Bon Iver:
Winter's End?
Words: Becca Nelson
Photo: Drew Kaiser

Bon Iver, the assumed identity of musician Justin Vernon, has secured a sanctified spot in the fabric of the “new” new indie rock. He doesn’t give a shit, and we love him for it. And yet, as opposed to the active evasiveness of equally elusive artists in decades past (Prince, punk rock, etc.) Mr. Vernon doesn’t seem to care whether anyone cares that he doesn’t care.

Bon Iver’s first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, has become the stuff of blogosphere myth in the months since its formal release in 2008. Facts: Vernon abruptly departed Raleigh, North Carolina in late 2006, leaving behind both his band (DeYarmond Edison) and his girlfriend (whose name was NOT Emma) to seek artistic asceticism in his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He happened to have a microphone and four-track in the trunk of his car, remnants from a production gig with Chapel Hill band The Rosebuds.

In the months leading to this strange exodus, Vernon had also contracted mononucleosis, and spent a great deal of time in bed watching Northern Exposure. During this time, Vernon was moved by a quaint colloquialism repeated often: bon hiver, meaning, “have a good winter.” The word hiver was truncated, however, as it reminded him too much of the word “liver” (said organ suffered complications due to his mono). Get rid of the offensive consonant; problem solved.

More than influence or a nom de plume, though, Vernon sought winter.

“I left North Carolina and went up there because I didn’t know where else to go and I knew that I wanted to be alone and I knew that I wanted to be where it was cold,” Vernon told Treblezine in February of last year. He goes on to emphasize that for all he was seeking the cold, he was NOT seeking to make a record.

“The reason I went up there, first and foremost, was really out of necessity. It was kind of a rushed decision. I didn't go up there thinking, 'alright, I gotta make a record.'"

Much has been said, and more speculated, about the reasoning behind this odd turn of events, but what is far more important is the result. For Emma, Forever Ago is comprised of nine deeply pained and deeply beautiful songs that recount in simple detail a relationship gone awry. This is not exceptional. Nor is the way they sound, particularly: Plaintiff scruffy vocals atop roughly recorded guitar melodies, everything somehow washed in the obliterating hush of woods and snow.

Why, then, all the fuss? Vernon’s story continues as such: For Emma’s nine tracks were recorded as demos; Vernon originally intended to ship them to various labels hoping for a signing. But, after the rough tracks garnered such heavy-handed approval from friends, Vernon decided to keep them as they were, and release the record himself. The record was later picked up and re-released by Jagjaguwar, the imprint with which Vernon is still associated.

The self-empowering decision to release his songs as they were served as a catalyst for the legend that has become Bon Iver: a project created for the sake of creation, and one which Vernon declares will never succumb to outside influences. He intends to record and release all subsequent material in the same manner as Emma, retaining sole creative and production power.

Again, from Treblezine:

“I'm a pretty worrisome dude, so the only reason I thought the originals from Emma were demos was because I was insecure. I still, to a certain degree, will be insecure always, but I think that I'll continue to make records like this. I'm not going to hire engineers; I'm not going to hire producers. I'm fully capable of doing all that stuff, and I'm just going to keep it within myself, under my control and surveillance.”

Emma’s influence had not even begun to waver when Vernon released a subsequent four-song EP, Blood Bank, in January of this year. Blood Bank is tricky to talk about. Four songs, on the heels an almost-epic first album, released before anyone expected anything, and which prove more confusing than anything else? The record listens like a preemptive strike against critics who were all too ready to lump him in with similarly scratchy-voiced, bearded, stripped-down folk acts like Iron and Wine and Fleet Foxes. The songs are almost happy, in an endearingly morbid way. (The title track croons, in earnest, “Well, I met you at the blood bank/We were looking at the bags/Wonderin’ if any of the colors/matched the names we knew on the tags.) The wanton demon having been exorcised, the woods around Vernon took on a new light.

Blood Bank’s tracks tell a very different tale than the forsaken love of Emma, offering a multi-layered, vocoder-heavy, soulful and almost Jamiroquai-esque romp through a thawed forest, snow replaced by jonquils (albeit trampled ones) and self-pity replaced with humor. Vernon took the very aspect of his first record that people grasped onto - its overarching sadness and bitter resignation - and made lemonade out of it for his second.

Jagjaguwar emphasizes this aesthetic difference in a statement found in the label’s press alcove for the EP: “As much as Emma is about the cold, the Blood Bank collection is about the warmth that gets you through it. You can feel the air move. Like a fire you've been stoking for hours and finally got to sustain itself, the heat blisters your face while your back is frozen solid.”

If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Vernon seems to have both the biggest and the smallest. The very nature of Blood Bank is so far removed from what came before, it’s almost offered up as an antidote. Bon Iver may only exist to persistently negate itself, but something tells us this is OK with Vernon. Indie rock as it was once intended - for no one apart from its maker.

Once more, Treblezine: “I'm just going to make a record, ya know. I'm just going to make the music that I want to make and I'm going to take all the time that I need to do it. And if I need to go up to Eau Claire to make another record, I will. If I don't, I'll still make a record that I'm proud of, if I can be free of distraction, free of outside influence. As long as I can be happy and free to approach my music the same way - if I can recreate the path and not the process, or if I don't care about the story, I'll be good.”