Hottt List: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver Issue #38

Out of the Woods

By Katie Hasty
Published: December 1st, 2008 | 12:00am

From the muted string count-off of “Flume” to 39 seconds of restless silence at the end of “Re: Stacks,” Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago sounds like a man exhaling. It’s spacious and cohesive, with humming guitar strings snapping out the rhythms as well as the melodies. Tracks of mastermind Justin Vernon’s soulful falsetto are stacked on top of each other, softly mourning.

Vernon’s lyrics are freeflowing, full of garbled personal memories, allusions to nature (“I crouch like a crow / Contrasting the snow” on “Blindsided”), religious references (the Torah, martyrdom, the excavation of Kumran).

“I studied religion more than any other academic subject,” Vernon says. “It was a dark period in my life, I think because I got weighed down with a lot of the things you think about in classes like that.”

Certainly some of those dark things, plus a handful of others, caused the singer-songwriter to pick up and leave his adopted home in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the end of 2006 and spend a trio of months in a remote cabin in Northwest Wisconsin — in the middle of winter. He was retreating after splitting from his band of a decade, DeYarmond Edison, and from a busted relationship. His health was bad. It was the end — and the start — of an era and he had a backseat full of recording equipment, some hunting gear, and good fodder for writing.

“For Emma, Forever Ago,” which is only nine tracks long, is about that visit and so much leading up to it; it was arranged, recorded, and performed almost entirely by Vernon. He self-released the album in 2007 and Jagjaguwar picked it up and re-issued it earlier this year.

“With almost any artist, not much is intentional. I think intentional seems to pretend [like there’s] some kind of plan to get big, or to ‘make a classic album,’” he says. As his MySpace site states, “[For Emma] wasn’t planned. The goal was to hibernate.”

These days, Bon Iver is anything but hibernating. He’s headlined in Europe, steadfastly remained on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, had tracks featured on “Grey’s Anatomy,” shared bills with Wilco, Iron & Wine, and Black Mountain, and has scheduled an extensive North American tour for February and March. With early and oft love from online press, plus increasing attention from the mainstream, Bon Iver and his Jagjaguwar team even constructed a “Frequently Asked Questions” tip sheet for his press kits in order to skip the redundancies (Question: “Are you talking to anyone in particular in Skinny Love?” Answer: “This song is directed at me. There are lines that are sung from another’s perspective towards me...” Question: “Describe where the cabin stands and its environs and animals.” Answer: “There are owls, eagles, pheasant, cranes, deer, bears, some coyotes). From his long stretches of performances this year, Vernon’s learned “that I can get tired and my voice is destructible. Or at least [in] the way that I use it.”

At press time, Vernon was tight-lipped about what’s next and didn’t comment on exactly why. Perhaps he’s saving it for the next good winter.