Bon Iver
For Emma,
Forever Ago
Jagjaguwar
By Mike Randall
To do away with pain, often times the best remedy is to allow things to get worse before they get better; to open up the wounds and let them rid themselves of all the negativity that is festering. Justin Vernon, quickly becoming better known as Bon Iver (a misspelling of the French phrase for “good winter,” pronounced bohn eevair), did just that by isolating himself in his father’s northwest-Wisconsin hunting cabin, completely alone except for a pen, some instruments and his thoughts. It is there his distress surfaced, which he channeled into an unbelievable set of introspective folk songs for his solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago.
Vernon seemed to have used the fresh, falling snow as his canvas, crafting subtle arrangements using nothing more than an acoustic guitar and his haunting falsetto (eerily similar to TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe) as his paintbrush. These songs are lush and completely natural sounding, as if they existed previously in the ether and Vernon simply grabbed them because he was the only one who could pull them off. It’s the kind of record where no single line stands out because it’s so poetic and the songs are to be digested in whole, not in pieces; the ambience tells enough of a story anyway.
The listener’s attention is demanded, and you hang on to every melody, every syllable even, to the point you can hear your heart beating during the silence between tracks. During songs like “Lump Sum,” you expect to detect the droplets of snow melting off the roof. It’s cerebral sounding, and complicated passages like, ‘My mile could not pump the plumb/in my arbor ‘till my ardor trumped every inner inertia/lump sum’ give an indication as to the obtuseness of Vernon’s extraordinary writing. When he reveals, ‘Someday my pain will mark you,’ during “The Wolves (Act I and II),” he’s exposing a deep laceration – one that’s been around for a while but he’s only now beginning to face. The exceptional “For Emma” unfolds like a Neil Young-meets-Sufjan Stevens script, as Vernon is found in a rare moment of tenderness, singing, ‘With all your lies you’re still lovable.’
‘I’ve been twisting to the sun I needed to replace/the fountain in the front yard is rusted out/all my love was down in a frozen ground,’ Vernon reveals during the album-ending “Re: Stacks.” To accept that Emma, or whoever she may be, is gone, Vernon had to lock himself away as the world froze around him, literally and figuratively, letting his emotion spill into words and music. While it’s unknown if his demons escaped in that Wisconsin cabin, he did turn pain into beauty.
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