august 19–september 1, 2019 | new york 73bon iver beganas an exercise in seclusion, the fruit of singer-songwriter
Justin Vernon’s retreat to his family’s hunting cabin in northwestern Wisconsin
in the wake of the breakup of DeYarmond Edison (a band that took its name from Vernon’s
own unique middle names), a split with his girlfriend, and a protracted illness. Bon Iver’s
debut,ForEmma,ForeverAgo(2007), was stark, breathtaking, and wounded, the sound
of a man taking inventory of his choices and plotting a path forward.
The story of the band’s trek from the solitude ofForEmmato the
rustic expanses of 2011’sBon Iver, Bon Iverto the jarring electronics
of 2016’s22, A Millionand the nervy maximalism of this summer’s
newi,iis as much one of personal growth as of piecing together a
pliable band and giving it room to work. What took root in a cabin in
the woods has since broken through pop and experimental music’sPHOTOGRAPH: BONIVER/TWITTER
Bleak Is Beautiful
Oni,i,Bon Iver mines the daily dread
of watching the world unravel.
POP/CRAIGJENKINS
Justin VernonI,I
BON IVER,
JAGJAGUWAR.ambient keyboard textures of Bon Iver, Bon
Iver can be sourced to the front man’s ten-
ure alongside members of the midwestern
hip-hop collective Doomtree and the synth-
pop group Poliça in the supergroup Gayngs,
or to Volcano Choir, the team-up with the
Milwaukee experimental group Collections
of Colonies of Bees, which yielded 2009’s
offbeat, upbeat Unmap and 2013’s rootsy,
stately Repave.
Bon Iver grows as Vernon’s connections
do, allowing a performer who is leery of the
fame machine (in part owing to anxiety) to
step back and democratize the voice of his
group. Together, they’re creating a musical
language that’s left of center but shy of
inscrutability. They’re reliable but not pre-
dictable. The distance Bon Iver covers
from one album to the next recalls the
journey of Beck in the ’90s, both for the
bold nerve of mixing folk sounds with hip-
hop production values and for the sense
that each new album is the culmination of
all the incremental moves before it. You
don’t get the lush, louche funk and laconic
country sounds of Beck’s 1999 Midnite
Vultures without passing through Mellow
Gold’s country-rap convergence, Odelay’s
big-beat foundation, and the time-travel-
ing genre exercises of Mutations. Simi-
la rly, i,i feels like the end of a world-build-
ing exercise that For Emma kicked off.
Blasts of strings, horns, pianos, and voices
compete with synthetic keys, programmed
drums, and robotic, manipulated vocals.
Like a feisty young nation-state, this music
balances a love of nature with the necessity
of industrialization. It makes good use of
machines, but it is bleak and even para-
noid about where our reliance on them has
us headed.
As far as any Justin Vernon lyric sheet
can be surmised to have a singular mean-
ing, i,i is an album about the daily dread of
watching the world stumble into gridlock
over solvable issues. The mournful
“Sh’Diah,” or “Shittiest Day in American
History,” recalls the morning after Election
Day 2016, when many Americans were
confronted with the reality that not every-
one shares the dream of inclusiveness the
union was built on. “Hey, Ma” hits at people
hoarding wealth and resources while oth-
ers starve: “Full time you talk your money
up / While it’s living in a coal mine / Tall
time to call your ma.” “U (Man Like)” warns
that the union is only as stable as its most
impoverished citizens and imagines a
future when our misdoings catch up with
us. (“So, Cerberus, ride / Bring those dead
alive / Like Pirate Jenny on the Black
Freighter.”) “Marion” frets over “the rising
sea,” while “Naeem” evokes the era’s daily
horror in one line: “I can hear crying.”
Like the political ’80s album rock histopsoil as Vernon ventured out into rock,
folk, synth-pop, and hip-hop circles, elevat-
ing the craft of his collaborators and bring-
ing ideas and players back into the fold for
his flagship.
Vernon’s music doesn’t behave like pop—
or at least not like any version of it since
Todd Rundgren got serious about electron-
ics in the ’70s, or since that stretch in the
late ’80s when Bruce Hornsby oscillated
between the Range and the Grateful Dead.
(Vernon’s ability to keep the attention of
both pop and rap fans as well as indie-beard
bros is at least as unlikely as Rundgren’s
producing for Grand Funk Railroad and
Hall & Oates the same year he fronted the
synth-heavy progressive project Utopia, or
as Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” touching new
ears after being sampled in 2pac’s “Changes”
over a decade after it hit No. 1.) By rejecting
the prevailing sounds of the era, Vernoncame to acquire a certain unexpected hand
in steering them, as A-list stars with good
taste and extraordinary means began to
look outside their respective fields for ses-
sion players and expand the reach of their
hits by breaking new ground.
A decade ago, Vernon’s Auto-Tuned cho-
ral exercise “Woods” fertilized Kanye West’s
“Lost in the World.” From there, Travis
Scott, James Blake, Vince Staples, Eminem,
Chance the Rapper, and many others came
calling. Conversely, 22, A Million’s use
of drums, synths, and samples—see the
heartbreaking slice of Mahalia Jackson
vocals that peppers the opener, “22 (OVER
S N)”; the Stevie Nicks deconstruction in
“10 d E A T h b R E a s T”; or the hip-hop
drum patterns in the middle of “33
‘GOD’ ”—felt like ideas Vernon had brought
back home from his travels. Similarly, the
crackling noise, lush instrumentation, and