Okay, so we’ve all heard the legend now haven’t we?  Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) breaks up with his band and girlfriend Emma. Consumed with an apparent desire to forget and recuperate he sets off to Wisconsin, to his father’s log cabin, for 3 months.  Whilst there he, in between bouts of log-chopping and other wilderness-y pursuits, starts making tunes on the very basic recording equipment he brought with him to the woods.  Intended only ever as demo’s to hawk round record labels when he got home, they were so good that friends, family and record labels alike decided they were good enough to release by themselves, upon which Bon Iver, to a wave of critical acclaim and full marks reviews, becomes the most talked about sleeper artist of 2008 with For Emma, Forever Ago.     

Few albums can have had such an engaging back story;  even Gareth Gates  epic determination to beat his stammer pails in comparison to Vernon’s emotional triumvirate of love, loneliness and loss.  Yet of course, as is the way with these things, a story can only get you so far.  A story isn’t going to get you mentioned as one of the albums of the year by every musical publication this side of Baghdad.  You need the tunes to make the story worth telling.  Fortunately For Emma, Forever Ago has them. 9 of them to be exact.

For one of the most beautiful things about the album is it’s apparent (if not actual) simplicity.  9 songs that clock in at just over 37 minutes, each seemingly segueing into one another to create an atmosphere dripping with achingly real sadness.  Beginning with ‘Flume’ and it’s opening line of I am my Mother’s only one/that’s enough, he sets the tone for the album as a whole, and we know that Vernon is currently suffering from that very hardest of ailments; the post break-up blues.  He doesn’t let us forget this once; there is no happy tune, no comic relief, just 9 songs depicting one mans very real unhappiness and isolation.  

And though the album as a whole is a lo-fi folk masterpiece where each song feels very much a vital part of the picture, it does, like any great album should, have standout tracks.  In ‘Skinny Love’ and ‘The Wolves (Part I and II)’ Vernon has created two of the great lost-love songs of our time. And put them next to each other!  ‘Skinny Love’ toils under the weight of bitterness, never better shown as when in the chorus he needily yelps I told you to be patient/I told you to be fine/I told you to be balanced/I told you to be kind. Vernon seems to fallen into the awful position of lamenting ever loving Emma, the pain of losing her being as bad as it is, leaving him breaking at the britches. It’s fucking hearbreaking.

To then flow straight from this into ‘The Wolves (Part I and II) with it, where he whispers someday my pain/someday my pain/ will mark you, is a measure of the confusion he feels. This is a man being torn between his love for this woman, and his desire and wish for her to be feeling half of the pain that he is.  It’s a sad indictment of the human psyche, that we want those we love the most to hurt the most, but will be an all-too familiar feeling for anyone that’s ever been on the receiving end of a conversation thats started with ‘we need to talk.’

Of course, there may be those among you that may be put off by all this negativity.  It’s a reasonable thing to think; most people like a glimmer of hope, of redemption, at the end of the tunnel and Vernon provides little, at least lyrically and tonally.  But to take that view is to miss the whole point of the record.  The album is his redemption, the music itself is the indicator of life moving on for him. In final track ‘re: stacks’ Vernon opens with this is my excavation, and it is here we can see the true intention of the album for him. It is a cleanser, a way of rationalising and releasing his heartache.  Although he is far from the end of his emotional upheaval (as demonstrated by him going on to sing that this is not the sound of a new man or crispy realisation on ‘re: stacks’), it means something positive, something real, is being garnered from it.  Music like this wouldn’t get made without some pretty shitty things happening, and we should be glad that these shitty things can inspire people such as Vernon to bear, to excavate, their soul so readily. 

Posted In Features, Dec 10 2009. Words - David