“‘Flume’ was the catalyst for the whole thing, and it feels like it still is the catalyst. That song, and what that song is, I really can stand beside: that is the first thing that this band has done and it seems like it will feed it forever. Because whatever’s happening in that song makes sense to me, and it’s still all unravelling for me from that song.”47
“I knew I was talented, but I did struggle with not feeling unique,” he added. “I tried for a really long time – 15 years of writing songs – and I was thinking I might have to think about not doing this. ‘Flume’ was the catalyst for my life right now. I recorded it, not at the cabin, but I was there already. I was ready.”48
He packed his bags, vision complete.
“That was the song that made me leave.”49
* Joe and his girlfriend took an apartment about a mile from the house.
* The system also included hundreds of films and a wide range of video games.
* Varying reports put this gig as late in 2005 or in January 2006.
* A song about killing yourself to escape financial ruin in the Great Depression.
* At least, at time of going to press.
* Some sources claim Hazeltons was recorded in Eau Claire before the move to Raleigh, and thus before the new sets of demos he’d begun recording in the wake of the Bickett residency. This is unlikely since the album contains songs sung in falsetto, and Justin has claimed he first sang entirely in falsetto during the gallery residency.
† Though Justin is said by several Raleigh scene regulars to have been a member of a band called The Hazeltons, it’s likely that he played shows featuring tracks from the album under that name.
* Or perhaps another old girlfriend he’s never spoken about.
† Due to the indistinct nature of Vernon’s vocals other readings of the lyrics have been suggested, including “Can’t squash those open sores/Can’t chase away the hope”.
* Some time later Justin would see Megafaun play a song called ‘Find Your Mark’ and believe it was written about this split. “I remember seeing Megafaun play ‘Find Your Mark’ and just weeping,” he said. “I vainly feel like it’s about me. I listen to it, and think, ‘Fuck, I hurt somebody’. We’re really, really close friends, but I still haven’t asked them about that song.”
* His liver infection would continue to cause Justin problems for the next two years.
* A duo made up of Phil Moore and Beth Tacular.
* Some sources claim this offer happened at the Megafaun show
CHAPTER SIX
The Cabin In The Woods
“When I made For Emma, it was my last chance to see if I could sit down and make something, for myself, that was beautiful.”
–Justin Vernon1
November 17th, 2006
I’M now technically back home. Although home is much more north than it has been for the last 25 years. The last few months in Raleigh, were … many things … trying, rewarding, hard, sad, exciting … Right now, I am just glad to not have a plan and to be able to concentrate on music. Not where to play it, not when, not with who; just music. And I have that now. Between that and digging, building, cutting, buzzing, sawing, nailing and splitting … my days are full up. As for now, in less than 20 hours, I will be sitting in the middle of nowhere, with a freezing nose, toes and fingers, at 5 a.m., watching the sun come up through the trees.
see ya, Justin2
The day the Rosebuds album wrapped up, so did Justin Vernon’s life in Raleigh. He packed everything he owned into a U-Haul and his old Honda car, throwing his four-track, his old-model Mac and Pro Tools LE home recording rig into his car alongside the microphones that had been stored in there for a couple of weeks already, fired up the engine and hit the road northwards. It was an 18-hour drive, on the road right through the night, and he filled it smoking cigarettes, listening to maudlin tunes and thinking about the friends he’d left behind.
“It was really kind of scary,” he said. “I was afraid of what I was doing. But 51 per cent of me knew it was the right thing to do and 49 per cent of me was really aching and sad about leaving my best friends and this band was my identity. We all had girlfriends through the years, but we were really committed to each other.”3
He spent the best part of a day on the road before pulling into Eau Claire to visit his family home. No-one was home. For five hours Justin stayed in his parents’ house, weighing up his options. “I sat on my parents’ couch, and nobody was there,” he remembers. “I felt really claustrophobic. I knew just because I left a place I knew I didn’t want to be, I wasn’t heading toward a place that meant something to me, or was going to be good for me. I felt really super-empty, and was like, ‘I don’t know if I can be here. For the first time in my life, I don’t have a real musical identity, and I’m really worried about that. Maybe I need to take some time and do nothing’. I had some music that I started to think about in the back of my brain, but at that point, I was still sort of depressed. It wasn’t that I was sad; I was indifferent. It felt really odd to feel that indifferent and lost and unsure. I basically left that afternoon. I went straight up north to my dad’s cabin because I needed to be alone. I needed silence. It was a necessity more than a conscious decision.”4 Home, he realised, wasn’t where he needed to be. “I stopped for about five hours and I was like, I can’t stay here.”5
Over the coming years Justin would have many opportunities to ponder the reasons he got back in his car with his “junky old music equipment”6 left over from the Rosebuds sessions and drove further north, to The Land, to his father’s cabin in the woods. At times he’d consider it a running away, from distractions, from his situation, from himself. “I went because I had the opportunity,” he told Stool Pigeon. “It sounded like something I always wanted to do. It may sound corny but I was just trying to escape myself. I really needed to locate where I was mentally. It was lonely sometimes but I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere else. It was a bittersweet experience, but it was fine because I knew I had to be there for a period of time. I think when people have that peace and that ability to speak to themselves free of outside voices, chatter and phones, then you can approach yourself without distraction and it helps your mind.”7
“The reason I went up there, first and foremost, was really out of necessity,” he told Treble. “It was kind of a rushed decision. I didn’t go up there thinking, ‘All right, I gotta make a record.’ “8 “It wasn’t exactly planned out,” he said. “I moved up to the cabin to be isolated, and to enjoy myself.”9 “I went up there, because I absolutely needed it,” he said to the Captain Obvious website. “Things had been chasing me, and I had been chasing too far from the things that I wanted in my life, in my cradle, my mind. I got up there to the space and the peace, the silence, and felt as if those voices you hear in your head had much more time to work themselves out. They aren’t distracted by the doorbell, the phone, or your roommate walking in.”10
“I needed somewhere to live,” he told Drowned In Sound. “I didn’t have any money and this place was free, plus it was in the middle of the woods, which was attractive because I was definitely going through a stage where I was sick of people and I recognised that I needed a change … I needed to clear a lot of cobwebs and extract a lot of things that were not good in my life.”11
Other times he felt it was a sense of determination that drove him out into the wilds. “I was like, I’m going to do this,” he said to Mojo. “I am just going to do whatever I fucking want. I’m going to sit around and drink beer, I’m going to do nothing, I’m not going to talk to anyone. It was kind of like laying flat on the ground, like stretching my back out and getting ready, or something. Just kind of shaking it out and allowing myself to adjust and kind of reel back from what I’d gone through, or what I was going through. I was all right with it. I had gained this weird confidence.”12
Other times he put it down to economics. “I thought it was just a meantime sort of thing, an opportunity to escape the trap of so
ciety, to not pay bills, to play music and live really cheaply – but I ended up staying for months.”13
Whatever his reasoning, a few hours after leaving his family home in Eau Claire, Justin’s Honda wheels crunched over the familiar frosty leaves of The Land, and he pulled up beside the homely cabin. He didn’t bother unpacking the recording equipment from the trunk, and wouldn’t for a fortnight or more. Instead he brought the bare necessities across the icy path to the threshold and wrapped himself against the chill of the Wisconsin winter, burying away his bruised heart as if preserving it for hibernation.
Closing the door against the dead cold of the woods, Justin cracked open a beer and set about building a fire in the hearth. He marvelled at the fact that he’d arrived just as his dad had installed a toilet and a shower, as if knowing he’d be coming. Another beer and with the warmth of the fire immersing the cabin he drifted off, dreaming, no doubt, of the wolves.
The next morning, he set about using his hands in those hardy ways he’d been so frustratingly denied at the Rockford. He had gone there to find the focus of fending for himself, so he trudged out into the November snow in search of wood to cut. When he needed to go further afield in search of fuel he hopped on his father’s tractor to head deeper into the woods, dragging logs up to the sawmill, reliving the handiwork of his youth, rediscovering himself. As the days went by he began rising at dawn, taking long treks out into the snow, revelling in the isolation, watching “frozen sunrises high up a deer stand”.14 By day he’d set about working on chores around the cabin, sawing and nailing wood into furniture or repairs. In the early evenings he’d drink beer and watch DVDs before turning in at sunset, working his way through entire seasons of Northern Exposure. He loved the familiarity of the snowbound hometown comedy, the photographic negative of the melancholy winter he was embarking on.
“I was just up there splitting wood, or nothing,” he said, his music shunted to the back of his head. “It wasn’t despair or anything, it was just like boredom. Whatever you do it takes a lot of time to get to a place where you can do it. Some people meditate, that’s not for me.”15
“I just went up there to turn my [life] around. When I was there, I was happy to be there, but it was lonely and sort of like, ‘What am I gonna do tonight? Well, drink a half bottle of whiskey, I guess.’ “16
But most of all, he pondered, picked apart his emotions, drowned within himself. “I unravelled up there,” he said. “I unravelled a lot of shit – from a long, long time.”17
“On a physical level, I would wake up to stoke the fire or get wood chopped to get it in the house to keep warm … I was about 25 miles from anything – even a gas station – and even miles from another home. The only thing you’d really hear is a slight howl from the highway 20 miles away and then maybe birds, but really it was so quiet. I had nothing but the sound of my own thoughts, and they were really loud when that’s all that was going on.”18
When he wasn’t snowed in, friends and family would visit him at the cabin. His father would stop by to see how he was and give him odd jobs to do around the place, piling up lumber and clearing away brush. A friend of his who’d found themselves in a similar state of emotional crash arrived for a three-day stay; they indulged each other in their sadness, took lengthy walks into the woodland and bared their souls over copious mugfuls of coffee, chicory and brandy. His brother, Nate, was a regular visitor and confidante too.
“It wasn’t misery,” Nate recalls. “We would hang out during that time – and there were good times, and dark spots and turmoil. It was just a time when he was figuring a lot of stuff out, and escaping from it made it easier.”19
Together, Nate and Justin went hunting to bag some deer for Justin to live on during his time at the cabin. Over the three winter months he spent up on The Land, Justin killed and ate two deer. “I understand why people are repelled by the idea of hunters,” he said, “there is a lot of machismo involved, especially where I’m from. But at one point I decided the most humane thing I could do would be to kill my food myself. That deer fed me for the whole winter.”20
Rather than make venison medallions, Justin would often cook up large pots of venison stew to get him through weeks at a time. Cubing massive amounts of venison, he’d brown the meat and add whatever spices came to hand – cumin or even simply salt. Rooting through the cupboards for leftovers, he’d make a soup base from whatever he could find, be it broth, chicken stock or spiced water, then add potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, rice, green onions and Amish egg noodles. Next he’d “let it get smooshy”21 and dish it out into some wooden bowls his father had made by hand. What he didn’t eat, he’d leave out on the cabin porch to keep cool for the next day.
He’d call his storage routine “self-indulgent, lazy behaviour”22 and, sure enough, his outside larder brought unwanted diners to his door.
At 3.30am one particularly freezing night, he awoke to a scratching, grunting, snuffling and the heavy thump of cushioned footfalls on the porch. Easing himself out of bed in his underwear, Justin peeked out of the window and caught his breath at the sight of a hulking dark creature hunched over the stew pot he’d left out by the front door the previous night. He was used to scaring off the turkeys and wolves that lived out in the wilds, but a night-time scavenging assault from a wild bear was a whole other level of potential disembowellment. Justin had returned to the wilds in the hope of restarting his life, now it looked as though it might end in some hideous stew-based re-enactment of Grizzly Man.
Chilled to the bone and “freaking out”23, Justin grabbed the cabin’s shotgun and set about trying to scare the bear off his property. “It was 3.30 in the morning and negative 20 out,” he remembers, “and I was there on the porch in my underwear trying to shoo a bear off my stew. I had to kind of laugh to myself about that afterwards – just as soon as the adrenaline levels had dropped.”24
December 6th, 2006
Tonight, I bury my past and powerbook in the new fallen snow.
Tonight, I will bury my powerbook in the snow. This seems (a) like a waste of money, even if it was a junker – I could at least sell it. (b) rather dramatic considering right next to the new fallen snow is a BFI co. garbage hauler. But, nevertheless, I will proceed … I still don’t know exactly how to phrase what lesson I learned, and I usually don’t care enough to follow through with my self learning to the point of coherently framing it in language, because at the core I know what it is I’ve learned; BUT, I do know that I feel new. I feel like dumping those bad songs and journal entry’s was the best thing that could of happened. I am guilty of it, maybe more than others, but drudging our past around with us too much is of obvious badness, but here I sit in as old of a place as they come, with a new feeling … I’m putting on my boots and my mom’s packer jacket she left up here and heading to the limestone bed for a little ceremony they call, renew.
Justin25
After three weeks of relentless isolation, Justin’s mood took a turn for The Shining. His head was a swirl of “those weird conversations where, like, it’s so quiet for so many days where it’s actually starting to affect you.”26
“It was all kind of hazy. It all sort of melted into … one day turned into another. I don’t recall a lot of very concrete memories of it, because I think I was a little bit out of my head.”27
Craving human contact, he began to edge into the tiny local community, a handful of houses, more a township than a town. An elderly couple called Dick and Sharon inhabited the house where Justin believed he’d been conceived 25 years earlier – Dick had recently undergone quintuple bypass surgery so Justin called by to offer them a hand splitting their wood. Over the following months he’d drive the log-splitter down to the house and help Sharon split and pile stacks of logs. “There was this time when the hot exhaust from Briggs and Statton was blowing on Sharon’s purple sweat pants and I could see the exact shape or her calf,” he wrote in his journal. “It was just a metaphor for how closely we were working together, with really
having no idea about anything about each other. Touching hands as we hand off logs, unloading logs, logs that will heat their home the rest of the winter. One of us farted. I don’t know who, she was moving too fast to notice.”28 No matter how intimate he was becoming with these strangers, though, he couldn’t pluck up the courage to ask to go inside their house and see the room where he was conceived.
Eventually, after weeks of mind-warping isolation, Justin had nowhere left to turn but music. His surroundings were calling to him. “That space really did hand me a lot of ideas,” he said. “Ideas I already had, but that I needed help with strengthening.”29
He pulled out his old Mac to listen to demos he’d been working on before he left Raleigh. The laptop, full of old songs and diary entries, packed with his past life, fritzed, whirred and died. The dreaded computer crash no-one ever thinks could happen to them had happened to Justin, a metaphor for his deleted life. For two days he tried to rescue his lost files, putting the hard drive through extensive data rescue programs and unscrewing the machine down to its component parts, but it was, as his Creature Fear blog would confirm, “zapped clean. Washed completely of any trace of these things of mine. These 010110’s of mine.”30
It felt like fate tapping his shoulder. Flushed with the symbolism of a former life interred beneath winter’s fresh blanket, like his life wiped clean by the whiteness, he took the laptop out into the woods and threw it into the snow. “It wasn’t actually that dramatic,” he’d later argue, downplaying the forlorn nobility of the gesture. “It was basically broken.”31
But the act was certainly meaningful for Justin. “Every one of those songs had been written for years and were all written the same way about the same things,” he said. “I felt like it really robbed me of all these personal memories – there were photographs – but it was really a metaphor for me that those songs were leaving. It was almost like somebody was saying, ‘Dude, get rid of ’em. You don’t need those any more.’ Because it sounds like another person wrote those songs compared to the person that wrote the songs in For Emma…. At this point, I don’t miss those songs at all … I sounded like I was wrapped up in my influences, where I had tried to sound like people who had inspired me to be a songwriter, rather than approach it myself with any sort of honesty or validation. I couldn’t write beyond myself for years and years.”32
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