Bon Iver is not accustomed to spring heat, and stretches back in the Texas
sun, “Every so often” he grins, “it’s nice not to have to cope with snow”.
Broad and unshaven, with messy, sandy hair, the 26-year-old
singer-songwriter – Justin Vernon to his mum (who, incidentally, is Justine)
– has in six months gone from unknown to indie superstar. He scratches his
head and smiles as he recalls the day, only a few months ago, when he
realised that something that he had only fleetingly dared dream of was
indeed happening.
Listen to
Skinny Love by Bon Iver
“We’d only pressed up 500 copies of my album. A review appeared on Pitchfork;
by 6pm that day we’d sold out. Up to then we’d only sold 200 copies over
three months.” The album, For Emma, Forever Ago, scored an 8.1
on the influential music website. In the music world, that’s the equivalent
of being voted Richard and Judy’s Best Read . . . ever “That day was insane.
It tipped things over the edge. My manager was taking calls in the shower.
I’d go for a piss and come back to 50 e-mails in my inbox.”
Now signed to a high-profile label, he’s in Texas at the South by Southwest
music festival as a “buzz” artist, with each of his gigs packed and fans
mouthing every word of his songs back to him. He has of course sold a lot
more than 500 records. It’s a very modern, word-of-blog success story, made
all the more striking when considered alongside the album’s peculiar and
impossibly romantic genesis.
At the time the record surfaced, not much was known about Vernon or his
haunting creation. Rumours began to circulate. It had been made after a
break-up. Vernon had escaped into the wilds of the Midwest. There he had
gone feral, foraging for food. This latterday Rousseau had survived a bitter
winter and emerged in the spring with a collection of songs that became the
album. To top it all off, the songs had been an attempt to win his
girlfriend back.
“The stories got pretty wild – that I had killed a deer with my bare hands,”
Vernon says, grinning.
Of course, none of it would have been believable without the record.
Viscerally atmospheric, it’s an album you inhabit; you can even hear the
creak and sighs of the room it was made in. It is wrought with emotion yet
is as stark as a white wintry sky, crafted out of little more than the
tender scrape and rattle of a multi-tracked acoustic guitar and Vernon’s
voice, a glassy falsetto, layered hypnotically, chorally, like drifts of
snow.
Remarkably, most of the rumours turned out to be true. Vernon grew up in Eau
Claire, Wisconsin, a town in a part of the American Midwest evocatively
known as the Driftless Zone. It’s a region of deep river valleys and vast
forests; identified with logging, corn, cheese, hunting, and long, long
winters.
“I was talking to my dad yesterday and they just got another foot of snow,
it’s currently minus 5C. To give you an idea of how much snow is a part of
our lives, our town has 300 salt and snow removal trucks for 80,000 people.
When I lived in North Carolina, they had four for 400,000 people. You start
to go a little crazy around March but in the main people from the Midwest
are proud of two things: beer and the weather.” It was his move to temperate
North Carolina in 2005, after studying world religions at college (“All it
taught me was that it’s a pile of garbage. People need to think more and
pray less”), which coincided with Vernon’s creative and personal nadir. He
had moved there with his friends and bandmates of over a decade, to make a
go of their band, DeYarmond Edison.
“It was a tough transition for me, and it wasn’t for them. I can look back now
and see that for the first time we were growing apart. But we’d known such
happiness together, I was frozen by a fear of never having that again.”
That winter, Vernon packed all his belongings into his car and drove the 1,200
miles to the cabin. Built by his father in 1979, it lies in the middle of 80
acres of woods.
“It’s not a getaway, there’s no lake or recreation. We put in a toilet only
last year. We’d go as kids [he has a younger brother], my dad would pretend
it was fun, but we’d basically be there to use a chainsaw all day and haul
trees to the sawmill. It’s his bizarre hobby. He spends more time there than
he does at work . . . I’d like to see myself in him, in knowing how to be
alone. He treats life sacredly without saying much about it.”
For the first two weeks Vernon didn’t empty the boot of his car. He spent his
day splitting wood, buzzing, sawing, nailing, walking, being cold (the
average December temperature is minus 13C). He even ritually buried his
laptop in the snow (“It wasn’t actually that dramatic, it was basically
broken”). He did live on deer meat he had killed, but with a shotgun.
“I understand why people are repelled by the idea of hunters; there is a lot
of machismo involved, especially where I’m from. But at one point I decided
the most humane thing I could do would be to kill my food myself. That deer
fed me for the whole winter.”
After a while he fetched in his old guitars, dragged them up the plank stairs
his father had built and began recording on a simple four-track.
“I didn’t know what I was doing. It was very foreign. The landscape was
definitely breathing on me. The cold, dry space of the woods gives you
enough quiet that you can hear your own thoughts.”
Vernon has a deep speaking voice and had always previously sung in a gravelly,
shouty baritone, “like Waits or Springsteen. Over the years my fave singers
have been more gospel singers, but every time I’d tried to sing like that
before I always ended up sounding like a complete asshole.”
Alone, with no one to hear how he sounded, he dug deep and found his inner
falsetto. “It felt more internal, more realised.”
He recorded layer upon layer of melody. There were no words; instead he
stacked up syllables and built up vocal tracks. “Then I’d listen to them
over and over and annotate what I guessed I was saying. I ended up feeling
like I’d gotten to my real meaning somehow, by going through the backdoor
that way. Excavating my subconscious.”
He spent three months in the cabin. When he emerged he had nine songs that he
didn’t even realise were an album until one of his friends told him that’s
what he had made. The name, Bon Iver, is a bastardisation of the French, bon
hiver (good winter). “I don’t speak French, it’s from a story about a
town in Alaska; people would come out of their houses after the first snow
of each year, hug each other and say “ Bon hiver’, but hiver,
reminded me of my liver, so I dropped the ‘h’.”
Vernon is great company. Both fond of a swearword and ruminative, he is also
clearly charismatic. His new band-mate is a 20-year-old he once taught
guitar whom he rung up out of the blue and gave a night to decide whether he
wanted to drop out of college and come on the road with him. “He called me
the next morning and said, ‘Yes, I don’t know how thrilled my parents feel
about it but I’m in.’ ” The response from audiences so far has been
overwhelming, “Every day I’m surprised at the reaction. It’s hard to keep
up.”
And what about the Emma of the album title; how does she feel; did he win her
back?
“Emma doesn’t really exist. Well, she does, Emma is her middle name but we had
split up long before I moved. 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.”
And there have been other lives profoundly affected. Vernon shakes his head in
disbelief as he describes receiving an e-mail from a man who has been
playing the album to his terminally ill 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 a cabin. People
need to have the time to deal with their issues. Find sanctity . . .
serenity.”
For Emma, Forever Ago is out on May 12 (4AD); Bon Iver’s UK tour starts at
ATP, Rye, May 10 2008
Who would have thought it? A song (Re:Stacks), written by a backwoodsman, has now burrowed its way into my brain, and will now, forevermore, be associated in my mind with today, my birthday. I feel pretty sure that is not what it author intended, but hey, that is the magic of modern life. Thanks.
Eric Pettigrew, Richmond, UK
Incredible album, and a very fine interview with some fascinating insights, well done the author
George, Edinburgh,