Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  The first thing he did was quit his job. “I don’t know where else I would’ve got it except from there, washing dishes,” he says. “I remember quitting: I was just like, ‘I’m going to be in bed for three months, I can’t come into work.’ And they were like, ‘all right’, and I never went back. That’s the last time I ever really had a job.”22

  Then his other job quit him. DeYarmond Edison had spent the year heading off into ever more outré experimental territory, demolishing any sense of creative limits, and Justin wasn’t enjoying the trip. “Everybody was getting sick of my songs,”23 he said, and they were also noticing him zoning out during rehearsals, not caring to join in on the communal adventure. One Sunday at a practice session in the Fairall duplex Brad noticed that Justin was particularly absent and pulled him up on it. Hard.

  “One day we were practising something I was just not into,” Justin said, “and I said I just can’t do this any more.”24

  By the end of the practice session, DeYarmond Edison were no more. “To cut a long story short, I got butted out of the group,”25 Justin would tell the Daily Telegraph, and later told Grayson Currin, once he’d moved on to write for Pitchfork, “It really unravelled. It was the most intense breakup I’ve ever been through; I couldn’t imagine going through something deeper because it was a 10-year relationship with multiple people. It just took time for that to heal.”26 Without him, Brad, Phil and Joe set about creating their own band, Megafaun.*

  Back at the duplex, another domino fell. His relationship with Christy was disintegrating too. By the end of the summer of 2006, Justin found himself jobless, broke, thrown out of his own band, seriously ill and sleeping on the couch at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. Though decidedly awkward, the split was relatively amicable; Justin had been helping to record an album for Christy’s band, Nola, before they broke up and he completed work on it afterwards. Likewise, Christy let him stay on in the duplex.

  For several months as 2006 decayed towards winter, Justin took to his temporary bed. He looked after cats, both Christy’s cat, Tony, and one that belonged to a friends’ band that was off writing a new album in the South Carolina swamps. He was drinking way too much: “I was like, I never wanna be in a place where I’m drinking because something hurts,” he said, “but then I did that.”27 And his online gambling habit was reaching breaking point, culminating in a particularly crippling run at the internet poker tables. “I lost $220 online, which at that point was all my money,” he mused. “It was a microcosm of the rest of the stuff in my life, like, yes, you are actually not able to control this.”28 He became obsessed with DVDs of a Nineties comedy drama set in Alaska called Northern Exposure, most likely because it reminded him of home. “That’s beyond a TV show,” he’d say, “that’s my favourite shit ever. It’s brilliant, I got so into the show. I was laid up really sick when I watched it; for three months I was really, really ill, and so I think maybe I was kind of screwed up on some drugs a little bit, but I entered the entire village of that show, it was so good.”29

  His illness worsened before it got better. A rash of poison ivy grew across his face and his spine became twisted, unaligned with the rest of his body. “It was really hard because my back was out the whole time,”30 he said. But as profoundly miserable and incapacitated as he was, he still managed to spot a light at the end of this darkest of tunnels.

  “I had a moment when I was lying in bed,” he said, “it was almost like the sickness gave me a ticket to get out of there. I had so much time to think, to lay out all the maps, to figure out what it was that I really needed. I was so brutally unhappy. It was like ending a marriage but with four people. I knew that the only opportunity I would have to have more of that time was to escape to my dad’s cabin.”31

  Of course, Eau Claire. Retreating from hardships, back into the arms of nature. He’d be comforted there, alone in his own space, being snowed-in a living metaphor for his isolated psyche. He set his heart on it.

  It was a long, long drive though, and he was too ill to make it. Before he could run away he had to see off the fevers and chills, fight off the mono. And if one thing was going to get him through this lowest of times, it would be music.

  He reached off his death bed, picked up a guitar.

  And began to write the music of his life.

  It’s telling of where Justin’s mind was roaming that one of the first ideas he set to work on was an a capella loop of a single rhyming couplet. “I’m up in the woods,” it went, “I’m down on my mind/I’m building a sill to slow down the time”.

  “I made that sketch in North Carolina in an afternoon,” he said of an idea that would eventually be called ‘Woods’. “It keeps rewarding me to follow my own thing.”32

  Alongside the wilderness escape fantasy of ‘Woods’, Justin was also penning songs about his breakup with Christy, in the very duplex they shared, and playing them to her. One such tune was a faux-jaunty, upbeat bawler built around bright descending acoustic chords, handclaps and slapped beats. It sounded like a desolate soul wrenching himself into an upbeat mood, and its words were those of a man desperate to eke out what little love there was left in his life. “Come on skinny love, just last the year,” he sang to her, “I told you to be patient/And I told you to be fine/And I told you to be balanced/And I told you to be kind … Now all your love is wasted/And then who the hell was I?/And I’m breaking at the britches/And at the end of all your lines”.

  The private renditions, they both claimed, were “awkward but bittersweet”33. Christy assumed that ‘Skinny Love’ was directed at her, but Justin would argue otherwise. “To say that ‘Skinny Love’ is about Christy would not be entirely accurate,” he said. “It’s about that time in a relationship that I was going through; you’re in a relationship because you need help, but that’s not necessarily why you should be in a relationship. And that’s skinny. It doesn’t have weight. Skinny love doesn’t have a chance because it’s not nourished.”34

  Indeed, Justin would claim the song had just as much to do with Sara Jensen and the knock-on effect their relationship had on his subsequent ones. “Part of the trouble with the old haunting love,” he said, “is that it fucks with your future loves, and can damn and/or ambush your relationships. That’s who this is about.”35

  “Skinny love is basically a metaphor for someone you like a lot but you’re not all the way there; the love is frail,” he said. “That song was written about all those girls I was with, and I sabotaged the relationships because I realised I wasn’t as in love with them as I was with my first true love.”36

  His resolve on the woodland retreat set firm, Justin waited out his illness, gradually improving over the late summer months. By the time he was well enough to plan his move Megafaun were taking shape and it was time to make the demise of DeYarmond Edison official. A notice was put up on the band’s MySpace page announcing the split: “Justin will temporarily/indefinitely be heading back west, recording and performing as himself,” it read. “I am sure there will be new recordings from him in no time.” The scars from the split would eventually heal – “It was weird for awhile,” Justin said in 2008, “but we’d played in a band together for 10 years and we’re like brothers. I talk to them pretty much every day.”37 As a parting gift, DeYarmond posted on the page a final five-track EP, comprising the tracks they’d completed recording before the band dissolved. The Unreleased EP showed heavy influence from the Bickett Gallery residency. First track, ‘Baby Done Got Your Number’, for example, was an a capella spiritual of the sort that had characterised Justin’s night at Bickett. The song took a traditional blues slant, telling of an unbalanced love affair wherein the woman gave far more than she got back: “Baby done got your number, she ain’t got your name … baby done took your hand and you just left her shame”, but it was the delivery that made it stand out from DeYarmond’s usual output. Full of spirited handclaps, thigh slaps and gospel harmonies led by various band members, it reached a caterwauling climax as they stretched
their vocal powers beyond their ranges to throw every ounce of passion they had into the singing.

  Having adorned a new version of ‘Song For A Lover Of Long Ago’ from Hazeltons with high-pitched harmonica whines and feedback and bouts of creaking amp noise like a guitar having a nightmare. Closing the song with a minute of ambient found sounds in the same style as ‘Hanna, My Ophelia’, DeYarmond wandered into even more radical territory on ‘Epoch’, a sleepy charmer of a track combining Justin’s fuzzed baritone with backing vocals from a static-strewn radio, distant strains of harmonica and piano distortion, languid banjo and tambourine taps to shiver-inducing effect. The track had even more of an Ophelia link, since it seemed to envision someone drowning, their body shutting down as they sank – “It’s your sinking divide/Clock went cold and readouts die/Head ain’t reading things right … looking up at the waves … surface gets further away/Settle and sediment sinks to clay”. But, as in previous Vernon lyrics, the dead live on in the memories of the living. “There’s a flicker in the cold,” the second verse continued, “Second chance to have and hold/Out with the new, in with the old … they’ll remember you weep/It’s more than a dream”. The old Vernon theme of devastation laced with hope showed no sign of abating.

  That theme, and the watery imagery – another Vernon trademark by now – continued into ‘Where We Belong’, a choral banjo classic that, more than any other DeYarmond track, hinted that, had they stayed together, they were probably destined for the same level of alt.folk success as a solo Vernon would soon achieve. “Waves crash on a vacant pier,” sang an artfully weaved choir of voices, “boats rock on a sea of fear/The tide is high, your hope still floats/Pull the anchor, cut the ropes”, a scene of emptiness and decay that followed lines suggesting a sailor sent to war and the lover left at home placing their future in the hands of fate – “A call to arms, an epic right/The war’s begun, I choose your side … Come back and it’s meant to be … Return or not, it feels the same … Be still, let the journey bring/Calm winds and a song to sing”. Besides finding faith and optimism in the bleakest of situations – in this case the sailor’s lover watching a storm at sea – it was the chorus line that once more highlighted Vernon’s mindset: “In the pines where we belong”.

  The gorgeous ‘Where We Belong’ was stretched out to over nine minutes with Brad’s lustrous guitar phases and wails, after which the EP’s last track, fittingly called ‘Finale’, saw DeYarmond Edison bow out with a minimalist swirl of Joe’s avant jazz improvisation on banjo and caressed drums. It, like the EP, was full of promise and possibility, pointing to a vast array of musical terrain DeYarmond still had to explore.

  But that bridge was burnt, and its ashes set to scatter.

  Justin Vernon’s leaving party – a low-key gathering at the Fairall Drive apartment the night before he planned to leave for Wisconsin in mid-September 2006 – was a subdued and tense affair. Though he was no longer bedridden and well enough to face the long 18-hour drive north, his liver still hurt* and a heavy emotional weight still hung over him. The MySpace DeYarmond announcement had added to his sadness over the split, not least because only days earlier he’d witnessed the first ever Megafaun gig in Raleigh, a reminder that his own musical exploits were in a rut. Sure he had some new songs, most of an album’s worth, but he didn’t know how best to record them, and all of his other musical projects had wound to a close. He’d been working with Nola on their album for most of the year and though he was immensely proud of what they’d achieved together, later calling it one of “my most meaningful and fulfilling experiences as a musician”38, finishing it had left a hole in him, creatively and emotionally. It was, after all, a big full stop on his relationship with Christy.

  He’d talked to various local bands about joining forces on new projects, most seriously with Phil Moore and Mark Paulson. They were in a band, of local underground post-rockers called Ticonderoga and Justin had met them earlier that year, before his illness, after having seen Phil’s other band Bowerbirds*, play early in 2006. That show had a deep impact on Justin: “When I first watched them play … there are just these kind of tempos, slow downs and speed ups, the melody and Phil’s voice, the strange and beautiful places he takes you with his lyrics … all the songs blew my mind. I went home, and that was the first time I thought about quitting music. Yeah, it really was, I really wasn’t sure I could do it any more … I thought what I saw that night just may be better than anything I could ever do.”39 Before long DeYarmond had played Raleigh shows with Ticonderoga and Justin had become close friends with Phil and Mark, so when DeYarmond split Justin and Mark spent several late nights drinking beer, writing and recording songs and talking over the idea of Justin joining Ticonderoga. But the plan slowly disintegrated; Ticonderoga were busy building their own cabin in the woods of North Carolina, there were talks of solo albums rather than group efforts, nothing solid could be grasped. Justin was left with that lingering feeling of uselessness. “I had kind of given up. I remember seeing the Bowerbirds play, and basically thinking, ‘Wow, I am nothing’. I felt very un-special.”40

  He didn’t feel that he had yet created anything as meaningful as what he saw onstage that night. “DeYarmond Edison represented all the years of me being an imitator,” he’d say, “borrowing other people’s sound rather than borrowing the emotion or the introspection of the songwriters I liked.”41

  This ‘un-special’ Vernon nodded and chatted to friends around the grill at the gathering to announce his departure, clearly sad, feeling boxed in by Raleigh, itching to get on the road home. Until a guy approached him with an intriguing proposition. Ivan Howard was multi-instrumentalist and singer with The Rosebuds, one of Raleigh’s local bands that were breaking out of the scene onto a bigger national stage having been signed to Merge Records. “I met Justin Vernon for the first time at Kings Barcade in Raleigh [at the first Megafaun show],” Ivan said, “and during our conversation, I asked him about recording and what does he think about home recording. He said, ‘You should just do it yourself. I know you guys can do it. Besides, only you know what you want.’ “42

  Since then Ivan had been mulling over an offer for him. Recording sessions for The Rosebuds’ third album, Night Of The Furies, had hit a rut of their own, after two producers had been and gone they were stuck, in need of some local expertise. Howard had heard good things about Justin’s abilities recording bands over the years, so offered him the job of helping them complete the record.* It was a bold temptation, to work with a signed band, maybe rejuvenate his enthusiasm for music and it would only postpone his trip home by a month or two. Vernon agreed.

  Working with The Rosebuds was a nourishing experience for him; they were the sort of inclusive musical collective he’d been used to back in his Mount Vernon days. He’d visit the band at the brick house where Ivan and his bandmate Kelly Crisp lived as a model of communal living. With Justin completing their crew they did everything together, making crepes for each other, feeding Justin sushi and Bojangles takeaway chicken and sitting down with him to watch episodes of Automan or Freaks And Geeks, shifting into the next room whenever inspiration struck where the recording set-up was waiting to take down whatever idea was floating around. Justin wasn’t only taken in as a producer, mixer, engineer and part-time member of the band, a close friendship soon blossomed.

  “It was a really inspiring time for us,” Kelly said, “and the record we were making felt maybe secondary to how much fun we were having together. Whatever the spirit of creativity was, it was so strong that I don’t think it left him when he left us for Wisconsin. It didn’t leave us, at least.”43

  “A lot of our music isn’t based on theories or chords,” Ivan added. “It’s based on a feeling. I think maybe that rubbed off [on Justin].”44

  This new musical vent inspired Vernon, who began to concoct his plan for recording his next solo album. He’d been mainlining Springsteen’s Nebraska, Dylan’s Basement Tapes and New Morning albums and the early works of Elliott Smith, hu
nting out new ways to hone his sense of intimacy, and experimenting with his falsetto, working out how it could fit.

  Then one afternoon in the duplex, as the Rosebuds sessions wound to a close, everything clicked.

  A wrist-swinging sort of rhythm. Dark, yearning chords. Cavernous wails of distant electric guitar enclosing this tiny nugget of warmth in writhing whale-song. And the falsetto, double-tracked, finally settling atop the music like an unbroken snowdrift.

  “I am my mother’s only one,” he lied. “It’s enough.”

  ‘Flume’ hit Vernon like a Damascan sunstroke. The music and vocal tones gelled wonderfully, the image-rich lyrics dripped from his lips, subtle, full of bruised colours and evocative of the sticky violence of love: “only love is all maroon/Gluey feathers on a flume … leaving rope burns/Reddish rouge”. Alliteration caressed the verses as deeply as their submerged meanings, making the line “lapping lakes like leery loons” feel like the tongue-lolls of a man driven insane by his moon-like lover, drifting in a womb-like sky. Ironically, considering its lovelorn theme, he recruited Christy to join him on backing vocals and add drum-tapping percussion to the song’s immersive second swell, and added a mid-section of amorphous xylophone strikes and serrated string buzzes created by an e-bow, a “magnetic field you put over the strings … It creates a magnetic field between the strings and the magnet, so it gets the string vibrating really, really fast. And then if you slam the magnet against the string, it gives it a break sound. The string itself doesn’t break, hopefully. It’s a very light vibration, but it sounds very violent.”45

  Listening back to what he considered at the time to be a part-finished demo, Vernon felt the tingles of a masterpiece.

  “It immediately felt insane,” he said. “I’d never done anything like that. It was this new falsetto thing that I’d been working on but never landed. It felt really scrappy. I’d been working on so many songs that spring, but nothing really gathered itself until ‘Flume’ came along.”46