Day 127: Bon Iver – Bon Iver, Bon Iver
These are the last few days of my holiday, so I’ve been making the most of it. Scotland is snowy at the moment but the snow hasn’t reached Glasgow, so we headed up north to see some snowy mountains. On the way back, I wanted to put on something atmospheric that I don’t listen to often, so I put on Bon Iver, Bon Iver by Bon Iver.
Bon Iver, or Justin Vernon, used to be a bit of a mainstay on the playlists of my youth, but I haven’t listened to him much as of late. Maybe it’s because I spend less time meandering with big emotions, because that’s what I think his music is made for, but I do play some songs of his from time to time. Usually, though, it’s from his debut For Emma, Forever Ago.
In 2006, Vernon’s band had broken up, he broke up with his girlfriend and he had mononucleosis that turned into hepatitis, so he went to spend the winter at his dad’s cabin. While he was there, he apparently ended up semi-accidentally writing and recording most of an album, which he then self-published. He watched a lot of the ‘90s TV show Northern Exposure where characters wished each other happy winter in French, "bon hiver," which he decided to use as his name but alter a bit since hiver reminded him too much of the word liver, which he associated with his hepatitis.
After For Emma became a bit of a sleeper hit through word-of-mouth, blogs and Pitchfork, Justin Vernon says he somehow forgot how to write songs. For his second album, the 2011 release Bon Iver, Bon Iver, he brought in a group of other musicians to create songs with them collectively rather than alone with a guitar, as he’d done with the first one, saying “I built the record myself, but I allowed those people to come in and change the scene.”
The resulting album has ten songs, each of them based on a different place. It open with “Perth”, a song he wrote after he brought a crew to make a music video to his house for three days, and while there, the director found out that his best friend Heath Ledger had died. I don’t cry a lot to music but that one always gets me, there’s a tenderness and a minimalism to his sound that still somehow manages to punch you in the gut emotionally. We drove back in almost complete silence to this record, which is no mean feat because I almost never shut up.
I’m assuming you need to be careful when saying the artist and the album title or else you’ll summon Justin Vernon like Beetlejuice, but other than that, I can’t find any fault in it. It’s just beautiful from beginning to end. Bon Iver Bon Iver by Bon Iver Bon Iver is a 9.5/10. There’s always a time and place for a record like this. He’s one of those artists who probably stay with you for life, to some extent. It’s not quite a 10 but it’s not far off.