Bon Iver

Bon Iver

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • 22, A Million
    22, A Million
    22, A Million

    Bon Iver’s magnetic core was always Justin Vernon’s voice, an instrument both singular and versatile. Like the fire flickering inside the hearth of some rustic cabin, Vernon’s keening falsetto was the centrepiece of the largely acoustic For Emma, Forever Ago. He stretched his voice on the foundational EP Blood Bank, his husky baritone anchoring the title track, while his curiosity led him to process it to celestial effect on “Woods”. Even on the ornate Bon Iver, where horns cascaded and dual drum kits sometimes evoked black metal, it was Vernon’s voice that gave emotional ballast to oft-inscrutable lyrics. His generational finesse and aplomb as a singer became most obvious on 22, A Million, a visionary statement from— and extraordinary leap for—someone who had recently been considered a mere guy with a guitar. Released in 2016, the album features a sprawling lineup, with a few dozen people contributing bits and pieces. But Vernon and a team of audacious producers—BJ Burton, Chris Messina and Ryan Olson—move that big band inside a machine, cutting and warping the sounds into blocks they rebuild into surrealistic pillows for Vernon’s emotive acrobatics. He sings, for instance, over tessellated samples of his own voice at the start of “22 (OVER S∞∞N)”, his seraphic falsetto setting up snapshots of faint foreboding. Doubled and tripled, shifted and corkscrewed, his voice is the sole instrument of the stay-or-leave plea “715 - CR∑∑KS”, with images of rivulets and moons and reeds cast like spells against loneliness. And Vernon’s baritone stands at the pulpit of desire during “8 (circle)”, saxophones and snares swirling with a choir of keening glossolalia, while his fluttering notes play the role of conductor for the propulsive rhythm during “666 ʇ”. Vernon, of course, invented neither the falsetto nor vocal processing, traditions respectively developed for centuries and decades. But perhaps no other musician has mobilised them in such imaginative ways on one album of sheer triumph as he does on 22, A Million.

  • Bon Iver, Bon Iver
    Bon Iver, Bon Iver
    Bon Iver, Bon Iver

    Solitude never really suited Justin Vernon. As the fable goes, Vernon quit his longtime band, DeYarmond Edison, and split for his parents’ hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin, where he wrote and recorded his first falsetto masterpiece, 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago. But even before fame came, Vernon was steadily amassing a band, not only to animate those forlorn missives he’d made solo, but to give his more expansive ideas about big drums, plangent noise and ineffable harmony a chance to exist. Onstage, For Emma, Forever Ago quickly outgrew its origin story of isolation. For his self-titled 2011 follow-up album, Vernon invited a dream team of collaborators to April Base, the studio compound he’d built just miles from his childhood home in the Wisconsin countryside. The cast was small but staggering, with his early live band of Sean Carey and Mike Noyce augmented by saxophonists Colin Stetson and Mike Lewis, second drummer Matt McCaughan and pedal-steel hero Greg Leisz, among others. Together, they made postmodern art-rock symphonies, a space where granular synthesis and saxophone choirs animated Vernon’s still-life portraits as widescreen epics. Vernon turns the rarest of sophomore tricks here, using images and experiences from his ascent to stardom as lyrical fodder without venting about the frustrations of celebrity. The opening track, “Perth”, emerged after Vernon filmed a music video with a friend of Heath Ledger as word spread of the actor’s death; “Still alive, who you love,” he solemnly purrs over its dagger-sharp riff, a cavalcade of horns and drums mounted around him. Lifting a melody from a song he cut while still in his old band, “Holocene” confronts a string of sacred memories—hearing a favourite tune for the first time, hotboxing a room during a holiday with his brother—and reckons with our collective insignificance in light of what he knows now. A Bruce Hornsby devotional, the closing track “Beth/Rest” testifies to the bittersweet ways our professional success does not ensure personal happiness. There is a tortured and tender wistfulness to these songs, with Vernon, then nearing 30, looking back on the times of his life with both sigh and smile. For Emma, Forever Ago prompted a wave of pitchy imitators, with hordes of guys and gals with guitars hoping to mine its sylvan aesthetic. But Bon Iver proclaimed without apology that Vernon had no intentions of sticking around to lead that typically hirsute scene—that he was looking for new ways to dig into old feelings of love, loss and their own ever-renewing cocktail.

  • For Emma, Forever Ago
    For Emma, Forever Ago
    For Emma, Forever Ago

    In November 2006, Justin Vernon packed up his belongings in Raleigh, North Carolina, and drove 18 hours through the night, back to where he grew up in northwestern Wisconsin. But once he made it home to his parents’ place in Fall Creek, he didn’t stay long enough to see them. Instead, he kept driving, to a remote hunting cabin his father had built in 1979 on an 80-acre spread in the North Woods referred to amongst family as “the land”. Save for the wildlife—wolves, deer, wild turkey—and the occasional slightly concerned visit from his father, Vernon, then 25, was alone out there for months. He chopped wood, drank beer, watched old episodes of Northern Exposure, hunted for his meals and, eventually, began recording songs. When he emerged, in February 2007, he had something that would change his life forever: nine songs over 37 minutes, none of which he’d originally intended for people to hear, at least not in great numbers. He named his new project Bon Iver, French for “good winter”. Only a few hundred copies were pressed in a self-recorded run he passed around among friends and locals. Vernon had originally moved to North Carolina with his band, DeYarmond Edison, a Wilco-indebted roots-rock unit he’d formed in high school with some of his closest friends—local guys he’d met in jazz camp when he was a teen. It didn’t go well. Vernon struggled with depression, mononucleosis and liver issues. He drank too much and gambled away what little money he made washing dishes by playing poker online. Within a year, he dissolved the band and his relationship with his long-time girlfriend—all at once. You can understand why he’d want to spend some time on his own, why he’d run. But you wouldn’t have believed anyone if they’d told you that Vernon would be recording in a compound on Oahu with Kanye West four years later, or win a Grammy a year after that. “I was embarrassed about it,” he said later, of giving up and coming home. “That’s why I went up there.” Since its release, the romantic and almost mystical qualities of For Emma haven’t faded. This, despite its being repeated and distorted and eventually co-opted so extensively it became parody. (When Justin Timberlake dons a frown and fake beard to impersonate you on SNL, there’s a chance you’ve been swallowed up by your own backstory, no matter how personal.) Some albums are hailed for being regionally specific, unique to that spot on the map where they were made, whether it’s Atlanta or Manchester. But For Emma has an emotional and atmospheric specificity to it as well. Listen on headphones. The moment you hit play, everything around you goes still and the temperature seems to drop, no matter where you are. You’re not just in Wisconsin now, you’re alone in a timber-frame cabin, in the dead of winter, surrounded by miles of frozen birch trees and snow-bathed hills, with a guy who’s hurting, howling, caterwauling at times. It starts with “Flume”, the one song he’s said still resonates with him and the song that prompted a new-found falsetto to tumble out of him unexpectedly as he wrote it. For years he’d sung in an earthen baritone (he once called his vocals in DeYarmond Edison very “Hootie”, in reference to Darius Rucker’s), but he’d also grown up singing along with the voices of women—Mahalia Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, Indigo Girls. When his dad would pop by to check on him, he was just as startled by the anguish he heard as he was the voice that was channelling it. He’d never heard his son sing that way before. But that voice. It inspired generations of imitators. Vernon said he’d eventually found his lyrics and phrasings in a “weird, subconscious, back-door way”, by humming the melodies over and over until the words finally just came. Both are haunting. “What might have been lost,” he sings in the towering coda of “The Wolves (Act I and II)”, his vocals processed and layered so densely he eventually becomes a choir of one. His voice takes on a soulful grain in the therapeutic chorus of “Skinny Love”, like a blues singer’s. It floats and falls in “Re: Stacks”, the album’s gorgeous closer: “This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realisation,” he sings, above honeyed guitar notes. “It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away/Your love will be safe with me.” Vernon said once in an interview that he remembers his body chemistry changing as he recorded For Emma, that his sweat began to smell and taste different. He was going through something essential. What you’re hearing as a result, start to finish, is catharsis. That will always be timeless.

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About Bon Iver

Even if Bon Iver’s career was limited to just his first album, he’d still go down a legend. In the midst of a quarter-life crisis, the artist born Justin Vernon in 1981 shacked up in a cabin outside his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He emerged with 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, a gut-wrenching art-folk exorcism that—following the lead of rustic compatriots like Fleet Foxes—pushed indie rock deeper into the woods and inspired untold legions of sensitive bearded men to commit their feelings to tape atop the creak of ageing floorboards. But For Emma’s raw serenades weren’t immune to Auto-Tune manipulations, and since that definitive debut, Vernon has used his tech savvy to completely reshape the singer/songwriter archetype through the ethereal art pop of 2011’s self-titled release, the fractured digital operettas of 2016’s 22, A Million, and the densely textured elegance of 2019’s i,i. And as he’s continued to take intimate, confessional indie rock into increasingly expansive and abstract realms, his soothingly soulful vocals and adventurous production have also burrowed a portal from the indie fringes into the pop mainstream. An invite from superfan Kanye West to sing on his 2010 masterwork, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, yielded an ongoing series of collaborations with the rapper and transformed Vernon into the world’s unlikeliest hip-hop impresario, with contributions to records by Travis Scott, Vince Staples and Eminem. By the time Vernon turned up to duet on Taylor Swift’s 2020 indie-leaning opus, folklore, it felt less like a left-field surprise than further confirmation of the genre-blurring, post-everything world Bon Iver helped create.

ORIGIN
Eau Claire, WI, United States
FORMED
2006
GENRE
Alternative

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