Out Of The Wild - Bon Iver

 
Justin Vernon is clearly not a man without musical history. Having been in a band before for 10 years, Vernon writing the songs but arranging together, Vernon’s process was coming from a different place. “Oftentimes I'd find myself writing a song to impress them or make them happy to be in a band with me. Five years of doing that really affected the way that I’d come up with something. Constantly being critiqued by their possible critique. I broke up with the band and immediately left and went right to the woods, and I went through a lot of changes and realisations, not really changes, more of realignments with my old feelings”.
Surrounded by coyotes, bears and deer may sound like Disney-fancy, a ‘Jungle Book Does Winter‘ if you will, but with bears scratching about because of a pot of soup, there’s reason to cower and to sleep with a gun. Yet there’s food to put on the table and a supper to scratch together, something Vernon did by hunting on the land and maybe having a conversation with his muse. “I killed two deer and that fed me all winter. I'd rarely sleep past 5.30 each morning cos I'd have to put more wood on as the fire had burnt out. It wasn't some vast crazy Thoreau-ian escapism, it was possibly the most self-indulgent thing you could possibly imagine. The first two weeks I was there I didn't do music. It was like when you have a weekend and you do what you want and you don't feel like calling your friends and you sit on the couch from Friday to Sunday night. That kind of half depressed, half lazy state, it was basically like that for three months. Then after a while the music sort of took over”.
 
Yet, to travel some 1200 miles to reach the cabin and to spend it over winter must take some emotion to catapult you to such a situation. It kind of figures he must have been pissed off or angry? Vernon - “No, I was lost, for sure. Mostly, it was ‘cos it was in the middle of nowhere and it was beautiful. And because it was free and I didn't have to have any job to sustain any bullshit life or whatever, for a crappy apartment and crappy things. I rather enjoy winter. It's kind of sacred to me. So I was plenty excited about going. There's eighty acres up there. It was really peaceful. There would be days when I wouldn't go outside, but even being indoors surrounded by so much space was calming. No buildings nearby or commercial anything for twenty miles”.
 
Which in a roundabouts, desultory fashion brings us to the topic of influential artists that have helped to form his artistic vision. Vernon - “Singer-songwriters were central, they still are. Even from the young years my Dad was listening to Mingus or stranger artists. Tom Waits, Dylan, Springsteen. Richard Buckner, Patti Griffin, those are the artists that allowed me to find myself. But I've found a lot of freedom and self-discovery in exploring music outside of that. That's why I enjoyed this record. This was the first time I told myself it's okay to go out on a limb, to do a choral piece because it feels natural. And it's odd, cos I was always trying to be this troubadour, or the song-writer I wanted to be or looked up to”.
 
Yet, to a non-musician with an interest in the creative process, it beggars the question - where did the creative urge come from? Are the songs heard internally first? How important is rhythm in conceiving a song? ‘For Emma’ harbours a poeticism that is far from slight, such as the track ‘Flume’ has Vernon singing "only love is all maroon", reminding of an intelligible Liz Fraser. Vernon goes on to explain how the recordings were made - “I played some drums and built them up. I think about rhythm and chord progressions a lot as well as the lyrics and things. The pulse of the song is the first thing I always hear, the first beat. Maybe 75% of the time it's in my head first. But 'Flume' was an accident. It just started writing itself as I was playing guitar. I write the form of the song, and I'd sing random things on top, random syllables and whatever sounded good, I'd do that eight times on top of each other, and I'd have eight voices singing bizarre sounding things. And when I'd be working on a song I'd play it, and notate, then rewind and notate what I'd think was going on and it'd point to some subconscious vehicle, and that's how I'd get some pretty good meaning. 'Lump Sum' is pretty accurate in telling the story of me leaving and going to the cabin, and it was a song that was written like that - complete gibberish, but listened to and notated down to get the lyrics. So I was able to come up with lyrics that weren't the same old of lyrics, and still have the subconscious in there”.
 
By the final track of the album, ‘Re: Stacks', the ghosts feel laid to rest. There’s a sense of peace, of resolution and of redemption. It's the most lyrically dense song with layers of meaning and lots of ways of looking at it. Vernon goes on to unravel the conjecture. “That song was written a little more traditionally and I didn't change it much. There was a small aesthetic, maybe a Nick Drakey thing going on as regards the recording, it was sort of done. It works well as a last song cos it does bring a lot of subjects from the record, and it does bring them to some sort of ending. Some sort of peace”.
 
The story goes that Vernon didn’t always do this tremulous falsetto that we find on wonderfully multitraked on ’For Emma’. Word has it that the gruff speech was his mien, and that he was doing this Tom Waits growly vocal thang.

Vernon - “It was pretty troubadoury. Springsteen, that sort of thing. I just got into the choral stuff and doing things with my voice and experimenting vocally. It I felt more honest and creative, and feel more like myself then I ever have. Because for ten years I was doing the same. Whether I got caught in traps or comfortable cycles. I don't want to play a new song until I've been to the studio. I don't want to just make a rock track. We've been talking about doing a Talk Talk cover 'I Believe In You', it's one of our favourite songs. If we're headlining our own shows I wanna get some more songs. Yet, I feel surprised at how satisfied I feel after having played the same set after eight or nine weeks. I've been talking seriously with Antony Hegarty about doing some vocal stuff. Now I have the opportunity to be an artist, what I've dreamed of, it may mean no I will not go on tour for twelve weeks. You have to play the career game, yeah, but I want to make artistic calls”.