“I needed to come home,” says Justin Vernon. “This record was about centring myself. It was about using the sound to make myself feel better.”
Vernon, the key voice and songwriter behind Bon Iver, the acclaimed Wisconsin-based band which this week released its second album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, is, like Bob Seger, a Midwesterner. It was Seger who famously sang about old-time rock ‘n’ roll: “That kind of music just soothes the soul.” In burly curmudgeon form at a relatively young age, Seger lamented that “today’s music” didn’t have that certain comforting capacity.
One wonders what Bullet Bob might think about Bon Iver’s latest, a gorgeously textured collection of indie rock marked by glowing sounds, silvery stacked harmonies, reverb and Vernon’s affecting falsetto vocals. Lyrics cross seasonal and personal growth.
The record’s beginning eight seconds are ambient, before broaching into first song Perth with a heavenly and quartz-like feel, despite the military snare drums, brave horns and a central crescendo. “In a mother, out a moth,” Vernon croons like a bracing whip of wind, “furling forests for the soft.”
Comforting? It is. Chicken soup and Seger too might envy Bon Iver, a healer with its elegant, lush and pristine roots rock.
“There are so many pop records, when you turn it up loud the treble is out of control,” says Vernon, speaking on a cellphone as he walks the street of his hometown of Eau Claire. “For this record, sonics came first. We were trying to go for rich and warm sounds – sounds that wouldn’t cut your heads off.”
Bon Iver isn’t alone in its assuaging style of indie, folk-based rock. Fellow travellers Fleet Foxes, the Antlers and My Morning Jacket have recently released albums marked by high, pacifying voices and the liberal use of echo. It’s Simon & Garfunkel anew – the sounds of soothing.
If Vernon was in healing mode, it came from a personal, not altruistic, place. His career has been on a whirlwind pace, even before his debut album and the strummed raw emotion of the song Skinny Love were even released. 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago, recorded in a remote cabin during a bleak Wisconsin winter, was a poignant, exposed album made in response to romantic misfortune.
“That album came along at really good time personally,” explains Vernon, who used the record to (successfully) deal with emotions long suppressed. Bon Iver is a play on bon hiver, which translates to “good winter.”
“And then, all of a sudden, literally without warning, as soon as I finished it, it was the subject of A&R offices in America and Europe. And it hasn’t slowed down since then, not for a day.”
Last year saw Vernon collaborate with Kanye West, and the new album Bon Iver, Bon Iver was partly named that way so as to enforce the idea that the album was made by a band and not simply Vernon himself (as was the case with For Emma, Forever Ago).
Song titles refer metaphorically to locations – including the shimmering Calgary, which includes the line “always keep that message taped cross your breasts you won’t erase.” That refers to Vernon’s tattoo, a drawing of the state of Wisconsin he had done in 2009 to remind him of his roots and things he held dear.
Vernon has a personal as well as a professional relationship with Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards – he’s been in Toronto periodically, co-producing her forthcoming album – but he’s never been to the Alberta boomtown.
“Living in the upper Midwest,” says Vernon, “there’s plenty of fascination with Canada. We look fondly upon on it: it’s a mystery, it’s beautiful. It’s like, why don’t I live there?”
Calgary, according to the songwriter, is a wedding vow of a song, between two people who haven’t met quite yet. “The album is about place, period. It’s a conversation about what place means to people.”
The record was recorded in a studio built in Eau Clare by Vernon and his brother. His hometown is a refuge and a place of comfort, with the new album a reflection of that.
“I ain’t living in the dark no more,” Vernon sings on the concluding Beth/Rest, his voice cloaked with effects on an otherwise middle-of-the-road ballad. He’s coming in from the cold, then. The winter, for Vernon, is over.
Bon Iver plays Toronto’s Sound Academy on Aug. 8.
