments, beginning the song with electronic hiss and blips, as if the file of the song was corrupted, and ending it with wild crashes and rolls of free-form drums and wiry, discordant guitar plucks, as if played on the strings between the headstock and the tuning keys. In between nestled a bright, delectable tune flooded with warm acoustic guitar and carried by Justin’s first example of a full song in falsetto on a ‘studio’ record. “It felt more internal, more realised,”17 Justin later told The Times about this new vocal style he was trying out, struggling to work out how it would fit into his work, not yet happy or comfortable with it. He was experimenting with it on his own, singing along to Kathleen Edwards tunes in high pitch while he was driving, but as yet he didn’t feel it had clicked.
As a forerunner to his next record, the one that would finally make his name, ‘Frail Sail’ was an invaluable trial run, and not just vocally. More so than any song before, the lyrics were more about the sound and rhymes of the words than the meaning. Though the opening lines made reference to his new interest in online poker and other forms of internet gambling – “filling up your winnings here for spinning … you’re killing, you’re still in” – their rhythms and rhymes were more important to the song, loping along rhyming every other word like a dense rap verse. Glimpses of meaning were dotted across the tune, suggesting a couple discovering they’re expecting a child in the asides of “I’m late now” and “I’m pregnant”, a rock band connection in the line “our little pairs of British fans are leaving” and a sense of needing to up anchor and escape the pressure of the situation – “later on you can point and laugh at all the rest of us/When you pull out like a compass weight/Frail sail”. But the images are so abstract, the words so often selected for their rhyme rather than their reason, that it’s folly to attach any firm autobiographical detail to ‘Frail Sail’.
‘Game Night’ continued the percussion apocalypse that closed ‘Frail Sail’, a 180-second assault of cymbal and snare drum heavy on the sibilance, an acoustic guitar picking out a melody akin to early Nineties cult folk mopers Red House Painters or Death Cab For Cutie. Combined with the song’s continuation from ‘Frail Sail’, its three central lines, bawled in the same slurred manner as ‘I Been Drinking’, hinted at the previous relationship reconciled by circumstance, the day saved by improved fortunes: “Your wallet on the rise, no more tears inside her eyes, lay down your head”.
Taking to a languid, misty and emotive piano and returning to his husky baritone, Vernon still managed to inject ‘Easy’ with a modernist folk edge thanks to the extraneous noises of pedals being pushed and piano stools creaking, the pregnant pauses and lengthening of bars and the beauteous funereal tread resembling Nick Cave’s ‘Into Your Arms’ or ‘The Ship Song’, creating the same sort of ethereal stateliness achieved by Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ at a fraction of the cost. A study in romantic pessimism, the six languorous lines of ‘Easy’ find Justin predicting the end of an affair and pleading to be let down easy. It was almost as if he could scent his personal storm coming.
The featherlight, R.E.M.-style ‘Liner’ lightened the mood to ‘wistful’ with its pretty pastoral pace and indistinct lyrics like Justin half-forming the closest words to the sound he found himself making. It was a meaning-masking technique he carried over to the album’s fulcrum, ‘Song For A Lover Of Long Ago’, a foreshadowing of the title of his breakthrough album and a song far more blatantly and directly about his lingering feelings for Sara Jensen* than the subsequent album that bore her name would be. Teasing dour arpeggios from his acoustic guitar, Justin seemed to chew on his words like they were drenched thick in molasses, as though the memories he was singing of were still so hard to swallow. He sang of a woman he just couldn’t forget no matter how hard he tried to bury the memory of her: “I have buried you/Every place I’ve been/You keep ending up/In my shaking hands”. The desperation and frustration of the song brought out sublime poetry, images of “the famous violinist playing in my gut” to portray the inner swell of heartache and his feelings summed up in the lines “rain you out of me/Shake the memory free/Can’t squash the molten soul/Can’t chase away the hole.”†
“She’s a person that was always in my thoughts,” he’d say of Sara Emma Jensen some years later. “Whether she knew it or not, her memory took many years to get over. I never got better and finally I just had to say ‘enough is enough’.”18
Ironically, by pouring out his pain over this lost love here, he would to some degree exorcise that particular demon, the final minute or so of birdsong seeping into a silent room so perfectly capturing the sound of loneliness and regret – the atmosphere of missing someone – that he’d never need to tackle it head on again. When he’d next come to record an album this long-lost lover would have faded into rose-tinted history, become a symbol of indefinable loss, a metaphor for all the loves that didn’t work out. His next album would be less about any particular girl in question, and more about his inability to let his memories of them go.
Hazeltons ended at a funeral. A modern a capella spiritual that eventually grew splays of ragged and raw guitar notes, percussion that sounded like a marble rolling around a tin can, monotone puffs of woodwind, xylophone tinkles and traffic noise, ‘Hanna, My Ophelia’ was amongst the bleakest tracks Justin had ever made, imagining the internment of a loved one. Since “rifles crack” at the burial it may well have been a development of the theme behind ‘Redemption 1 (An Army Man And His Self-Discovery)’ from Self Record, placing us at a military funeral, in the mindspace of the family who’d watched an uncle, son and brother go off to war. “Tears fall on my muddy feet/I quiver as the pulleys creak/As they lower you slowly into the ground” Justin wailed as his guitar made the noise of creaking pulleys and a chorus of rattles, plinks and clinks struck up a mournful kitchen-sink carnival.
But it was a bad time for Justin to be asking for whom these tiny bells tolled. They tolled for he.
Justin Vernon’s life in Raleigh died like dominos.
First to fall was his health. Working his eight-hour weeks at the Rockwell restaurant was, he thought, the reason he suddenly felt lethargic, feverish and out-of-sorts, with this heavy, painful weight around his liver, “sat in my gut like a rock”19. He felt he must h
ave contracted some sort of bug from washing the dishes. He began to appear sloppy, grumpy and uninterested in band rehearsals, partly due to his encroaching illness and partly because, as they began recording for a new album, the creative chasms within DeYarmond Edison yawned impossibly wide.
“I didn’t know why I was frustrated,” Justin recalls. “I was really lost; they seemed to be really found, like they were really sure of themselves about the kind of music they wanted to make. It seemed like, day by day, I grew less sure of myself – less and less sure, less and less confident, and less and less into what we were doing as a band. What contributed to the breakup most, out of all the variables, was me being dissatisfied, and them being dissatisfied with my dissatisfaction.”20
Justin realised he was more concerned with pleasing his bandmates instead of focussing on what he was enjoying about the music they were making, and he resented the way they seemed settled in Raleigh. “The three of us, after living in North Carolina for a year, had really planted some roots and were really happy there,” said Phil. “He just wanted to go back home and we wanted to stay there and that was it.”21
One doctor suggested Justin may have Lyme disease, a common tic-born disease that causes fever, depression and fatigue. Further diagnoses revealed otherwise. Justin had contracted pneumonia combined with mononucleosis, also known as glandular fever. The mono had also come with the added pain of a liver infection. Justin was likely to be laid up for three to four months.
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