Attempting to describe the debut album from Bon Iver is not unlike describing the magnolia tree currently blooming in my back yard. I could write about the colors and smells and the way the lawn under the tree turns white when a storm disturbs its petals. But it’s still just a tree until you sit on my back porch and take it in.
For Emma, For Ever Ago is a gorgeous nine-track journey filled with raspy guitars and lilting falsettos. Whether Bon Iver, front man Justin Vernon’s moniker, is journeying towards a particular destination or escaping a troubling past is left up to the listener. For my money, it’s a little of each. The strange genesis of the album is part of the allure for Vernon’s fans. At the tail end of a break-up with his band and girlfriend and feeling the affects of a bout of pneumonia, Vernon packed up his recording equipment and drove to an isolated Wisconsin cabin. The result of the months spent in relative isolation is For Emma.The unconventional way Vernon chose to write his songs is one of the reasons descriptions of the album fall flat. In a February interview with Treble he described the process
....I still had all these things on my mind that had been unexpressed, like un-extracted, I guess you'd say… I compiled them and, at the end, it was very interesting for me; it was very freeing. I found all this shit, all this grudge and meaning in what I was singing, these syllables. It was weird to put them together and match them up to the sounds that I was hearing… So I was able to do all that completely unhinged, instead of having to make words that rhyme or whatever, and I was able to get lyrics that were born and meaningful to me in a way that was distant and new.
For Emma is certainly not the first album to disassemble the song-writing process. Sigur Rós’ fabricated language, Hopelandic, is perhaps the best-known example of a band intentionally communicating through incomprehensible sounds and syllables. And while Bon Iver has not invented a new language, at times his songwriting feels like a fresh dialect to describe a passage too significant for conventional verse.
Maybe the direction of Justin Vernon’s journey as captured in For Emma is not that important. I wonder if what matters more is his ability to create word and sound for our shared uncommon experiences. At a Bon Iver concert in Chicago a few weeks ago, Vernon repeatedly thanked the small audience for our attention to his songs. He seemed to see our interest as a gift. To which I can only respond in kind.
“Thank you.”
From For Emma, check out Wolves (Act i and ii) courtesty of La Blogotheque.
