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Many rock records have been written after bitter breakups, but few have been as exhaustively chronicled as Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” the 2008 debut LP from the songwriter Justin Vernon. The details are the normal ones, give or take, involving a Wisconsin hunting cabin, a woman, a laptop and the end of a mildly experimental folk act Vernon formed in 2002 with some college pals.
The stubborn persistence of Vernon’s story, which has since been told and retold with ritualistic, near-biblical frequency, might be explained by the fact that he’s more willing to talk about it than most. But Vernon’s music and lyrics have grown, over the course of two albums and an EP, consistently more inscrutable and opaque. On “Bon Iver,” his newest, there are times when he barely seems to be writing in English. Consider this verse from “Perth,” the lush, swelling bit of chiming complaint that opens the record: “In a mother, out a moth / furling forests for the soft / gotta know been lead aloft / so I’m ridding all your stories / what I know, what it is, is pouring — wire it up.”
It is a testament to the power of Vernon’s voice that he is frequently told by fans how much his music helped them heal or triumph over loss. “For Emma,” at least, contained moments of lucidity delivered in Vernon’s falsetto — “Who will love you?” he asked on “Skinny Love.” (The song is currently enjoying a new vogue in the U.K., thanks to a solemn cover from a 15-year-old piano player named Birdy.)
“Bon Iver” complicates Vernon’s penchant for being indirect with newly elaborate arrangements, courtesy of veteran studio musicians like saxophonist Colin Stetson and guitarist Greg Leisz. Vernon’s voice, always a textured and complex sound, is now playing counterpoint to a full band. For every moment that slices through, like “Holocene” (with wonderfully specific-yet-still-gnomic lines like “3rd and Lake it burnt away, the hallway was where we learned to celebrate”), there is a moment, as on the beginning of “Michicant,” where Vernon employs his voice just to toy with cadence and rhythm: “I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age / melic in the naked, knew a lake, and drew the lofts for page.” The words are likely unimportant — it’s the punctuation that dictates the sound.
Lately, the story people like to tell about Vernon has undergone an upgrade. “Woods,” a meditative, Auto-Tuned bit of self-reflection from Vernon’s 2009 EP “Blood Bank,” so entranced Kanye West that he sampled it on last year’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” West flew Vernon to Hawaii for writing sessions that have now become legendary, thanks in part to the nature of the process which included putting Vernon, the Miami rapper Rick Ross, and an unspecified quantity of marijuana in a room together and recording the results.
Both Vernon and West have the rare ability to transcend their own halting words and to provide vivid glimpses of emotional viscera. But where “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was among West’s most articulate (if self-castigating) moments, “Bon Iver” is Vernon’s least transparent creation, a blinking constellation of words like “hawser,” “arboretic” and “fane” set to free-flowing and largely undefined musical gestures. It is a tribute, then, to Vernon that, despite his avoiding transparent words, he makes a work so emotionally transparent that we all end up in the same unnameable place.
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The stubborn persistence of Vernon’s story, which has since been told and retold with ritualistic, near-biblical frequency, might be explained by the fact that he’s more willing to talk about it than most. But Vernon’s music and lyrics have grown, over the course of two albums and an EP, consistently more inscrutable and opaque. On “Bon Iver,” his newest, there are times when he barely seems to be writing in English. Consider this verse from “Perth,” the lush, swelling bit of chiming complaint that opens the record: “In a mother, out a moth / furling forests for the soft / gotta know been lead aloft / so I’m ridding all your stories / what I know, what it is, is pouring — wire it up.”
It is a testament to the power of Vernon’s voice that he is frequently told by fans how much his music helped them heal or triumph over loss. “For Emma,” at least, contained moments of lucidity delivered in Vernon’s falsetto — “Who will love you?” he asked on “Skinny Love.” (The song is currently enjoying a new vogue in the U.K., thanks to a solemn cover from a 15-year-old piano player named Birdy.)
“Bon Iver” complicates Vernon’s penchant for being indirect with newly elaborate arrangements, courtesy of veteran studio musicians like saxophonist Colin Stetson and guitarist Greg Leisz. Vernon’s voice, always a textured and complex sound, is now playing counterpoint to a full band. For every moment that slices through, like “Holocene” (with wonderfully specific-yet-still-gnomic lines like “3rd and Lake it burnt away, the hallway was where we learned to celebrate”), there is a moment, as on the beginning of “Michicant,” where Vernon employs his voice just to toy with cadence and rhythm: “I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age / melic in the naked, knew a lake, and drew the lofts for page.” The words are likely unimportant — it’s the punctuation that dictates the sound.
Lately, the story people like to tell about Vernon has undergone an upgrade. “Woods,” a meditative, Auto-Tuned bit of self-reflection from Vernon’s 2009 EP “Blood Bank,” so entranced Kanye West that he sampled it on last year’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” West flew Vernon to Hawaii for writing sessions that have now become legendary, thanks in part to the nature of the process which included putting Vernon, the Miami rapper Rick Ross, and an unspecified quantity of marijuana in a room together and recording the results.
Both Vernon and West have the rare ability to transcend their own halting words and to provide vivid glimpses of emotional viscera. But where “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was among West’s most articulate (if self-castigating) moments, “Bon Iver” is Vernon’s least transparent creation, a blinking constellation of words like “hawser,” “arboretic” and “fane” set to free-flowing and largely undefined musical gestures. It is a tribute, then, to Vernon that, despite his avoiding transparent words, he makes a work so emotionally transparent that we all end up in the same unnameable place.
Download from iTunes
