Photo by Chelsea Saunders

REELING FROM LOST LOVE, SHATTERED dreams, and the demise of his longtime band, Justin Vernon was broken, physically ill and emotionally battered. Seeking refuge, he left North Carolina in 2006 and retreated to his father’s isolated Wisconsin hunting cabin for the winter.

The hope was that with nothing to do but chop wood, walk in the frozen forest and maybe play some guitar he could clear his head, heal his body, mend his soul and find some direction. What he found was Bon Iver. Pronounced “bohn eevair,” French for “good winter” and intentionally misspelled, Vernon’s indie-folk debut, For Emma, Forever Ago , is the sound of a man confronting his demons and one that’s become the sleeper, word-of-mouth album of the year thus far.

While living in Raleigh, Vernon worked the grill in a nice restaurant to pay the bills. It was a slow death that was quietly eating away at him, until eventually it all came to a head. He contracted pneumonia, mono and a liver infection, and he assumes it entered his body while washing dishes in the kitchen. Vernon drew a line in the sand. He quit and vowed never to have a life-sucking, “real” job ever again.

It just so happens that while Vernon was falling critically ill and dealing with the dissolution of a long, romantic relationship, his band, DeYarmond Edison, was dying as well. “We were best friends when we moved to Raleigh, and we were basically married to each other. I think we went through some changes, especially me, when we made such a big move,” admits Vernon. “I didn’t adjust as well and went downward. We all were trying to become something, and trying to be creative, and we just got pushed away from each other musically. It was hard when it broke apart.
Maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through."

WITHOUT A BAND, A GIRL OR dead-end job to keep him in North Carolina, Vernon became open to transformation. And the key very well may be that all of this just happened— it was never premeditated. So when Vernon showed up in Wisconsin he wasn’t thinking about making an album. He was just purging, using the process of playing music for 12-hour marathon sessions to free his soul of all the sorrow and pain that had collected inside. As is often the case, Vernon’s head and heart were at odds. Although he’s been writing songs since he was 13, played guitar and baritone sax all through high school and has been in bands ever since—including a recent stint with North Carolina’s The Rosebuds—it wasn’t until his heart broke that his head would unlock a pure emotive response.

“I was sad. And on some days, I feel it still,” reflects Vernon. “[It was] lost love. The true love that you feel like you lost forever and you will never be able to get again; or anything half as good.”

It was a combination of loss and the freedom of working outside the confines of recording an album within a band dynamic that led Vernon to a new voice—literally. Inside that cabin, where no one could hear or judge or laugh, Vernon began to sing in a stark, fragile falsetto, wrapping it in a blanket of reverb not unlike a young Jim James once did when honing My Morning Jacket. The quivering, multilayered falsetto defines Bon Iver.

“I think the somewhat wild freedom of being alone gave me what courage I needed to just make my voice do that,” explains Vernon. “Like I said, my subconscious was pushing that through.” The anguish is felt in every crack of Vernon’s voice and every corner of the nine precious songs.

“It was a person all alone, free of distraction for a long time,” says Vernon. “It gave my conscious brain the key to my subconscious mind. I would sit down and just bleed into the mic, saying words and syllables that didn’t make any sense. And going back over that later, and notating it, I realized that I was saying something.”

For Emma, Forever Ago is a journey toward salvation. It traces the dark path Vernon took from that severe illness, the broken relationships and self-doubt to an artist with a new voice and a new direction home.

He had written personal songs before, “but not in same way,” he explains. “[In the past] songs of honesty, which most of them were, were all ‘heart on my sleeve, this is what happened’ songs, very literal. [On For Emma] I was exploring how far I could go with my thoughts on emotional context.”

Instead of thinking, Vernon was just feeling; and what he was feeling at this point in his life was an overwhelming sadness. It’s this beautiful, pure sense of despair that pulls us to untangle the web of reverberating, opaque words, stacks of acoustic guitar and strange, ghost-like echoes inside For Emma, Forever Ago. It’s a cycle that begins with the heavy potential of “Flume,” the first words we hear creeping in: “I am my mother’s only one/It’s enough.” Over the next 37 minutes, Vernon sheds his fragile skin, growing stronger and tempering sullen moods with bursts of short energy.

The open-ended lyrics found in “The Wolves (Act I and II)”—“Someday my pain/ Will mark you/Harness your blame/And walk through”—and the manner in which the swarming acoustic guitars are draped around the shivering words creates great mystery, as if Vernon is still searching for the true meaning of his songs. The effect of traveling with Vernon into the material gives the listener the same opportunity to create meanings and emotional contexts for each of the tracks.

“This is the redeemer,” Vernon says of the album’s final cut, “re: stacks.” “This was the last song I recorded. It was the most conscious song on the record. It was about approaching happiness again after sitting down to drink my demons under the table,” he continues. “The album served as an entity, the most cathartic experience of my life.”

As much as Vernon insists that this isn’t about breaking up with his girl, there’s no denying the experience filled him with the emotional burden that informs the album. Whatever the case, the disc’s essence goes much deeper for him: “This is not a break-up record; it’s not even a record about someone, or something. It’s this loose road sign that barely sticks in the ground, pointing toward years of built-up grief and loneliness and lack of perspective and lack of personal
connection. This album was about me trying to alleviate this cancerous mediocrity that had come into my life.”

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