Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  Then one night, with an idea for “this choir-ish sounding thing, layers of vocals”33 careening around his head, Justin could hear what it would sound like to write beyond himself. He went to the trunk of his Honda and pulled out his recording equipment at last. A battered Silvertone guitar, a Shure SM57 microphone and his four track. He took them up the cabin’s poppel plank stairs to an upstairs room which would become his studio. Over the coming weeks they would be joined by wires and boxes, Nate’s old drumkit brought from Eau Claire and various home-made instruments Justin would forge from whatever he found around the cabin. When his guitar broke, he’d trade venison with a local musical technician to get it repaired. But for the time being he had all he needed; a guitar, the icy enormity of the wilds and his innate need not to hate his life any more.

  “I didn’t go up there to make a record,” he said, “but music was just part of the process of me ironing out that weird vibe inside me. I sat down and started working on the songs, layering vocals on top of vocals, trying to be a choir…. Almost every lyric on the album was written in that weird, subconscious back-door way … I wanted to have songs that live in one place.”34

  “I’d just found it impossible to have any sort of joy in my life,” he expanded. “That’s what that record was for me. But in your life it’s like ‘why continue to go down this path of not being happy?’ I’m not sure why anyone would do that.”35

  This method of isolated four-track recording was unusual for Justin, but somehow liberating. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “It was very foreign. The landscape was definitely breathing on me. The cold, dry space of the woods gives you enough quiet that you can hear your own thoughts.”36

  “When I was alone, I think I shed all these guards that had always been up, all that periphery. It became like this very small internal dialogue between me and the microphone. It’s so hard to be totally honest with other people – even with loved ones – but being alone, that difficulty fell away.”37 “I thought I was gonna quit music altogether,” he said, “and so I was just making the music for myself.”38

  “By being at my dad’s cabin, by myself, surrounded by woods, with no outside influence, that really helped me to shake loose a lot of things that’d always been there, and allowed me to access a lot. In that way, it really was a result of its environment.”39

  “I didn’t have anyone to answer to, I wasn’t in a band, and I didn’t even know I was making a record,” he said. “I was just messing around, trying to do something new because I’d sort of reached my wit’s end on a lot of levels, life-wise, right around that time. I was just scraping my subconscious trying to find some sort of flame in there and it really worked for me to uncover some of that stuff.”40

  “Making food and creating songs, I was by myself, no band, with a very limited set-up that gave the whole thing a real four-track vibe, for me, personally. I arranged stuff very meticulously, because I had nothing but time. So all that fed into the way stuff sounded.”41

  One of the first sounds Justin wanted to explore was his own voice. Back in Raleigh he’d pulled out the Auto-Tune program being used by many R&B and rap stars at the time* and used it to write ‘Woods’. Now he wanted to try the technology out on his new falsetto. “I realised that I have all of this information in all of those higher registers,” he recalled. “All of a sudden I realised all of these female things that I was never able to.”42

  Working around tunes he’d written back in Raleigh, Justin also started expanding on his idea of concentrating on the sounds of words, writing lyrics that evoke a mood or impression through their rhythm, cadence or syntax rather than clearly spelling out an image. Over the tunes he recorded he’d sit and sing a wordless melody then, listening back, he’d try to work out which words the sounds of the melody were trying to become.

  “I’d listen to them over and over and annotate what I guessed I was saying,” he explained. “I ended up feeling like I’d gotten to my real meaning somehow, by going through the back door that way. Excavating my subconscious.”43

  He’d expand at length on the process in Treble magazine. “I’d record a line in ‘Lump Sum’ then I’d go back and record a melody, and then if I liked the first line but didn’t like the second line, I’d go back and record syllables of a melody. So I’d have the melody, then I’d double that with the new syllables. And it kinda sounds like jargon: two people saying different things.

  “I’d do that for all the songs, then I’d go back and listen to them about 20 times and write down what I thought I heard … it was very freeing. I found all this shit, all this grudge and meaning in what I was singing, these syllables. It was weird to put them together and match them up to the sounds that I was hearing … Good lyricists are also people who just put words in good order ‘cause they sound good together. So I was able to do all that completely unhinged, instead of having to make words that rhyme or whatever, and I was able to get lyrics that were born and meaningful to me in a way that was distant and new. It wasn’t like I was pulling them out of my heart and putting them on a piece of paper.”44

  “I’m a pretty overt emotional person,” he’d tell Captain Obvious, “and I think I get addicted to emotion and emotional context. So, if I have an idea … I usually am too quick to get to the point if I go in the conscious way. I usually set the song up, go in and try and get lost somehow…. in it, in sounds, and vocal shapes … And, I usually end up extracting some kind of lyrical idea that is more folded and obscure but somehow gives ME even more meaning to what I am feeling about a subject. I really actually learn a lot about myself writing in that way.”45

  “I’ve always been into the Springsteen thing, writing pretty literally and trying to tell stories,” he said. “With these songs, I was creating sounds first. I would create a space for the vocals, then transcribe vocal sounds and listen to what it sounded like. I would get lyric ideas from the sound of the voice. And I was actually able to pull out more meaningful stuff, personally speaking, because of that. I would surprise myself by what I was singing about, just all these weird, subconscious melodies and sounds … I was alone, I had no rules, I had no band, I had no sound I sounded like, I had no one to answer to. I just felt a little freer. I went back to those days as a 14-year-old, working on an eight-track.”46

  Recording these new songs began to feel like a mission of redemption. Seven songs he’d describe as “an opus: seven songs that have succeeded to pull me through a hardened shell of myself, surprise me, entertain, impress and even heal me. They are me, and I am them, but, they sound nothing like I have ever really written before.”47 He dedicated himself to the recordings, working 12-hour sessions until two or three in the morning, sometimes forgetting to eat. During the day he might spread his time between the wood shop and the cabin, but when he sat down in his makeshift studio amongst “everything I love … a pile of old guitars, a mound of microphones, wires, chords, electric boxes”48, he worked tirelessly, playing all of the instruments himself, re-recording each melody line and guitar part in intricate detail, overdubbing eight vocal tracks on virtually every tune, scavenging extracts of guitar parts from demos he’d recorded back in Raleigh. His aim was “to get them to blend and do the right thing, I just went over and over it until it sort of smoothed out.”49

  And soul-searching too. Vernon saw the process as a way to “challenge myself, in a very specific way, not like games, or exercises, but challenge in the sense of really trying to navigate way down into my subconscious, to find where my real aesthetic shit is. My art. Not my gross EGO self-expression stuff; that’s the Springsteen/Dylan in me.”50

  “I was very much making a record that I needed to make,” he’d say. “It was my last chance.”51

  Over Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2008, Justin took some of his new tracks back to Eau Claire to try them out on friends and family. “Once he said, this is the song, and what do you think?” recalls Justine. “Of course it was in his falsetto which I wasn’t used to so I was
kind of like, ‘oh I don’t know’, but it was ‘Skinny Love’ and I loved that song.”52

  One night he recalled a time back in Raleigh, laid up in bed with mono watching endless DVDs of Northern Exposure* He remembered a detail he’d caught hold of, an Alaskan tradition touched on in the plot. The episode had focused on the residents of the Alaskan town that forms the setting of the series as they witnessed the first fall of winter snow and came out of their houses to meet as an entire community in the town square. There, they hugged and kissed each other, hailing their neighbours with a strange French phrase. “I was like, ‘whatever that is, that’s cool!’,” Justin says. “So I would write it down.”53

  Justin first heard it as ‘boniverre’, but when he looked up the correct spelling of the phrase, he wasn’t quite as impressed.

  “I already knew what it meant to me,” he said. “It was whatever those people said to each other. Then I found out it was French and I was like, ‘Ohhh’. I’m not French, I don’t want to bastardise this, whatever. Then I found out how it’s spelled and it was sort of disappointing. I didn’t like how it looked. It didn’t have any emotion. Looking at it didn’t make any sense. I wanted to look at it and feel something.”54 There was something niggling about the original French spelling, something that wormed away at his gut. “‘Hiver’ reminded me of my liver, so I dropped the ‘h’.”55

  Justin first used the moniker Bon Iver in a letter he typed to Kelly Crisp of The Rosebuds to thank her and Ivan for taking him in a few months earlier and for being such good friends. “I wrote them a letter on my typewriter saying: ‘Thanks for letting me work on your record. Thanks for letting me crash at your house. Thanks for being friends’.” He said. “I signed off ‘Bon Iver’.”

  Mis-spelt or not, the phrase struck a chord with Vernon. It meant ‘good winter’.

  “For me growing up here in the Midwest,” he’d say, “it was a sacred thing. A lot of people run away from it or shy away from winter. It seemed very fitting to name the project after the winter that created the music.”56

  And that cruellest winter, for Justin, would soon become the kindest, most celebrated of all.

  * So much so that within two years Jay-Z would come out against the widespread proliferation of the software on a track called ‘D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)’.

  * Justin had become such a huge fan of the show that, when he saw the final episode with its emotional montage finale, he reportedly shaved off all his hair and cried for hours.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Blindsided

  January 3, 2007

  Ireallllllly think I am going out of my head sometimes. I’m watching re-run marathons of sexual victims shows and shows about sex in the city … I’m at least 60 miles away from anyone I love, sometimes more like 1500 … Today, instead of sitting in the recording chair and working from basically when I wake up till 2 or 3 in the morning (just because nothing fills time better than that for me, except maybe for sitting with people) I woke up, ate a piece of toast with mom’s strawberry jelly, took a jog down the road and back, walked out to the woods to check on a deer carcass, ate a cheddarwurst cut up into pieces, watched a couple of these shows, teared up. In the afternoon, I took some shit over to the town dump … I took two truck loads, and after driving back the second time I parked by the pull barn and hitched up the log splitter. I drove it down the road to an older couple that lives down the road.

  Dick just had quintuple bypass surgery but he helped me and Sharon split a large, huge pile of wood for about an hour … Sharon and I, were a well oiled machine … we just split and stack. Split and stack … I was leaving in the truck, when I suddenly heard myself say ‘I feel good’ followed with the retort: ‘I feel great’. I punched on the CD player and, I know it seems unpoetic, Michael Jackson’s solo version of ‘We are the World’ … My friends are a thousand miles away. I miss them. But here I am with re-run marathons and an opus. I’m okay. I’m doing okay.

  Justin Vernon,1

  When Vernon emerged from his cabin hideaway “looking like a caveman”2 early in 2007, drawn by an offer from The Rosebuds to tour Russia with them, he didn’t know the value of what he brought back with him. “I don’t think I really had any clue what was going on while I was there,” he said. “I was just there. There would be days when I would work on music that sounded really happy. Or I’d be really happy to be working on it. I think you can be jazzed about working on a really sad song if you’re into it. But when I left the cabin, I don’t think I felt renewed or ‘done’ or anything. I still felt sick, my liver still hurt. I was going back to North Carolina sooner than I thought, to work with The Rosebuds. It took me months and months to realise what I had accomplished up there musically, personally, all that … It’s sort of odd to look back and see it as magical, because it felt like a lonely few months at the cabin, where I plugged in the laptop and fucked around.”3

  He hadn’t fucked around entirely alone, though. That January, two of Justin’s old UW-Eau Claire Jazz Ensemble I compatriots, Randy Pingrey and John DeHaven, had added tracks to the recordings, writing and recording trumpet and trombone parts over shots of whiskey. But the collection of songs he’d completed nonetheless felt decidedly Justin’s own, another album he’d made ostensibly for himself, but one of which he was immensely proud.

  “I think the biggest thing that happened out there was I managed to make peace with a lot of dark circles that had started to pool in different areas of my life,” he said. “You know oftentimes you don’t have the time or the strength to really deal with those issues or whatever. It’s a bizarre feeling because for the six, seven years prior to that a lot of these demons had started to creep up and take hold of my life in a secretive way, so to actually face up to them was bold and kinda scary. I can’t say the day I left I was like, ‘well that was great’, you know I was still pretty fucked up – maybe fucked up is a little strong – but a couple of months after that I started to realise what had happened to me up there. And during that time I also realised I’d made an album. Before that I’d thought I’d made maybe some demos, but as I gained perspective I realised I should make a record of that event.”4

  When he reached North Carolina again and started playing it to people, the magic in the first Bon Iver recordings gleamed through like sunlight off a snowdrift. It opened with the tune that had illuminated the project from the start. From its opening muted strums, ‘Flume’ rose from the speakers with a glacial grace, Vernon’s haunting, high-pitched voice like ectoplasm drifting in a mist across the lens of the song, the buzzing of the e-bow and the cosmic echoes of guitar enclosing the song in a cocoon of intimacy from which burst chilling choral choruses of multi-tracked devotionals. As much as its evocative imagery was open to the listener’s interpretation – the words like throbbing organs, warm blood in the snow – the sound of the track conjured visions too. A ghostly woodland cult singing a sacrificial campfire song. A pack of mountain wolves given human voices to howl at the moon. A feral woodsman communing with his smiling, swaying choir of multiple personalities over the insanities of loneliness, isolation and lost love. It set the wintry wood-shack atmosphere of the album perfectly.

  Like all of the tracks on the album, ‘Flume’ would come to inspire reams of debate as to its meaning. Some believed it was a fictional ode to a dying or dead mother and the unanchored sense of grief at her passing, her photograph hung on the wall a constant reminder, keeping him emotionally unstable, marooned. Others put forward the idea that the journey down the flume represented Justin’s difficult first love, the loss of the emotional protection of childhood and the transition into adulthood, the gluey feathers being the pieces of him that he lost – not least to ‘Emma’ – on the inexorable slide towards maturity, or the sticky fragments of love that stuck to him through the years. Here the “sky is womb and she’s the moon” line was about how young this old lover had made him feel and how she still shone in his memory, even when his innocence had turned to confusion, an ungro
unding and “reddish rouge” pain from the rope burns of romance, injuries sustained as he slid downwards, trying to keep his grip.

  The interpretations flooded in. The line “I wear my garment so it shows” was suggested to define an emotional exposure, a naked vulnerability, a heart on a sleeve.* The idea of being his “mother’s only one”, some argued, was meant as a barb to the bandmates and girlfriend that had abandoned him, leaving him to find solace in his family alone and realising “it’s enough”. The “gluey feathers on a flume” were said to be the remains of the birds crushed by logs cascading down a water flume, and therefore Justin’s sense of being one of nature’s small and helpless victims of love’s violent torrent. A universal spirituality was found in the sky/womb/moon image, or a sense of self-love or rebirth; water was taken as a metaphor for love and the flume for its inescapable flood, his past relationships turned to emotional cascades. The “gluey feathers” were argued to be Justin’s stick-on disguises or the plumage he lost while shifting from a pre-birth ‘angel’ to human form. The “rope burns” were quoted as evidence of possible suicidal thoughts.

  Icarus was mentioned often. Freudian commentators equated the mother in the song with a recently lost lover, arguing that men are looking for the unconditional love and protection of mother figures in their life partners – and the ‘death’ here represented the breakup. Ecologists pointed to the moulting cycles of the loon bird as a clue, stating that the often solitary loon, which is flightless unless it has every single one of its feathers, sheds its breeding plumage in its mating pond in order to grow flight feathers to migrate – when discarded ‘gluey’ mating feathers occasionally stick to it in the mating pool, it will be stuck there for an entire year, its partner long gone, until it can shed its plumage again. Into this was read an image of Justin, homesick and incapacitated by illness, stuck in his barren mating pool in Fairall Drive.*