Interview: Bon Iver

We live in an age where Google owns your house, Facebook’s sleeping with your wife and Twitter will deny you the right to a fair trial if you dare to kick up a fuss. As such, the idea of someone sloping off into the woods to tap hidden wells of inspiration holds a special sort of appeal. It speaks to our conditioned ideas about the solitary genius, certainly, but it’s also wish fulfilment for a culture increasingly short on places to hide. But for Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, getting away from it all wound up causing almost as many problems as it solved.

To recap briefly: in the winter of 2006, Vernon sought solace from assorted friends, bandmates and estranged GFs in the frozen wilds of rural Wisconsin, producing an album of quiet, introspected beauty after three months spent toughing it out in a log cabin. From there a grizzled man-myth of truly epic proportions grew up, sprung in part, no doubt, by delighted music hacks reared on a gruel-like diet of PR guff, but also from the peculiar chord struck by his story.

The record in question, For Emma, Forever Ago, was a knockout with fans and critics alike. But in the end the snow-globe mythologising of Vernon’s countryside retreat started sounding awfully glib, and condescended somewhat to the man’s undeniable sense of craft. One commentator even went so far as to note that “what fans should fear is Bon Iver figuring itself out”, as if the gift of self-reflexivity were completely alien to this thoughtful and softly-spoken individual.

Fortunately for him, Vernon is able to see the funny side of all this: “It’s just keeping yourself at arm’s length, never taking yourself too seriously. That can be so damaging. Whatever was special about that record got mystified into vapour at some point, almost beyond repair. 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 [while I was out there]. 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.”

So you’re saying you’re not actually like Jesus?

“No, not at all… But really, yes,” he deadpans.

Still, it’s easy to see how Vernon might feel slighted by the notion that For Emma… was somehow a fluke of circumstance. “There are people that slave up to that artistic thing,” he says. “But [when I was recording For Emma…] I’d just found it impossible to have any sort of joy in my life. That’s what that record was for me. It wasn’t like I was expecting it to be some commercially released thing, period, never mind it doing well and everything.

“But in your life it’s like, ‘Why continue to go down this path of not being happy?’ I’m not sure why anyone would do that. I mean, I’m not an egotistical person but I’m very proud of this new record I made precisely because I did figure my stuff out, and I think the music is better as a result. Not to take away from the last one… I’m proud of that still, but it’s a different thing — it’s like black and white, charcoal-ash compared to this album where it feels I’m starting to use colour.”

The new record, Bon Iver, should provide ample reminder that Justin Vernon the musician is every bit as interesting as Justin Vernon the myth, with a beautifully crafted set expanding on the blueprint rolled out by its predecessor. For those who paid attention, of course, the signs that Vernon would successfully steer his Bon Iver project out of the woods were already there — first, with the minimal experimentation of 2008’s ‘Blood Bank’ EP, and also with impactful turns on the Gayngs and Kanye West records, which showed he could do suave and epic as well as forlorn.

Even so, the whirlwind of potentially damaging hype surrounding For Emma, Forever Ago’s release did make Vernon think twice about recording its follow-up.

‘Calgary’

“I wondered about it for a second,” he says. “You ask yourself the question: ‘Do I have to suffer to do this?’ And that’s ultimately the question you always ask. I was a religious studies major at college and my senior thesis was this class called ‘the problem of evil’, so 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.

“And by no means am I in a race to be in some kind of genius list or anything, but I think what’s important is trying to expand your palette and your ability to express things. And with this record I was like, ‘I don’t need to be sad.’ I mean, there’s some grieving on there, but it’s more like I’m grieving sadness. Like a ‘goodbye loneliness’-type thing. I’m not gonna invite that shit into my life if I don’t have to.”

Lighting out for new lyrical frontiers was only half the problem, however, since writing sessions for Bon Iver also found Vernon coming up against his limitations as a songwriter. “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 says. “Well I’d just lost that. I didn’t have a guitar that did it for me anymore. I had to go into the studio setting and find something that would help. So I’d plug the electric guitar straight in — which is a sound I really like from old Motown recordings; just that really dry, soft sound — and I’d shape it with pre-amps and different microphones, mostly just all in the box before it gets to the recording device, so it’s sounding really good. And 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.”

Vernon built a studio in an old veterinary clinic near his childhood home in Wisconsin for the record, which draws on a seasoned ensemble of musicians to nudge Bon Iver’s sonic vessel out into the misty unknown. Opener ‘Perth’ goes off with the gunpowder poignancy of fireworks at new year; ‘Towers’ is buoyed by Greg Liesz’s precisely flowering, pedal steel accompaniment; and ‘Calgary’ steals breath with the soft eighties thunder of its arrangement.

The title is intended to be read as a goodbye of sorts to the Bon Iver of old; as in, ‘bon iver, Bon Iver’, an aside that speaks to Vernon’s themes of cycles in life and nature. “It’s almost like you’re saying ,‘Happy death, Bon Iver,’ because you’re inviting change,” he says. “You can look at winter a couple of different ways. You could see it as a metaphor for death of life, or as the end of an old cycle and giving into the new cycle with spring. It’s meant to be ambiguous, because I didn’t want it to be boiled down to this one single idea. I don’t think anything really can be.”

‘Hinnom, TX’ sits as the record’s lyrical centrepiece, Vernon pouring his lower register like hot syrup over a frozen piano accompaniment as he sings about burying the past: “In the first of light / Past the Noachide / Bodies wrapped in white.” Meanwhile, the closing track (‘Beth/Rest’) seems wilfully perverse on first inspection; an almost nauseatingly slick combination of sax, guitar and cloying keyboards. But Vernon insists it’s completely in earnest.

“That song feels really honest to me,” he says. “It’s embracing that digital analogue pad sound I actually find really useful when listening to music, whether it’s Prince or fucking Bruce Hornsby. I wanted to go there. And I wasn’t afraid to play a guitar lick. I didn’t want anyone to think I was jerking ’em around. The song’s about letting that love into your life and letting the part of you that’s selfish die. It’s like a joyful sleep if you will, but it’s a wakening too.”

Better leave your preconceptions at the door: Bon Iver’s back, and he’s finally coming in from the cold.

Related: