Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  He also reunited with Wisconsin itself. “Made Hobo’s on the fire last night,” he wrote in his Blobtower blog. “Banana Peppers, Perry’s Pig’s Bacon, Potatoes, Goat Cheese. Slept in Tent. Woke up. Stoked embers. 70 degrees and breezy. Made breakfast Hobo. Perry Bacon, Eggs, Potatoes, Sharp White Cheddar. You absolutely cannot fuck with Wisconsin summer. Fuck.”33

  When he wasn’t reconnecting with old friends or spending the annual long weekend camping with his family on what’s known as Sather Weekend, keen to remain the old down-to-Earth Justin he’d been before the tear-away success of For Emma …, he was inviting people over to his bungalow or hitting the YMCA to play basketball. “Nothing else seems so fluid,” he said of the sport, his prime form of exercise. “It just shakes everything out. It’s so good for your mind, because you don’t think like you usually do. Your mind relaxes into this instinctive, reactionary zone. It’s beautiful.”34

  When Vernon set out for two months of further US dates from July to August of 2008 he decided to take a small piece of home with him. So he asked Bowerbirds to support, and the party was suitably stoked. From the first show at Detroit’s Crofoot Ballroom through 23 gigs in Canada, Massachusetts, Maine and beyond, there were swimming pool parties in the early hours, massed choral versions of Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ and a new drink called Yahtzee invented by the combined touring posse, swelled by sound engineer Brian Joseph and a new member of Bon Iver in the form of The Rosebud’s touring bassist Matthew McCaughan. Each night Bon Iver would join Bowerbirds onstage to play a track called ‘Lovin’s For Fools’, a glorious burst of vocal harmonies accompanied by a single acoustic guitar.

  And the crowds, on this jaunt, had ballooned beyond all expectations. These were theatres, cinemas, churches and galleries rammed with hushed expectation and rapturous receptions. “I saw him at the 2008 Pitchfork Festival [in Chicago on July 20],” Stephen M Duesner recalls, “which was remarkable because he was on the smallest stage there and it must’ve been the largest crowd that he had played to at that time. I was backstage and I could see the crowd, an enormous crowd going back, I think they booked him on a smaller stage not realising how many people were there but he had a bigger crowd there than the headliners did, and they were all singing along with him. He’s just got this enormous smile on his face, you could tell he was moved by this experience of having so many people singing along. I don’t think he had any idea it had gotten that big yet.”

  In his breaks between live dates, though, Justin’s guitar was rather less use to him. “I was writing and recording in the windows of time snatched between tours in support of For Emma …,” he said. “When I finally came home to hunker down for a solid stretch there was a feeling of solid ground and an opportunity for liberation waiting in the space for me.”35 But he was finding that he couldn’t write on guitar any more. “It feels really awkward,” he claimed, “I need to be there working with the computer or looking at the tape or doing something with layers for me to get an idea that feels comprehensive out.”36

  “Somewhere along the line, I forgot how to write songs,” he told Rolling Stone. “I couldn’t do it any more with a guitar. It wasn’t happening.”37

  “I didn’t forget, I just couldn’t write with a guitar any more,” he said. “It wasn’t speaking to me. I had to locate a new sonic space; people talk about their ‘magic guitar’ that they use to write songs – I don’t have one of those any more – it takes more. It takes the studio and the gear and the microphone to have it sound the way that I need in order to write a song.”38

  “You know how there are people who have their guitars and they give them names like ‘Old Blue’, and it’s like there are songs hidden in there or something?” he said. “Well I’d just lost that. I didn’t have a guitar that did it for me any more. I had to go into the studio setting and find something that would help.” His solution was to feed his electric guitar straight into the amp without any pedals to get the soft and dry Motown sound he admired, then mould the sound via pre-amps and a variety of microphones. “Then you get to a point where all of a sudden you’re in that zone, the sonics of it are singing what you want the song to be, and it starts to write itself. No song really just got up in its fully finished form until many things were added to it. It’s kind of a constructionist vibe.”39

  Deciding he didn’t want his happiness to influence the next Bon Iver album and feeling like he was growing up and changing faster than at any time since he was a teenager, Justin vowed to “let it permeate”40, to give himself a chance to listen to the ideas in his head and make sure he was creating the music he was meant to create. His strongest idea for following up For Emma … was to recreate the environment of the first album, to make the project a series of locations oozing their music. “I’ve had a lot of ideas but what I’m trying to do as a conscious move is I want to go in and record and write at the same time again,” he said. “I mean I won’t go to the woods or any crazy shit like that, but … I also like the idea of making a record rather than a bunch of songs. I want to do it all in the same time period so the songs come from a similar place.”41

  So instead of concentrating on the follow-up to For Emma …, in June Vernon completed a four-track EP that he’d started alongside the first album up in the cabin and finished at various apartments, studios and hunting lodges in the gaps between tours. It would be called Blood Bank, the title track recorded during the For Emma … sessions but left off the album as Vernon felt it didn’t sit comfortably with the rest of For Emma…. “As much as Emma … is about the cold,” read a Jagjaguwar press release about the EP, “the Blood Bank collection is about the warmth that gets you through it. You can feel the air move. Like a fire you’ve been stoking for hours and finally got to sustain itself, the heat blisters your face while your back is frozen solid.”

  The fictional story behind Blood Bank certainly didn’t fit anywhere in the narrative arc of For Emma…. It told of a couple meeting at a blood bank, becoming snow-bound together in her car after their visit and starting an affair there. With its sense of familial warmth (the woman exclaims how similar the blood bags of the guy and his brother look “even in their plastic little covers”, emphasising the closeness of both family and the ‘brotherhood’ of humanity at once) and its uncharacteristically happy ending (having kissed in the car, the couple are pictured many years later hearing their children stirring on Christmas morning), it was a dislocated scene from the gradual healing process of the album, although fans did read tribulations into it. They questioned why the pair were at the blood bank in the first place, and what was the “secret” that “fucks with your honour” and “teases your head”, coming up with theories of terminal illnesses, pregnancies, paternity tests and the narrator having an affair with his brother’s wife. All testament to the deep analysis Vernon’s words were inspiring but the music, a cosy fuzz of electric guitar and non-falsetto pop hooks, was just as distanced from the For Emma … material, exuding warmth and positivity. “It just didn’t seem to fit the story and lineage, I guess,” Justin said. “So I just sort of surrounded Blood Bank with three other songs that were very different from one other, and they all kind of came together as a palate cleanser for the last record.”42

  First among these additional tunes was ‘Beach Baby’, a tangled saunter of slide guitar and maudlin acoustic that looked back to an idyllic tryst on a beach with an old girlfriend, from the perspective of a narrator watching her leave him.* A glint of deep-seated bitterness undercut Vernon’s requests to the girl: “don’t lock when you’re fleeing/I’d like not to hear keys” and “tell your lucky one to know that you’ll leave”. Once the girl is gone, making no sound in the lock as a knell to the relationship, Justin reminisces about a bout of beach love-making, “put a tongue in your ear on the beach/And you clutched/Kicking heels”. It was the pessimistic yin to Blood Bank’s fairytale yang.

  The EP closed with two divergent experiments. First ‘Babys’ was an insistent and often discordant stream of h
igh-range piano chords hammered out in the vein of Steve Reich’s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’, over which Justin wailed a distinct ode to procreation. “Summer comes/To multiply,” he sang. “I’ll probably start a fleet/With no apologies … my woman and I know what we’re for”. Though there were hints that the life of a successful touring artist was possibly turning his head in the segment of the song where the chiming pianos cut out, leaving Justin’s voice naked and exposed (“the carnival of scenes grows more and more appealing”), ‘Babys’ was a reiteration of Justin’s homeliness and grounding, as well as his distant background in avant jazz. Finally ‘Woods’ took his experimentalist nature forward: an a capella piece fed through Auto-Tune to create a different, computerised form of haunting, a techno-mist of harmonising robot voices reciting four self-explanatory lines, written in his bedroom in North Carolina shortly before leaving for the cabin. “I’m up in the woods,” the voices repeated 11 times, each round a more elaborate concoction of ghost-in-the-machine vocal whines, “I’m down on my mind/I’m building a still/To slow down the time”. The still he was building could have referred to his alcohol intake or his need for quietude, and probably both, but either way ‘Woods’ was the perfect bridge between Justin’s work on The Land and the new avenues of experimentation he wanted to explore with Bon Iver.

  “When you crank Auto-Tune,” Vernon explained, “you can use it really subtly, which is most of your pop radio vocal, to have a more accurate, normal human-sounding thing, but when you crank it up it just becomes this robotic thing that’s no longer your voice … And much like all the vocals for me with this Bon Iver project, which was much different than anything I’d ever done before with the high singing and sort of femininity, that was just an experiment that I kept layering, and I was using another thing called Harmony Engine which you can get deeper vocal tones in.”43

  Some online bloggers criticised Justin for using Auto-Tune, however. “All these bloggers are going, ‘Auto-Tune is evil and people in the folk realm shouldn’t use it’,” Justin said. “This has nothing to do with anything. It was inspired by an Imogen Heap song, it’s not a comment on [Auto-Tune-leaning artists]. And even though blogs are tastemakers and have exalted a lot of bands that went on to become successful, there’s this clique mentality that just … Look, if you like Bruce Springsteen, like him. Don’t wait for somebody to tell you it’s cool again to like him.”44 “This for me was a way to extend my voice or to experiment with different techniques, or just sounds,” he said. “It was really freeing for me to do, and I’m really happy it’s the last song on the EP.”45

  And to continue that exploration, Vernon was about to build himself a whole new home base.

  * Other acts Vernon played alongside on the tour included Phosphorescent (who replaced Black Mountain for the latter part of the initial Feb/March tour), The Hollows, Nordic Nomadic, Quest For Fire and, at the Chapel Hill date, Megafaun.

  † Bon Iver particularly loved Black Mountain’s ‘Stormy High’.

  * Author of Population 485, a book that, according to Justin’s Creature Fear blog of June 19, 2008, “most specifically and devastatingly defines my admiration and deep relationship I have for and with Northwestern, WI.”

  * A true story, according to Vernon’s live introductions of the song.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Veterinarium

  THE animal bones were the first to go. The remains of the sick pets and unsavable roadkill that still littered the 10 acres of ranch around an old veterinary clinic out in Fall Creek, south-east of Eau Claire, were gathered up and respectfully disposed of. Then the gangs of friends and band members would descend, a dozen at a time, to help with carpentry, removing old stainless steel surgery tables, fill in the old enclosed swimming pool attached to one side of the clinic to make a main recording room, or already start work on records amidst the wreckage and destruction.

  Justin Vernon finally had the means and assistance he needed to build the creative music hub for the Eau Claire music community that he’d dreamt of since a teenager. Back then, his vision was of a shared old house full of music, laughter and inspiration; now he was watching a fully furbished professional studio, office and living space coming into shape around him. He’d call it April Base Studios and, for the next few years, all of Wisconsin would seem to revolve around it.

  Justin and Nate, between them, had bought the disused clinic for $250,000 in 2008 and, excited to be a part of Bon Iver’s idyllic musical commune, local bands rallied to help construct the perfect HQ. They filled in the pool, put felt on the walls and laid the new recording room with hardwood flooring that Justin had bought from a local middle school’s gym in St Paul, Minnesota for $200 from Craigslist. Operating tables were torn out to make way for a production office and through a glass window from the recording room, a control room was created, where a huge wooden table sagged beneath the weight of Vernon’s computers. The control room was Justin’s personal den, slowly adorned with a cornucopia of memorabilia: a range of guitars hung on the walls between an enormous relief map of Wisconsin State, snapshots of Vernon’s friends and an array of large oil paintings his father had painted in the Seventies during his research into the religions of the East – he dubbed the paintings “wild turkey people”. Later, as the recording of Bon Iver’s second album progressed, these paintings would be joined by the Gregory Euclide artwork commissioned by Vernon for the sleeve of the album; an isolated cabin in an icy landscape of real-life leaves and wood flakes. A glowering reminder of the origins of Vernon’s new empire.

  With visions of turning April Base into his own version of Dylan’s Big Pink studio where his legendary Basement Tapes were recorded with The Band, Justin also set about constructing accommodation for the coteries of bands and artists that would come and go. A deck was built out the back of the clinic, a fireplace opened up in the front room and 12 sets of two-bed bunk-beds were put together by hand, allowing up to 24 sleepover guests. To give the place the ultimate homely feel he’d even rescue two cats from an animal shelter, the two-year-old Flo and six-month-old Melmon, and let them have the run of the place, batting at computers and constantly having to be shooed away from urinating on the Astroturf protecting the recording room’s wooden floor.

  “They are just weirdos,” Justin said. “Totally mutt cats, but they have a lot of love and hunt and play outside. They live the high life. I’m really into my pets. They are a good thing to have around for your brain. It’s good to take care of something other than yourself. I can’t really have a dog with my lifestyle.”1

  “It’s woody, it’s comfortable, it feels like home,” Justin said of the ranch. “It’s not a sterile studio setting.”2 “It’s a unique space and destination; it’s our home out here. [It’s] been a wonderful freedom, working in a place we built. It’s also only three miles from the house I grew up in, and just 10 minutes from the bar where my parents met. When I finally came home to hunker down for a solid stretch there was a feeling of solid ground and an opportunity for liberation waiting in the space for me.”3

  When Justin returned from the last leg of his For Emma … tour in Europe he was tired but bristling from the experience. In September, as a single of the album’s title track was released, he’d played at the left-field End Of The Road festival in the UK, blown away not just by the reception he got from the mud-smattered, welly-wearing UK festival crowds but by the setting itself, “a magical wonderland, set in the English woods, with white pianos in the middle of light/art installations in the forest”4 and hanging out with Kurt Wagner from Lambchop. Bon Iver hung out with Bowerbirds in Amsterdam and watched punk kids juggling outside their dressing room window, soaking in the peaceful Dutch vibes even though his blog admitted “there can be days that are lonely out here”. In Berlin, September 28, a short walk from the Berlin Wall, he lounged beside a river bank scrawled with the graffiti’d slogan ‘I LOVE YOU TOO’ and listened in raptures to the Land Of Talk album he’d helped make: “it stirs me, it makes me want to
crush sh*t, it makes me LOVE rock music; find hope lining the strings of anger.”5 In Groningen, Holland on October 4, he was just as thrilled to find himself sharing a bill with John Hiatt at the Take Root Festival.

  And on October 20, April Base still a focusing fuzz in his imagination, he arrived back in Eau Claire and threw himself back into town life, hitting Racy’s for coffee, Egg Rolls Plus for carbs, The Joynt for cheap pitchers and the open country roads to suck in the Wisconsin fall air – “driving in the sun, the sumac red trees and golden mazes”.6 That weekend Vernon attended Sean Carey’s wedding, sealing a blessed year with a fairytale kiss.

  As he set to work buying and renovating April Base he knew there was nowhere else he could possibly set up his musical headquarters. “I definitely feel more closely knit to the fabric of people around here,” he said. “This is where I’m from and it’s where I plan on staying. It’s so nice when you’re a musician to feel like the fabric of an entire community, rather than just a part of a community of musicians. To come home and know that there are loggers and there are people that are actually doing hard work. Not that I don’t work hard. It’s just cooler to feel a part of that.”7 “I’m cool with being part of something bigger than me,” he added. “That’s what that house feels like as an opportunity.”8

  Even amidst the rubble of renovation, Vernon was itching to christen April Base with its first creative endeavours. He hatched a plan to record the Ticonderoga material he’d recorded as a split single with Bon Iver, but the scheme never came to fruition. At Halloween, with “bon fires” raging in the back garden, he set to work on his first remix offer, a reworking of Lykke Li’s ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’, a slinky soul pop song that the pair had performed together around a fountain in LA in September as part of Lykke’s series of online videos featuring herself performing with guest bands in unusual places and situations. Their video had Justin slapping his thighs with sleigh bells and wailing backing vocals and the Bon Iver band playing accordions and providing close harmonies as Lykke cavorted around with a plastic horn. “That was really fun,” Justin declared at the end, and he was determined to capture the frivolous pop-up party vibe in his remix.