“It feels strange,” Justin said of the acclaim, admitting his thoughts occasionally strayed with fondness back to the calm of the cabin. “This is all such a beautiful big thing, but I’m kind of wondering if maybe it would be cool if it just slowed down a little bit.”9
“It became clear that he wasn’t interested in being famous,” Horrox says. “He wasn’t interested in being big, he was interested in making the right move creatively. That was what mattered to him. He didn’t want to accept an offer that might make him a bigger artist, might help him sell more records because his choices would be based upon what he felt was the right thing to do creatively, to help his music and his band resonate with people. That’s one of the reasons why he’s such a great artist and why people care.”
Jagjaguwar’s Darius Van Arman also found Justin art-focussed. “For him it’s really about the body of work,” he said. “He’s very careful about those decisions. And sometimes they are very anti-commercial decisions. He makes decisions that leave not only sales and fans but huge amounts of money on the table.”10
To his Eau Claire scene-mates, however, the rise and rise of Bon Iver was a brilliant spotlight of validation on their small town. “Watching him grow bigger and bigger in the music world is amazing for Kelly and me,” said Ivan of The Rosebuds. “He is like our very own Larry Bird out there that we helped unleash on the world.”11
In the midst of all of the press coverage surrounding the album’s release, detail after detail of Justin’s hidden life emerged. He told Pitchfork about his and Elizabeth’s ideas of moving out of Eau Claire, to Portland or the Yukon, and his dreams of scoring movies.
His record collection came under scrutiny too, citing Sam Cooke, Nina Simone and Mahalia Jackson as formative influences. “While I don’t share her actual convictions,” he told Mojo, “she is singing always in her conviction, towards the truth that is her own and showing it so well that you have no choice but to believe her. Also, when she sounds like she is in pain she is actually in joy.”12
He even talked music equipment with Pitchfork. “Probably my favourite piece of musical equipment remaining is this National brand acoustic guitar, it’s one of the metal dobro things, and it’s from 1928. I picked it up from a dude at the music store, a guy that worked at this old place I used to give guitar lessons at. He gave it to me for 400 bucks and I restored it. It had been painted over probably five or six times and somebody had scraped all the paint off; it had this really weird rusty look but it’s one of those guitars that you just play and it’s, like, magic time – the whole room resonates. It’s really beautiful, I love that guitar.”13
The cold isolation of the recording sessions was a regular talking point, both the myths it had begun to throw up (“The stories got pretty wild,” he said, “that I had killed a deer with my bare hands”14) and the atmosphere it had inhabited. Would it have been a different album, the Guardian asked, if he’d recorded it during the summer? “Probably would have been a bit more joyful, but it’s weird, I find I get more heavily depressed in the summertime. In the winter, it’s more like this lengthy, beautiful thing. It’s more inquisitive; winter is a time of internal thinking for me.”15
But besides the fascinating story behind the album, it was his intriguing, mysterious music that was most debated in the press, Justin openly admitting he was still learning about the songs himself as he toured them, that they still remained an enigma to him, they were full of dark corners he was slowly exploring night-by-night. He spoke about the effect the record had been having on its listeners; about the Scandinavian who’d claimed they’d fallen to the floor and wept the first time they heard it; the couples who were blaming it for their divorce; the man he’d heard of who’d been playing the record to his dying mother. “The music seems to be doing something for people in a serious way. I’m really happy but I don’t know how much I have to do with that. I just feel lucky that I had the opportunity to take the time to do it. Maybe that’s what this whole thing is about? That people want to be able to go to the cabin. People need to have the time to deal with their issues. Find sanctity … serenity.”16
“I know that the record is responsible for that,” he said. “I’m not responsible for that … I did down-deep know that it was going to do things like that.”17
“There’s always pain and joy to be explored, it’s a matter of how willing you are to go there. The record is out there doing its own thing and it’s cool to watch. Everybody makes it their own thing. The idea of disappearing and dealing with your life is something some people want. Other people latch on to the relationship side.”18
He also claimed he intended to have a follow-up album completed within months. “I don’t want to rest on these songs,” he asserted. “I know too many musicians that have to tour on the same 10 songs, and they burn out. They get back to their house and they have no reason to write new music. They are music’d out.”19
Admitting to a nagging sense of insecurity in his work, he nonetheless insisted he’d make the second Bon Iver record, if not actually isolated physically from humanity, at least entrenched just as deeply in his own world. “I think that I’ll continue to make records like this. I’m not going to hire engineers; I’m not going to hire producers. I’m fully capable of doing all that stuff, and I’m just going to keep it within myself, under my control and surveillance.”20
One awkward question kept coming up, interview after interview. Who exactly was Emma? Justin remained suitably cagey. “Emma is her middle name but we had split up long before I moved,” he told The Times. “I called her anyway and she’s pretty freaked out. But as I explained to her, it was never about her. The record was me finally stopping a terrible, slow spin that had been building for years. Me alleviating memories, confronting a lot of lost love, longing and mediocrity.”21
“In any situation with lost love,” he told Pitchfork, “I don’t think it ever really goes away fully. You just sort of learn where to keep it.”22
“I’ve had conversations with the people that the songs regard,” he said, “and, while it can be uncomfortable or awkward, I feel like we’re in a very celebratory, loving place.”23
Indeed, as his album crept towards 300,000 sales, and 400,000 in the UK, Senator Russ Feingold declared himself a fan and his songs were snapped up to soundtrack TV shows. Indeed, amongst a flurry of Bon Iver syncs over the coming years, ‘Flume’ and ‘Blindsided’ were used in One Tree Hill and ‘Skinny Love’ featured in Grey’s Anatomy and Chuck. Director Judd Apatow also asked permission to use ‘Skinny Love’ in his film Funny People, but Justin took too long to decide and missed the cut. He was wary of giving the songs too much sync exposure though: “The album became a pretty personal thing for some people,” he said, “and I just didn’t want to be a part of ripping some of that away for anybody.”24 Justin hinted at a state of mind most likely to upset his freshly cast fanbase: contentment. “I was very sad and very lonely and now my family’s doing really well and I’m in love. What happens now? I’ve done things that I’ve never dreamt of doing and I’ve kind of ran out of goals. So I’m kind of super happy.”25
For a reminder of Justin’s more maudlin days, though, those who bought the album via iTunes needed only to listen past the nine tracks to a bonus song on the download version. ‘Wisconsin’ was a churchy ache of distant misty guitars, harmonic whirlpools and a typically evocative vision of a couple reacting differently to their split. She went wild, dancing on bars and flirting with casual encounters; he, stripped of everything, retreated to a home in a cold climate, a place of security that was always with him: “That was Wisconsin, that was yesterday/Now I have nothing that I can keep/Cause every place I go I take another place with me”. There was a tangible sense of timelessness to the track, echoing Simon & Garfunkel’s acoustic wafts as much as ancient madrigals and ultra-modern alt.folk. If anything was worthy of following ‘Re: Stacks’, it was this.
Meanwhile, Justin himself was busy living his dream, happily playing
the saddest songs to the world. Even if touring the globe brought its own host of frustrations.
Justin rooted through his day bag one more time, desperate. The $300 he’d be pissed about losing, the credit cards could be cancelled, but he was only a month or two from having to fly to Europe to embark on his first Bon Iver tour there, so he urgently needed to find his passport. And as for the Polaroids of him and Elizabeth, those were irreplaceable.
After a thorough search of the back room at the Parish venue in Austin, Texas where he’d been headlining a daytime party for NPR Music as part of the city’s annual SXSW music conference, he admitted defeat. He’d been robbed. While he’d been out in the main venue someone had crept into the dressing room and swiped his wallet – cash, cards, passport, photos and all.
The robbery only added to Justin’s feeling of unease at SXSW 2008. He wasn’t comfortable with the crush of people, crowding him to small-talk their appreciation of one of the conference’s hottest names. And no matter how in-demand he was, he still felt chronically uncool compared to the industry hotshots filling his gig and grasping for his hand, he felt intimidated by the atmosphere. The Times newspaper was in town to interview him and report on his packed Parish gig full of people singing along, but he’d rather have gone and bought himself a taco, called his dad to help sort out a replacement for his stolen passport and kept out of everyone’s way. The news from home that they’d had four inches of snow on a day that Austin was basking in glorious sunshine roused him a little. “Every so often it’s nice not to have to cope with snow,” he told The Times.26
He’d been on the road for a few weeks; the tour opened on February 21 with Black Mountain as touring partners* and it was a draining, tiring experience. Bon Iver had no sleeper bus, so they were making regular 30 hour drives eastward between shows in Washington, Philadelphia, NYC and Boston, blaring out the latest Black Mountain CD the whole way† and stealing whatever snatches of sleep they could. What’s more, singing falsetto every night was causing Justin vocal problems that he was struggling to deal with. When he reached New York’s Bowery Ballroom, a key stepping stone on the East Coast live circuit that Vernon played on his way up the coast towards a date in Montreal, the New York Times appeared to spot the emotional strain setting in, picturing him “in retreat, seated, hunched over and surrounded by keyboards and amps and guitars”.27
Nonetheless, the gigs themselves were a joy to him – sold-out shows across the country, everyone singing his songs back to him – and Justin was enjoying exploring the songs more as they went, finding new depths to the opaque visual imagery of the likes of ‘Flume’ every time he played it. “I’m still discovering little niches and corners to hide in,” he said, “those songs are still mysterious to me.”28
“[Playing the songs live] stirs up the elusive emotions, for sure,” he said. “They’re definitely stirring the same pot of feelings [as I had while recording], but I don’t just associate those feelings with that time. They go from way before I made the album, to all that’s come after. The songs become this experience that I’ve been sharing with my bandmates. We’ve been trying to erect these songs as these singular entities, these things that come alive and exist just for that night, just for that moment in which we’re playing them. It’s almost like the songs I wrote were eggs, and now they’re the cracked eggs, flowing and running and we’re chasing after them.”29
The downtime, however, was more trying. At times, after days of continuous social interaction, Justin’s natural solitary instincts meant that he needed to get away from people and be alone in the van for a while. “I do enjoy quiet the older I get; the more quiet time I have, the better. It makes the other rambunctious periods a little more meaningful. And vice-versa.”30
And now that his passport was gone, he’d face the opposite problem. When the tour hit San Francisco’s Independent Club via Arizona and the Southern Californian coast cities, he was annoyed that he had to sit in his hotel awaiting news of its replacement rather than visit Golden Gate Park; similarly, in Portland, Oregon, before a show at Holocene, he couldn’t go drinking with his friends there for the same reason. He was missing out on seeing the towns he was playing in and missing opportunities to spend time with the people he loved.
Once his passport issues were resolved and Bon Iver made it to Europe in May for shows supporting Iron & Wine at the Forum and Jens Leckman at the Scala, things appeared to brighten. The buzz in the UK was already deafening and Bon Iver’s first show in London, supported by Laura Marling at the 100-capacity Social Club off Oxford Street on May 19, was rammed to bursting. “It came about because at the time I was really making an effort to keep on top of new music in a way I don’t do any more at all,” recalls Jack Lawrence-Brown, the drummer of White Lies who promoted the night as part of his Chess Club label activity. “There was a demo of ‘Skinny Love’ floating about, or maybe it was the album version, and he hadn’t been to the UK yet. I went with a cold email to their booking agent and said ‘how much? I love the track’. We booked it possibly three or four months in advance of him coming over and by the time that show came around he was actually a big deal and he seemed a little nervous. It seemed like a good venue for him to do that. I remember having my phone going the whole day for guest list and saying, ‘It’s just not gonna happen, it’s full’. “Obviously it was going to sell out in a matter of minutes and it’s got a really great vibe, you’re really in the face of the audience. He did that thing, I think for ‘Wolves …’, where he comes out into the crowd and does the song completely acoustically without any microphone and it was just amazing. I was stood with my friends who I put the show on with and I thought, ‘This is probably the best show I’ve ever put on here, he’ll probably become a massive act’. I briefly chatted to him, he was such a gracious guy and his whole band were so sweet. To cram them onto that tiny little stage, you can’t hide anything behind that and that’s why everyone realised when they were watching that show that he was definitely the real deal, he can do everything he can do on the record but it’s so much more immediate and exciting.”
Similarly, in Paris the band played a tiny gig for an audience of 40 in an apartment in Abbesses emptied for what was called a Take Away Show, playing without amps or PA and using only instruments the organisers from La Blogotheque website had bought for them that afternoon – a melodica and glockenspiel, a minuscule toy piano. Rehearsing ‘Flume’ in a child’s nursery – complete with tinkling toy piano refrains and an experimental interlude of guitar harmonics, knocks on the piano lid and rocking toys; and taking their stripped-back version of ‘For Emma’ all the way out onto the street, chasing a group of startled, if not terrified tourists through a cobbled square to sing it at them. It was a show Justin would describe as “incredibly special … a highlight, not just of the tour, but of our lives”31
Ed Horrox remembers a UK show on June 4 at St Giles Church in London that had an equally intimate impact. “It was really early days,” he says, “he was building that initial first few fans, and this gig came at the end of that European run. It was relatively ambitious for that first run, it was a 400, 500 capacity space. It sold out and the excitement that people were feeling around that time, because it was clear by then that it was really special, meant that the atmosphere in the room was incredible. At the end of the show Justin and the guys came into the middle of the audience with an acoustic guitar and possibly sang ‘For Emma …’. The audience sang along and that was incredible. So good live, lots and lots of great shows. A lot of joy in the room, a lot of very happy people having very moving experiences because the music was so good and he and his band were so good. A record that meant so much to people delivered live in such a profound, moving way that it was pretty emotional stuff.”
Even though they were playing sold-out shows in Europe, their accommodation was sometimes borrowed. “I’ve got fond memories of the band staying at my house on the first tour,” Ed recalls. “Justin in the attic, Mikey on the settee in the kitchen a
nd Sean on the settee in the front room. All of the guys had their heads in their computers listening to music.”
When Vernon returned home to Eau Claire after the first bout of touring to support ‘For Emma …’ he was keen to cement his links with the local artistic community. Having been turned on to the ‘pocket party’ – the art of playing in houses and apartments, one of his first moves was to visit the house on Main Street in New Auburn where his author friend Mike Perry* was in the process of moving out. Over the previous five years Justin had spent many evenings in the house, making an album with Mike and having barbecues, and Mike had been a rock for Justin during his darker hours. So to mark Mike’s departure he and a few musician friends paid a visit to make “an audio record of the house … we sat in the empty living room, in its magnificent reverberant glory and played a song that Mike wrote, called ‘Sweet Edge Of Time’. It’s safe to say this is one of my favourite songs. It’s about waiting in the pines of Rusk and Chippewa counties, for a girl, until the sweet edge of time. We played numerous times, which was good, because it was too short to take in the energy of such a historic moment, for me … I felt like it was really special to be able to say goodbye to his house with him.”32
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