For the next three months he’d zig-zag across the Atlantic almost weekly: from the enormo-fest of Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, to the sedate environs of the Serpentine Sessions in London’s Hyde Park and back again for a string of dates in Utah, Colorado and California. July 25 he was in England for the kiddie-friendly Camp Bestival festival, on August 7 he was in Chicago to play at Lollopalooza, on August 12 he was in Oslo to hit the Scandinavian festivals. There was a solid stretch of European festivals to cover towards the end of the summer – Pukkelpop in Belgium, Haldern Pop in Germany, Summer Sundae in London, Lowlands in Holland, Green Man in Wales – but perhaps the most satisfying run of shows on this summer 2009 tour were the three in California mid-July. At Santa Barbara’s Grenada Theatre, Fresno’s Tower Theatre and Saratoga’s Mountain Winery, Justin played alongside The Ingido Girls, finally part of the gig that had changed his life aged 14.
In songwriting terms, though, the tour was a frustration. The sounds he was creating for the next Bon Iver album were constantly stirring around the back of his mind, needing to be excavated, but he could do no on-the-road recording, he needed a studio environment to work up his soundscapes. He had the bare bones of the songs in place but he was “looking for texture”. “With all the touring and distractions going on, I would get a sound together but I wouldn’t have time to work on it,” he said. “So I sat on the road with these sketches and saw how they revealed themselves emotionally.”38
Instead, he wrote lyrics, working on the words for ‘Calgary’ every day while on tour and grabbing any spare time between gigs and Gayngs sessions to settle into his April Base studio nook, ram on his headphones and let the sounds he was making suggest words to him. “I actually worked on the lyrics on this album for much longer,” he said, “over the course of years, to get them right, and to get them right seems strange because they always read like I’ve just stopped in the middle of writing. But, somehow, each song is complete in that way.”39 “I had to work backwards in a way, the lyrics sort of came as the melodies and songs came together.”40
“With this new record, I attempted to build odd landscapes that you could exist in that had weird feelings but also cool-sounding words,” he said. “I really wanted to go deep – I went as far as writing out words on the page and making sure they looked good, reading-wise.”41
“I’ve made this weird choice to write songs from this more subconscious place. It’s kind of deciding on basic brain boundaries, to only come up with lyrics that come super weirdly, or just by sound, and I’ve learned enough by doing that to end up writing songs that mean something in a more elusive or opaque way, that makes it prettier.”42
The songs were still elusive, unformed; like ‘Perth’, ‘Calgary’ and ‘Brackett, WI’, they seemed to be cohering around places, each song redolent of a city, a building, a place in history or a geographical metaphor for a state of mind. But to make the second Bon Iver the masterpiece it needed to be, he’d have to flip his working method completely, from micro to macro, from hermetic to expansive.
And the key, the spark, would come in the form of the most unlikely phone call ever.
* An mbira is an Eastern and Southern African instrument made of metal keys attached to a wooden board.
* Released February 16, 2009.
* Observant students of Vernon’s lyrics will notice the start of an ash motif in the song here, culminating in the singings of autumn and the ash in Nana’s urn.
* Even then Justin wasn’t happy with the first incarnation of ‘Calgary’; it wasn’t until the snare part was introduced that the track clicked, giving Justin the inspiration to write the guitar lines and bridge.
* And to some sessions still held in Olson’s apartment in Minneapolis.
* If Olson’s intention for ‘Cry’ was to pay tribute to 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’, it was slightly off – the latter track was actually written by 10cc’s other songwriting partnership, Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman.
* Relayted was voted Album Of The Year by Guardian critics in 2010.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pure Fantasy
THE rap superstar awaiting his response, Justin mulled over the strangest offer of his life.
Mid-January 2010, Eau Claire deep in the clutches of mid-winter, April Base as cut off as a coffin. Would he leave this freezing hub, his comfort zone, his home, and fly off to Hawaii to record music in the ultimate luxury with some of the biggest names in rap lounging around the top-of-the-range studio?
“I was in New York in January and I got a call from my manager,” Justin said, “and he said Kanye West wanted to maybe use ‘Woods’ as a sample. I was like, ‘Yes’.”1
The trip to Hawaii, however, Justin had to give a moment’s thought.
It wasn’t that he was wary of collaboration by this point. Besides his work with Volcano Choir and Aaron Dessner, his live appearances with David Byrne and the ongoing recordings with Gayngs, he’d also recorded a song in 2009 with rising multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter St Vincent called ‘Roslyn’* for the soundtrack to the latest instalment in the Twilight movie franchise, New Moon.
“I don’t know those films and the little bit I’ve seen was pretty unwatchable,” Justin said of the sync. “And, to be honest with you, I said no to that because I don’t really jive with that shit. But, the next day, I was working on this song and I thought ‘Shit. This sounds like a fucking emo-vampire-song.’ I was feeling really weird about it, but driving down this country road in the middle of nowhere I saw this farm girl and she had iPod headphones in; she was wearing a Twilight T-shirt and I decided: ‘I’m doing it.’ People don’t read Pitchfork or read music magazines to hear about bands – I heard about Dinosaur Jr for the first time because of Wayne’s World 2.”2
Revolving around a spectre of acoustic guitar and mist-shrouded throbs of slide guitar, there was certainly something supernatural about ‘Roslyn’, St Vincent’s heavenly wisp melting effortlessly into Vernon’s many-headed vocal chorus. Mirroring a scene in New Moon where heroine Bella leaps from a cliff’s edge, the song seemed to tell of a woman’s suicidal plunge, “Dancing around/Folds in her gown/Sea and the rock below/Cocked to the undertow/Bones, blood and teeth erode/They will be crashing low”. He even slipped in vampiric images for the full Twilight effect: “Wings wouldn’t help you … when did this just become a mortal home?” With a song on the soundtrack of one of 2009’s biggest teen-friendly movies, it clearly wasn’t concerns of mainstream commercialism that gave Justin pause, the rapper still on the line.
Nor was it a fear of immersing himself in the darkest of themes. Towards the end of 2009 he’d also collaborated on a folk opera concept album by Anaïs Mitchell called Hadestown, the hour-long story of Greek hero Orpheus’ travels through the underworld to rescue his stolen lover Eurydice. Mitchell had been working on the project for three years before coming across the perfect voice to play the role of Orpheus.
“I got asked to open one of Bon Iver’s tours in Europe,” she says. “The very first night of the tour, when I heard Justin sing ‘Re: Stacks’ in this beautiful hall in Newcastle, my heart exploded, I thought, ‘He HAS to be Orpheus.’ I wrote Todd Sickafoose [the producer] and Michael Chorney [who wrote the score]: ‘He is the Orpheus of the century!’ But I had to have a stern little talk with myself that night, I was like, this guy doesn’t even know you, he’s already doing you a huge favour having you on the tour, you can’t ask him now, you might weird him out, wait till the end of the tour and THEN ask.”3
On only the second night, though, Anais made her move. “We were on a ferryboat from Scotland to Norway and I had a couple glasses of wine and I couldn’t bear it any longer, I’d been thinking about it all day, I just blurted it all out in a rush, ‘the opera, the record, will you please, please, please be Orpheus?’ And Justin just said, ‘Yes’.”4 *
Though most of her work on Hadestown took place in her Brooklyn studio, on Justin’s request Anais travelled to April Base “in darke
st winter” to record him singing the part in his natural baritone. “I’d teach him the melodies, then go out of the room and cook or read or whatever so as not to weird him out by hanging around,” she explains. “I’d hear him from the kitchen, but just one part at a time, one line at a time, so I was pretty clueless until he’d say ‘OK!’ and I’d run back in the room to hear the symphony of harmonies and countermelodies he’d created. He’s such an intuitive guy, he hears everything in his head, I think I saw him go to the piano ONCE to work something out. There was this one song where he sang some syllables, not words exactly, just sounds, they definitely weren’t part of the lyrics, and I was like, ‘hey man umm … what are you saying there?’ and he said, ‘I dunno! It just felt right’ and I was like, ‘OK we’ll keep it!’
“I love the idea that Orpheus, the son of a muse, able to make stones cry and milk flow from virgins’ breasts with his singing, is able to sing with many voices at the same time. When Todd and I went through Justin’s vocal files back in Brooklyn we came up with little names and numbers for his different voices, ‘cos they’re so different, his low ones are so manly and sensual, and his high ones so ethereal and emotional, and the combination, to me, is a very Orphic thing, emotional manhood, I love it.”5
Hadestown, which also had prime roles sung by Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown and The Haden Triplets, would become a critical hit, scoring maximum marks from reviewers at the Guardian and Drowned In Sound. So plunging into the depths of darkness wasn’t a concern to Vernon as he considered the bizarre offer. Darkness sold.
No, Justin’s only worry was the idea of dislocation. He was just settling in to working on his own album at April Base and, while he was very keen to snap up this new offer, he wondered if Kanye West might come to record in Eau Claire instead.
“Can’t you see if he wants to come here?” Justin laughed. “I don’t know why I said that. It was kind of dickish.”6
Dickish or not, Kanye agreed. A flight was booked, Kanye was coming to Wisconsin in January, the rap royalty state visit of the century. “He was literally on his way,” Vernon laughs, “and we were like, do we have to make the beds? Should we order pizza? We don’t know what to do!”7
Inevitably, the Wisconsin weather intervened. A snowstorm saw Kanye’s flight cancelled, and there was nothing for it but for Justin to head to Hawaii and party rap megastar style. “He called the next day and said, ‘Why don’t you just come here? It’s, like, nice.’ “8 “We ended up talking for a half hour about music and how we were fans of each other and Avatar. It was a really pleasant, easy-going conversation between two people that are pretty psyched about music.” How had Kanye heard of Vernon? “This guy Jeff [Bhasker] who plays keyboards and writes a lot of the music with Kanye told me he showed Kanye my shit. He’s like, ‘My fucking girlfriend wouldn’t go see Kanye play ‘cause she went to see you at Town Hall in New York. I had to find out who this asshole was so I looked you up.’ But I think [producer] No I.D. had something to do with it, too … [Kanye] was like, ‘I like how you sing so fearlessly. You don’t care how your voice sounds. It’d be awesome if you could come out to Hawaii and hear the track, and there’s some other shit I think we could throw down on.’ “9 “I surprised myself by not being nervous or apprehensive,” he said. “I said, ‘When should I come out?’ And he was like, ‘How about tomorrow?’ “10
The clash of genres held no fear for Vernon. “Genre is not important to me. I liked Kanye’s music so it made sense for me to work with him, even if on the outside it seemed odd. Working with him wasn’t difficult and it wasn’t challenging because it wasn’t my music, it was his.”11 “It seemed like a match made in heaven to me,” he added. “I’ve really been a huge fan since ‘The College Dropout’. Working with him made a lot of sense.”12
The scenes he encountered when he reached Kanye’s compound studio in Oahu, Hawaii were the stuff of a stoner surf bum’s dreams. In what the New York Times would describe as a “luxury sleepover”, Kanye West was piecing together what would become his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, surrounded by a swirling collective of rap’s biggest names – Rick Ross, A-Trak, Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj would wander in and out of the studio at random – and Kanye’s 16-hour working days would be punctuated by breaks to go jet-skiing or play basketball. Staying at Kanye’s house on the island, Justin would shoot hoops and share breakfast with him, amazed to find him so down-to-earth and knowledgeable about Vernon’s music. “He was into what I was doing; he would sit me down and talk to me about the lyrics to Blood Bank and I was like, ‘Who are you, man?’ He’s a good fan and just like anybody. He just gets put in to a rap genre; he is a rapper and he wants to make rap records, but he’s smart.”13 “I think he liked that I had a similar emotional approach to music, and that I used Auto-Tune as a kind of texture. It made sense.”14
Inspired by how “chilled, concentrated and hard-working”15 Kanye was, the first week that Vernon spent at the Oahu studio was spent exclusively working on the track that Kanye had forged out of his sample of Vernon’s ‘Woods’, called ‘Lost In The World’. “He plays me the track and it sounds exactly like how you want it to sound,” Vernon recalls, “forward moving, interesting, light-hearted, heavy-hearted, fucking incredible sounding jam. It was kind of bare so I added some choir-sounding stuff and then thicked out the samples with my voice … We were just eating breakfast and listening to the song on the speakers and he’s like, ‘Fuck, this is going to be the festival closer.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, cool’. It kind of freaked me out.”16
With Justin adding new vocals to the crunching hip-hop rampage that Kanye had constructed around his sample of ‘Woods’, they bonded firmly over that first week of working together. “He’s such a spirited dude,” Justin said. “We would have political conversations and there’d be all this arguing back and forth. No one else there was afraid to say anything. I think he’s very aware of the person he is, and I applaud him for that. It takes a lot of strength just to stay how he is amongst all the shit that he’s subjected to. But I found him extremely like a bro. You could talk to him about whatever.”
The pair exchanged viewpoints and ideas, shifting each others’ perspectives a little. “Kanye hates the word ‘humble’,” said Justin, “and after I spent time with him, I don’t use that word any more. He got really angry with me and asked me, ‘Have you ever looked at the definition of that word? It’s borderline self-loathing’. It really made me think. I don’t want to be humble. I want to have humility.”17
“After that first week he was like, ‘I want you to come back’. So I came back a few weeks later and it was the same kind of thing, throwing ideas around – there are a bunch of other songs I’d just throw down on, write a little hook, whatever. In the studio, he was referencing Trent Reznor, Al Green, the Roots – the fucking awesomest shit. It made total sense to me.”18
On his second trip to Hawaii, Justin requested a separate studio to work in “because I’d do so much overdubbing to get my ideas out. So I ended up recording in this tiny back room, and then Kanye would come back and listen to what I came up with, and then we’d work on changing the lyrics. We’d just sit there and collaborate. It was fucking fun, man … some of the stuff I was doing with my voice was more weird and instrumental – basically building what would sound like a synth part with vocals. I felt very much like a session musician, and that was really cool, too.”19
Another brand of freak-out Justin encountered was having rapper and Maybach Music Group founder Rick Ross smoke joints throughout his recording sessions. “Rick Ross would just be sitting there a lot of the time while I was working on shit, on a piano bench right behind me, smoking blunt after blunt after blunt. In between takes, he’d inhale and then say real quiet, ‘That was good, homie.’ I’d be like, ‘OK! I’ll keep going!’?”20 “I was literally in the back room rolling a spliff with Rick Ross talking about what to do on the next part of a song. It was astonishing. Kanye came back and was like, ‘Look at you two
guys. This is the craziest studio in the Western world right now!’
“There was one night where I was in the control room with the engineer and John Legend was in the sound booth singing along to something that I did. It was just like, ‘Holy shit, man. There’s John Legend in there singing like a motherfucker.”21
Over three week-long trips to Kanye’s Hawaii complex, Justin recorded vocals for around 10 more tracks for Kanye’s album, of which one made the cut. After verses from Kanye, Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj exposing their inner beasts, Vernon’s treated metallic voice took the final verse of the pulsing tribalist ‘Monster’: “I crossed the line/And I’ll let God decide/I wouldn’t last these shows/So I am headed home”. Four lines that, along with his Auto-Tuned treble on ‘Lost In The World’, would grant Vernon a whole new level of crossover credibility, make him the indie rock name to drop in hip-hop circles.
But besides the rap kudos, what Justin took most from his visits to Kanye’s studio was a sense of creative openness, a joint effort. “I watched how they were willing to see so many ideas through and allow the weirdest things into songs,” he recalled. “Things that might not work initially, but that you could ultimately twist and contort into working. I watched them direct more than I watched them play.”22
From the Kanye and continuing Gayngs sessions, Vernon realised that anything was possible in his music, and that collaboration was definitely preferable to isolation. So back in April Base, cushioned from outside pressure with only the Gayngs album mixing and a few Bon Iver live dates to get in the way, Justin filled the studio with all manner of instruments to use on the record, opened his mind to every genre from Bruce Hornsby to Charlie Mingus and Oxford shanty-folk troupe Stornoway* and knuckled down to the second Bon Iver album, taking a far more open-armed approach, both stylistically and in terms of allowing other musicians in. Amongst the first to be invited to contribute were pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz, Arcade Fire saxophonist Colin Stetson and saxophonist Mike Lewis.
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