“It felt like something different,” he’d say, “almost like I had set up some fake land or something. It was something outside, and something over there.”11
“No-one will completely understand a lot of the things I had to say in that record,” he’d add. “It’s a story, not just about a person, but about what someone can do to the people around them.”12
“The album was more about me than anything,” he’d tell Pitchfork. “Emma isn’t a person as much as it’s a place and a time.”13
When pushed for details he’d cryptically admit that Emma was a real name representing someone from his past, but also that it wasn’t her actual name and it also didn’t represent any specific old relationship. “The record’s not about her. It’s about my struggles through years of dealing with the aftermath of lost love and longing and just mediocrity and just bad news, like life stuff. And in the [record], where the title comes from, the lyrics are actually a conversation between me and another girl, not this Emma character.”14
“The story of the album, without getting so obvious, and internally personal, is about long gone, bruised, and pained love – about someone. The album was truly the one thing out of 100 things I tried to create peace around my … heart, for lack of a better word. It was actually more about me, than it was about this other person.”15
He’d be at pains to protest that he hadn’t made the archetypal breakup album too. “That is the most boring version of the story possible. Who hasn’t broken up with somebody? Who hasn’t broken up with somebody because they were still thinking about somebody else? Who hasn’t wrote a fucking song about it?”16
“It’s, like, six per cent breakup. Most of the record is about a love from very long ago. But there are many conversations in there between me and my most recent girlfriend, and we talk about this other third person from long ago. So, it’s definitely not a ‘breakup record’ in that specific definition. It’s more a portrait of seven years of my life, and how it unfolded in the end. It was a long bottoming-out – a really long, grey period – and, finally, at the end of those seven years, I started having some perspective on what I’d been going through, and that’s what the story of the record is. My revelations and ruminations on that whole era.”17
When Justin would allow the final notes to fade on his record and turn to the friends that he’d been playing it to – Ivan and Kelly of The Rosebuds, for example, or good friend Beth Urdang, who was one of the very first people to hear the record – he’d see a wide-eyed wonder, then an avid enthusiasm.
“I didn’t know I made a record,” he recalled. “I thought what I had was demos for a record I might want to re-record. I brought it down to Ivan from The Rosebuds, and he was like, ‘Dude, these aren’t demos. This is your record.’ “18
“I played them [The Rosebuds] the record and they were huge supporters of it. I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do man. I don’t know if this should be a band. I don’t know if I should put this out. I’ve never been on a label. I’ve never toured. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on.’ [Kelly]’s like, ‘Dude, don’t worry about it. Bon Iver – that’s your name.’ “19
Justin found the reaction to what he considered rough demos dizzying, but vindicating. It gave him confidence, proof that to make a ‘successful’ record all he really had to do was be true to himself. “It wasn’t because I thought the record was my chance to be successful; it was because the record actually meant something to me, and I felt like I was actually applying myself. If you are yourself and you don’t become successful, the happiness that you get from creating something that is that truthful to yourself should be enough to propel you forward in life.”20
Back in Raleigh while rehearsing with The Rosebuds for their forthcoming tour Justin stayed on friends’ couches or in spare bedrooms, spending periods staying with The Rosebuds and Grayson Currin among others, all the while starting to mix the tracks on For Emma … and exuding the vibes of a much happier guy than the one who’d fled Raleigh in ruins three months earlier. He took those positive vibes out on the road that February too*, playing guitar with The Rosebuds every night and sitting in the back of the van mixing his record every day. They headed to Moscow, where an assistant producer on Russia’s first ever big-budget blockbuster, Paragraph 78, had heard The Rosebuds’ 2005 song ‘Boxcar’, asked to use it in the movie and then flew the band over to perform at the premiere alongside Brett Anderson from Suede and The Stone Roses’ Ian Brown in the coldest week of the Russian winter. It was an eye-opening experience, particularly when Brown spotted the star-struck Rosebuds crew across the lobby of the President hotel and raced over to help them carry their gear to their rooms and then joined them for breakfast the next day. The show didn’t stop Justin doing a little sightseeing either, having his picture taken in front of St Basil’s cathedral holding up a note reading ‘To Moscow With Love, Eau Claire WI, USA, c/o Justin MCCIII & Tera’ and rounded off with a peace symbol.
Then followed a tour of Europe and Scandinavia alongside The Shout Out Louds, where they unexpectedly found a wild, enthusiastic crowd dancing like maniacs to The Rosebuds* and partied nights away on the SOL bus to Pet Shop Boys and Magnetic Fields, a chance for Justin to bond with The Rosebuds’ touring bassist Matthew McCaughan. And finally a short tour of the US (which would include a two-night stopover in Eau Claire) on the way to a show at the Hot Freaks! event at Club De Ville at SXSW, the annual industry showcase in Austin, Texas, where Justin would meet Ryan Matteson, the editor of online music blog Muzzle Of Bees who would come to be a big supporter. Along the way, virtually everyone who heard the songs Justin was quietly working on was blown away, an avalanche of appreciation that Justin’s insecurities could no longer bat away as merely friendly support.
“At that point, I thought the songs were just demos,” he recalled. “I was only trying to mix them really, really nice to send out to a few labels to see if they would give me money to record a ‘regular’ album. But I handed a couple of my buddies a copy of the CD, and literally, after handing those out, it never slowed down. It started an avalanche and I had no choice but to put it out as a record.”21
He began to start seeing For Emma … as a great personal achievement, the record he was subconsciously always meant to make. Though he’d need to be pushed towards acknowledging it by the enthusiasm of his friends for the album, deep inside he knew it was what he’d been working towards all those years. “I just knew that what I was doing was extremely honest. It was all the things I wanted my music to be, but yet it wasn’t grand and it wasn’t obtuse – it wasn’t overshooting, it wasn’t undershooting, it was precise. The lyrics and the way that I was able to extract and excavate emotion within me … I had a great victory just as a person. I overstepped countless obstacles by creating that record. And the record’s a metaphor for the personal steps I [took].”22
Decision made; the record was finished. Now to filter it out into the world as quietly as it had been born.
* It was also suggested to refer to a tattoo, of which Justin has many.
* Another outré suggestion had the song being narrated by a young loon gosling, the “mother on the wall” being a stuffed bird on a hunting lodge wall.
* The fact that maroon is the colour of dried blood hints that Justin was singing about the damaged after-effects of a relationship.
† Justin has never spoken about selling a car in order to make the journey back to Wisconsin. Other suggestions included the horse being a metaphor for war or a symbol of nobility and success. But a particularly satisfying, if unlikely, reading is that it’s a reference to the ‘horse latitudes’, another term for the doldrums where Spanish boats transporting horses to their colonies would often become delayed by the lack of winds and the crew would have to push any horses that died from starvation or drought overboard. Hence “sold my red horse for a venture home/To vanish on the bow/Settling slow/Fit it all, fit it in the doldrums”.
* A suggestion to move on their relationship pa
st the resentment phase, a promise to shoo off the “wolves” or perhaps a recommendation to go impose her cruel ways on some other guy.
† Another interpretation has the protagonist as an old man returning to his hometown to peer through the window of old friends or lovers shortly before death, the “agony” being realisation of his life having slipped past.
* Being ‘on a full count’ is a baseball term describing a situation where a batter has two strikes and three balls, meaning that a third strike will send them out and a fourth ball will give them a walk. This gives the line a double meaning; he’s both fulfilled by the woman he’s with but also on edge, the relationship could easily go one way or the other, he could take a chance and swing at his hopes and risk losing everything or do nothing and win an easy but unfulfilling advancement.
† Some argue this lyric may in fact read “so ready to be fought”.
‡ See also the line “seminary sold”, referencing a loss of a spiritual base, and the possibility that “spit out by your mouth” could refer to Biblical verse in which Jesus spits out lukewarm Christians. These two lines, however, could be interpreted as using religious imagery to illuminate the relationship in the song, Justin’s solid security or “seminary” being sold from under him and his being spat from his lover’s life for not being to her taste, respectively.
**A reading supported by the protagonist, in the final verse, questioning if he himself was the cause of the conflicts and if he’s ready to reform.
* Commentators have put forward many other interpretations of the phrase “creature fear”, from the fear of wild animals seeing their habitats destroyed by mankind to humanity’s terror of living without laws and regulations and the fear of change or of not being loved.
† Also arguably a reference to prayer, since she’s tired of and uncomfortable with his parable.
* The sun melting the snow could also be seen as the death of the relationship.
* In a game of poker you commit your chips to a pot you hope to win, much as in a relationship you commit your emotions, but you run the risk of losing it all; drunken poker players often play more recklessly too.
† The repeated stacks reference could also refer to stacking his equipment into the back of his car to leave Raleigh, or stacking logs at the cabin.
* He’d also introduce it at Illinios Canopy Club with the statement “This song is for anyone who’s ever been at a poker table and seen their soul. Good or bad”, claiming it happened to him around 2003.
* Much to the relief of Ivan and Kelly, who were then playing down relationship issues that would eventually see their marriage split.
* The Rosebuds had no European record deal, so didn’t expect to have as many fans there as they did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Amongst People
SPRING break week of 2007 and, back home in Chippewa Falls from McNally Smith College Of Music in Minnesota, a music mad 19-year-old called Kyle Frenette sat in his room, like a million other music mad 19-year-olds that very same moment, randomly clicking through music blogs and MySpace pages, looking for something to love.
If you were to glance through Frenette’s biography to that point, you might suspect fate or serendipity had some influence on guiding his mouse. He’d been a musician in high school in a band called Elliston and, after graduation, he and his bandmates decided to move in together to keep the band intact through college. Only to find the pressures of being away from home drove them apart.
So Frenette had put his energies into the business side of music instead, launching a label called Amble Down Records*, home to local acts including Daredevil Christopher Wright, Gentle Guest and Meridene, and it was for new local signings that he went hunting that day. Eventually, he came across something that grabbed his eye – an unusual name on a MySpace page, kinda French sounding. There were two new tracks just recently posted up. Frenette clicked on the first of them, a track called ‘Flume’. It was a click that would change his life.
“He posted two new songs, ‘Flume’ and ‘Lump Sum’ from that album,” Kyle recalls. “I listened to them and they floored me right away. This was one of those moments that happen when it’s like, ‘What is this? I want to tell the world about this! This is incredible!’”1
The MySpace page had email contact details for the guy behind this thing called Bon Iver. Justin Vernon, a familiar name; Frenette had been a fan of his solo and DeYarmond albums back in high school. Wasting no time, Kyle mailed him, explaining how inspired he’d been by the songs and how much he’d love to work with Justin on it. It turned out Justin had a whole album where those two tracks came from and he didn’t have a label or manager. They also had not just a history but friends in common –Kyle was the piano student of Justin’s best friend.
Kyle caught up with Justin’s activities that spring of 2007. While preparing for another tour jaunt with The Rosebuds and Land Of Talk in May and June (including dates in Eau Claire), he’d hooked up with Mark Paulson of Ticonderoga again and had semi-officially joined the band, as announced in an excited post on Ticonderoga’s MySpace page on March 29: “Shazam! Ticonderoga has undergone another transformation. Mark Paulson and Justin Vernon (ex-DeYarmond Edison, Hazeltons, Bon Iver) are now carrying the torch aloft, working on new music, and trying to get our third record done before Justin goes out with The Rosebuds on May 18th. It’s been a strange and exciting transition, and we’re proud to keep the Ticonderoga sailing on into uncharted waters. We’ll be posting some new material soon to get y’all salivary glands a-pumpin’, so stay tuned.”
“Phil and Beth have become seriously important to me,” Justin would say the following year as the project developed, “musically most certainly, but really as friends. Mark is honestly, maybe the best musical partner I’ve ever had; we’ve become really close, and musically, I just don’t think I could be on a page more evenly with anyone as I am with him. Ticonderoga is still going. It was Phil and Mark’s and Wes Phillip’s band, and when that sort of dissipated, Mark approached me to join forces. So, it’s been developing and developing. Now it’s kind of like Mark’s the centre of the band and the filter which everything goes through.”2
Over the coming weeks Justin and Kyle came to the decision to work with each other, Kyle becoming Justin’s manager. “I asked him what he wanted to do with [the album],” Frenette remembers, “and we decided to self-release it.”3 For Emma, Forever Ago, they agreed, would get its first release on Frenette’s Amble Down records.
So, between Rosebuds tours and working with Ticonderoga, Justin and Kyle worked towards the album’s release. Even with the official stamp of Frenette’s label behind him, the project still had the home-made touch of his previous releases. Some of Gil’s photography was selected for the album by designer Brian Moen, an Eau Claire drummer friend of Justin’s, and Vernon family members were roped in on manufacturing duties.
“When he put out his first 500 copies of the For Emma … record, we put that together sitting up at the cabin, [a] bunch of us were folding and stuffing,” Justine said, starting to get an inkling that this time Justin’s life as a musician might be getting a little more serious. “People were watching him and reacting to him with all this admiration and this CD had barely been out. That’s when I started to think ‘hmm, I think he might be onto something here’.”4
Meanwhile, word was gradually creeping around the blogosphere about this magical, soulful new folk music that had crept silently under the net. On June 1 Bon Iver received its first blog plug on My Old Kentucky Blog: “Justin Vernon was the frontman for a couple bands (Mount Vernon and DeYarmond Edison) in the Eau Claire, Wisconsin area, but has struck out on his own with a new project he’s calling Bon Iver … Vernon sings in a perfect falsetto over sparse folk backgrounds on a lot of tracks, but opens it a bit more naturally on this one. You can hear the rest of the tracks at Bon Iver’s MySpace. His debut album is called For Emma, Forever Ago and “was made on a pilgrimage to the woods of northwestern Wisconsin. Wi
th only guns, venison, firewood, a sears typewriter, and ancient musical equipment.”5
The blog included a link to ‘Skinny Love’ and gave a plug for the album release show at the House Of Rock in Eau Claire on July 8, when Justin would perform two shows to his old hometown supporters, an all-ages set in the afternoon and a show for over-21s in the evening. Justin played solo, but not without a little hometown help.
“My first show I actually printed out lyric sheets to three or four of the songs,” Vernon said. “I needed the voices … People were singing ‘Flume’. People were singing ‘The Wolves’. I think it gave me confidence … The song actually needs 80 to 500 people singing or whatever the vibe is of that room, it needs that fight.”6
Eau Claire had welcomed Justin back into its fold like a returning hero. Despite returning to Raleigh to such a warm and appreciative reception, Justin had once more felt the draw of home. “The seasons are part of the reason why I had to come back here to live,” he said, “‘cos I think that I attached myself to that sort of spin and got so accustomed to understanding and changing with it. It gave me this path that I could pick up and hold in my hands. I might be guilty of over-romanticising this town. There are some great things that I do here, like going to the bar, the coffee shop, these places that build their own history every day, and me being there and my friends being there – I get a lot of joy out of that.”7
“I want to get to know every inch of this city, rather than getting to know a bunch of inches of any other city,”8 he said, and expanded on the theme in a radio interview with 89.3 The Current. “It’s a good way to get to know a place by knowing it for your whole life rather than moving on. And it can be a challenge sometimes. We’re a small town and we don’t have everything. At all … But it’s also kind of the reason that I want to stay, sort of be a part of it, lend myself to it, or whatever.”9
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