“You asshole, thanks for bringing that up! I hadn’t even thought about it,” he feistily tells me. With such a fan base here, turning his back on it isn’t really an option. Bon Iver heads to the UK with a nine-piece band in late October and Vernon hasn’t thought about how he’s going to perform anything from ‘For Emma’. How long this peace will last only time will tell. Vernon admits the “invitation of sadness” in his twenties destroyed him a little, but he’s mending and can now “enjoy the peace”. But I realised I had done a lot, and the things like Kanye were other external compliments.” I was thinking, ‘Shit, I haven’t prepared’. “I had just turned thirty and was dealing with a lot of self-depreciation in the discreet comparison of other people, like when you think of what your parents were doing when they were thirty. “I was in this studio, which became like an artists’ camp where I was able to let my guard down.” So friendlier, busier, but still with that self-esteem struggling in the background. Physically, it’s recording couldn’t be further from the cabin. But it sounds richer, more confident and not as tortured. The double tracked vocals are still there, the pained and strained singing, the simple guitar-strummed melody. It’s still pretty heavy, and the sound is not that much of a departure from ‘For Emma’. Like ‘Calgary’ on the new record, a song of wedding vows for someone you haven’t met yet, or ‘Beth/Rest’, which says it’s the end of you and me, but it’s actually the beginning of a new life. It has swapped personal agony for a more distant variety of emotional turbulence – a key ingredient of Bon Iver it seems. The meaning is open ended.” The songs are about places that don’t exist, people you don’t know, deaths that can only be predicted. The album is a narrative of places – “they’re not just places I have been, they’re about places in general and what they mean to different people, like an emotional place or a time. He describes it like an “excavation”, reaching back deep into his brain to pull out his own creative monster – the end of one era and the start of another.īut what’s interesting is, in this new offering, the remoteness of the cabin remains, even if that wooden structure is far far away. Throughout all of this, Bon Iver was “still inside”, Vernon says, rumbling away for three years just waiting for the right time to burst. Working with him wasn’t difficult and it wasn’t challenging because it wasn’t my music, it was his.” I liked Kanye’s music so it made sense for me to work with him, even if on the outside it seemed odd. And while he was happy to be part of these projects, especially the six tracks of West’s 2010 ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, it wasn’t his music, his ideas or his creation.
“I’ve listened to Kanye for nine years and Peter Gabriel is an influence on me,” he says, unnecessarily justifying the partnerships. Maybe the collaborations played an important part in this change of attitude towards his own music.
I mean, I used to write songs like Neil Young or Springsteen, and who’s to say that’s not as personal.” The feelings are still rumbling away, but I don’t know what they mean anymore. “I didn’t feel like there was something I need to say anymore, which gives me a new-found freedom on this record that I never had before. The key to this new-found freedom appears to be keeping his emotions in a place where he can see them, manage them and ignore them.
Way to the woods music how to#
He believes he forgot how to write songs when making ‘For Emma’, and the pigeon steps through 2009 EP ‘Blood Bank’ and the many collaborations with the likes of West, Jay-Z, All Tiny Creatures, Gayngs and Peter Gabriel that followed his critical success were all part of his recovery. I had the golden opportunity to make the record of my dreams.”īut it wasn’t a simple journey, Vernon says. I wanted to move forward because I knew it was about more than the one record I made,” Vernon says, much chattier than the complex emotional sponge predicted. “I became very eager to explore what Bon Iver meant to me in the life of this project. What this new album, simply titled ‘Bon Iver’, does bring is a closure to what has been before and an exploration of what and who Bon Iver has become. Even turning thirty couldn’t shake his good mood, despite the usual ‘have I done enough with my life’ fears. The cabin has been replaced by a studio set up to perfection by Vernon and friends, and the wealth of love and experience he has gained have seeped into his now much happier consciousness. But three years down the line, Vernon is in a very different place, physically and mentally.
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