Bon Iver
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But his main ambition was to get the Eau Claire collective rolling, and he started by tying up loose musical ends. His first collaborative target was Thomas Wincek, whose records ‘Customer’ and ‘Birds’ with Collections Of Colonies Of Bees had had Vernon in raptures all year. He and Wincek had a smattering of old material they’d written together back in 2005 before DeYarmond Edison left for Raleigh, and Justin was keen to revisit it, revisioning it through the lens of the glistening sonics he heard in Collections Of Colonies Of Bees’ latest offerings. Likewise, Wincek was excited by the idea of getting his avant electronic mitts on Justin’s new Bon Iver aesthetic. “When I heard For Emma … I think people were hearing something different than what I was hearing,” he said. “He got that comparison to Iron & Wine, but I always thought there was something weirder and more atmospheric about Justin’s stuff.”9
With COCOB – Wincek, Jon Mueller, Chris Rosenau, Daniel Spack and Jim Schoenecker – joining Justin at April Base, they became a brand new group, The Volcano Choir, and set about constructing an album that fall, the first of many April Base group projects. “It was a weird chance just to be a lead singer,” Justin said. “Not having to do anything on the guitar, and not having to write any of the music, just sitting on top of music feels really good.”10
The music they made together, pieced together into a nine-track album called Unmap, was a swirling, urgent post-rock stew. Justin’s falsetto half-formed words, drifted across vowels, hiccupped over hooks, often acting as an instrument on an even footing with the others. Collections Of Colonies Of Bees provided driving, looping rhythms, dashes of cold electronics and galactic swirls of sound. ‘Husks And Shells’ opened the album with a deceptively familiar atmosphere for Bon Iver fans – a choir of heavenly male harmonies forming impressions of words over a sweetly plucked guitar. But Wincek twisted, reversed and looped these cabin atmospherics into an unsettling but beautiful machinated take on the For Emma … sound, an electronically manipulated deconstruction of folk music backed with the high-pitched ‘beat’ of a digital alarm beep. Then ‘Seeplymouth’ left familiar ground for more adventurous waters. It had an airy, repetitive sampled note as a backbone very similar to that at the foundation of Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Dear Mr Supercomputer’, around which span cloudy organ chimes, weaving guitar trebles and fuzzy rock riffs, like a meshing net of noise. The appearance of Justin’s voice calmed the growing maelstrom, seemingly cooing “all is summer” to a cascade of cymbal and military beats, but the relentless motoric gasp soon struck up again, joined by whines of machinery and a tumultuous noise collage resembling a subway train crashing, very slowly, into a Death Cab For Cutie gig.
After which, ‘Island, IS’, with its bright looping snippets of guitar creating a catchy electronic short-circuit melody and its comprehensible lyrics, felt like a radio hit. Justin was fascinated by Wincek’s way of constructing sounds, the way he’d take a snippet of Chris Rosenau’s guitar and chop and loop it upon itself – or “cut it up and reassemble it”, as Wincek would describe it11 until it was barely recognisable, sounding more like a repeating flashback of a guitar, haunting the machine. It was a method Justin would learn a lot from, and try to incorporate into his next Bon Iver album, and for ‘Island, IS’ he brought one of his own Bon Iver techniques to the table, creating wild impressionist lyrics from the sounds that fell from his lips, drawn out by the tune. There was little sense to be gleaned from lines like “come and serve it with an omelette/And you’re on it with the carpet/You solved it, said you’re corporate/Set your orbit, set your coffin/Said it’s often that your old fits/Are your old tits on your hard drive”, let alone the earlier lines about catapults, the Reeperbahn and “a harbour mind in turpentine”, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the immaculate gelling of Rosenau’s flittering micro-loops of butterfly guitar with Justin’s circling rhymes, creating music that was as close to the intricate simplicity of nature as Vernon had yet come.
‘Dote’ was a far darker prospect, a drone of sampled monkish humming speckled with scatterbeats and awash with ambient industrial fuzz and Justin’s paranormal wails, sparking images of cruel factories haunted by long-dead workers set on sabotage. Its deafening buzz finale gave way to a bout of metallic bouncing at the start of ‘And Gather’, a two-minute piece that developed into random clapping and esoteric synthetic meanders, held together by bursts of quite enthralling Beach Boys harmonising that was actually one of the album’s more accessible melodic highpoints, despite the formless language. ‘And Gather’ sounded like a modern update of one of The White Album’s more avant garde moments, and made for the album’s playful, brotherly centrepiece, the human heart at Unmap’s core. You could practically hear the giggles and bear-hugs.
‘Mbira In The Morass’ was an experimental free-form jazz noise painting of the kind Justin had indulged in before with DeYarmond and on his solo albums, but with a distinct, spooky mood and antique blues homage ingrained. As the Volcano Choir clattered random percussion out of bells, metal lids, chimes and what sounds like the creaking springs and winch of a jack-in-the-box turned scarily slowly, discordant toy piano chords and ghoulish plucks of taut strings, most likely played on an mbira*, made a contorted, mutilated melody. Over this Justin gave his best impression of Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’, lacing this chilling four minutes with images redolent of the dark Deep South, demons and death: “beneath the willow … wild dogs around me howl and the moon burns my hands … fall at the lake, you’re all alone”. Like a werewolf’s lonesome wail at a blood red moon, ‘Mbira …’ was the Portishead that only the seriously disturbed could dance to.
‘Mbira …’ was the first time since introducing his For Emma … falsetto that the soul element of Justin’s voice had come so blatantly to the fore, an element that Ed Horrox believes would come to influence a new wave of electronic soul experimentalists. “There was a lot of soul in what he was doing, and I think that became clear later in his career. Other artists recognised that – people like James Blake, who sound a lot more like what you’d think of as a soul singer, were massively inspired by Justin.”
At just over a minute long, ‘Cool Knowledge’ was almost like Volcano Choir catching themselves accidentally writing a pop song and stopping before anything too commercial happened. An ambient vocal drone was joined by a growled human bass beat and solid rock drums. A barbershop melody struck up, warping itself nasally out of tune like dive-bombing stukas as if to offset the conventional pop verse that Justin was singing behind it. Then the voices cohered into stirring harmony and the track stopped abruptly, just where the killer chorus would usually have been. Volcano Choir were never going to give their listeners such easy, basic pleasures as a traditional song structure; instead, they shift gears into ‘Still’, a reworking of ‘Woods’ from the Blood Bank EP with added organ drone, babbling brook guitars, metallic string taps and electronic glitches. Beneath Justin’s Auto-Tuned vocals, Volcano Choir slowly built a cinematic cacophony of cavernous guitar echoes, pounding drums and resounding gongs that was anything but ‘still’.
This mind-bulging post-rock parade closed with ‘Youlogy’, another experiment in classic blues and avant garde jazz, but where a eulogy looks back on a life worthily lived, ‘Youlogy’, in keeping with Volcano Choir’s musical pioneering spirit, looked forward to one. A single oscillating whine and a few banjo plucks formed the backing to a modern spiritual, Justin’s Billie Holiday voice singing grandiloquent snippets of soulful Americana – “my time, so long, look down that long, lonesome road where you and I must go” – expanding into distant gospel choirs as it floated through a melody inhabiting the emotionally charged space between ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, and thus a melody intrinsically evocative of pride, honour, hardship and nobility. Despite all future lows or financial woes (“dollar man knocking on my door”), ‘Youlogy’ predicted that love would carry us through. A heartwarming human end to an album of cold, crisp, crystalline invention.
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sp; The album, which would reach number 92 in the Billboard chart on its release in September 2009 on Jagjaguwar, was a grand launch for April Base, bedecked with further cause for celebration. Amid the flurry of activity around the recording of Unmap, work stopped to avidly follow the election of Barack Obama as President, and share in the nation’s tide of pride the following day – Justin posted a picture on his blog on election day standing next to a large US flag, and wrote “This is our time. We are entering our Golden Age. When we look back at this when we are old, we will know it as the time when America got its transfusion; with the red blood of the fore fathers of this young country and true patriots running through us again … Happy Election Day. Eau Bama”.
Vernon had other unfinished business. In December 2008 The Shouting Matches finally played their first ever gig at the Eau Claire House Of Blues, Vernon glorying in the rough electric charge of his guitar and the deep, warm snarl of his natural voice. Those local fans unaware of Vernon’s pre-Bon Iver work were blown away by the sheer muscle and thrilling brutality of the show, although The Shouting Matches’ Mouthoil EP, despite much public demand, was still on the back burner where it had been placed to concentrate on Bon Iver’s rise, and it wouldn’t see the light of day for the foreseeable future. Unlike the track he began working on around this time for an AIDS charity album with Aaron Dessner of The National, a band he’d bonded with as his star had ascended, and who had seen immense potential in him.
“I think Justin’s the Neil Young of our generation,” Aaron’s brother Bryce, also a member of The National, would say. “I’d go further, because he’s combining good songwriting and very adventurous sonic production in a way that I don’t think anyone else is doing. Usually, bands that are good at the sonic envelope are missing something in terms of writing actual songs. Justin does both things incredibly well.”12
As the end-of-year magazine polls of the year’s best albums rolled in, most featuring For Emma … in prominent positions, and Bon Iver rounded off 2008 with a final single from For Emma, Forever Ago, ‘Re: Stacks’, and a solid stint of live shows: in Dublin, London and the larger US cities, he found himself graduating to big theatres and music halls, seated venues of several thousand capacity. In NYC he was booked to perform ‘Skinny Love’ on the David Letterman show on December 11, a huge platform for exposure for upcoming alternative bands and a performance that Bon Iver watched that night on the screens of a bar next door to the 1,500-seater Town Hall where they were playing, insisting the jukebox was shut down and high-fiving each other and clinking beers as their individual close-ups appeared onscreen.
With a final gig at Eau Claire’s State Theatre as a thank-you to the local fans who’d stuck with him throughout his rise, Justin ended the year in a state of serene shock and appreciation for the success that had landed in his lap.
“I feel extremely grateful and lucky and fortunate,” he said. “There are so many things that have happened this year that, if any one of them had happened before, just one thing in one 10-year period, I would’ve considered myself lucky. So, it’s been like this shining year, where the magnitude of it has been both constant and immense. I’m more than I can measure happiness with. I’ve gotten more than I’ve ever dreamt of. It’s crazy. I think that all those years playing music, I never felt like it was hard, or like I was struggling. I was just happy playing music. Then, all of a sudden, this happened, and it far exceeded everything else I’ve ever done added together. I’m still reeling from that.”13
Justin was, however, acutely aware of the weight being placed on the mythology of For Emma, Forever Ago, soon to be declared amongst the best albums of the decade by both Pitchfork and Stereogum, which ranked it number 29 and 11 respectively. “Whatever was special about that record got mystified into vapour at some point, almost beyond repair,” he’d say. “It just got convoluted until it became bigger than what the original point was. I think what people reacted to was that someone made the choice to do that with their time but I also think people kind of made up what happened. Which is fine and romantic, but again there’s a danger in mystifying things beyond truth. It’s a problem with anything, like when they mystify the story of Jesus or whatever.”14
He was already formulating ideas about the manner in which he wanted to create his next Bon Iver album though, and also the band he dreamed it might one day become. “The way I could see doing a band thing is if I was looking to put together like an orchestra,” he postulated, “like two drum kits, five guitars and a French horn. You know if I wanted a specific vibe that I couldn’t get by overdubbing stuff, and that’s something I think about a lot ‘cos I don’t want to get into habits.”15
The habits he meant, of course, were the need for isolation and misery in order to create universally moving songs. What Justin had to figure out was how to let that same inspiration come without the need for personal suffering. “Not everything in my life happened in those three months,” he realised, “you live your life and you realise it’s not that important.”16
“I wondered about it for a second, you ask yourself the question: ‘do I have to suffer to do this?’” he told Stool Pigeon, referencing his Religious Studies thesis on ‘The Problem Of Evil’. “It’s like ‘why do good things happen to bad people?’ and all that stuff. Then you get to the question of whether artists have to suffer, and it just seems to be a bullshit circumstance. Sadness just happens to be the easiest thing to get at, and that probably has to do with your brain or something. It’s the easiest thing to realise that you’re alone.”17
“Part of what For Emma … meant to me was that it was an element of change,” he said. “An autumnal sort of recycling of spirit or something. And I knew that what I had to do for the next album was simply make a record for me. And that it would be successful even if it sold five copies or no copies and I just gave it to my friends. That would’ve been successful to me.”18
“I liked the process,” he said of his cabin days. “I also don’t want to recreate it, or invest in it as itself. I want to just take my attitude at the time and try to extend it, which basically means to keep growing and changing – two things I forgot to do from about the ages of 19 to 25. But, I have other stuff, folded down, and around in there, that I’ll just try and excavate.”19
The excavation would be a long one. There was just so much other stuff about to fold around him.
Sat at April Base early in 2009 – either alone for weeks on end or surrounded by bands and friends building beds, renovating rooms or filling the hallways with new music – Justin struggled to find a writing method that worked for him. It was almost as if there were too many possibilities, too many songs flying around waiting for him to catch hold of.
“I didn’t feel like there was something I need to say any more,” he mused, “which [gave] me a new-found freedom … that I never had before. The feelings are still rumbling away, but I don’t know what they mean any more. I mean, I used to write songs like Neil Young or Springsteen, and who’s to say that’s not as personal.”20
“I’ve always wanted this much room to work,” he added, “but it is daunting. There were definite days where I felt like ‘well, all right, I’m just going to have to try one of the hundreds of combinations of things in this room right now’.”21
To kick off his writing process, he took inspiration from the way that Thomas Wincek had created the Volcano Choir tracks via his “glitchy, do-whatever-you-want vibe”. Open to cutting, chopping and looping sounds to carve out the sound he heard in his head, Justin began writing by forming a soundscape rather than relying on a melody line, in the vein of the Volcano Choir sessions. He spoke of “de-construction/re-construction. It wasn’t altogether different to For Emma … – that was the biggest change that I’d gone through sonically, songwriting wise, so the process didn’t change that much between then and now – I just wasn’t using an acoustic guitar as much. On this record I allowed myself to go in to a different zone … there was this vast, vague landscape you
could go in to and not have any real idea what’s going on, but somehow, at the very same time, know exactly what’s going on.”22
“The songwriting was sort of apart of some subconscious ramblings and attempting to discover new sonic space,” he’d explain, “just trying to explore some new sonic space with different instruments and different ways of recording those instruments and seeing what I could come up with that way … Matt McCaughan and Sean Carey, I think, were there more in the beginning for me to help flesh out some of the drum parts. But I was playing some drums; I was playing some bass and keyboards and things like that, and also just experimenting with vocals the whole time.”23
It would be a slow and painstaking process. Every song on the distant vision of a second Bon Iver album would take a year to complete, from start to finish, and Justin would only write 10 in total. The first to come (besides the already underway ‘Perth’) was a song called ‘Minnesota, WI’, a waft of saintly slide guitar and plucked banjo that Justin felt should be about his childhood and would ultimately grow the sort of jazz horns he’d first worked into Mount Vernon. Then, for four months, nothing. One lush and romantic early piece (eventually called ‘Calgary’) took the form, in Justin’s mind, of a wedding vow to Kathleen Edwards, the folk singer whose songs he’d first sung his falsetto along to in the car, and for whom he clearly had great admiration and grand intentions. Should he ever meet her.