Don’t Cry for Bon Iver

After finding fame as a man apart, alone, and in the woods with Bon Iver’s 2008 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon has spent the ensuing years vying for community—and communion—beyond himself. His sound expanded past the folk tradition, and the reverent deification that often comes with it, into the more anonymous and abstract realms of post-rock and electronic music. He released albums with bands like Volcano Choir and Gayngs, diffusing the spotlight further. He invited more and more people into Bon Iver’s universe, to the point that the project’s last album, 2019’s i,i, featured the photos of more than 50 collaborators in its gatefold sleeve; amid that mosaic, Vernon’s own photo was the same size as everyone else’s—and heavily scribbled over, rendering him nearly faceless.

This egalitarian bent is admirable as a worldview, and a seemingly necessary way for Vernon to offload some of the emotional tonnage that gives his work so much meaning. To an extent, though, the tendency is also pointless. Yes, the addition of new styles and people has made Bon Iver’s music infinitely more interesting. But as a singer, songwriter, producer, and avatar for extreme feeling, Justin Vernon is just too much to convincingly fade into any background; the image of an elephant trying to hide amid a pack of dachshunds comes to mind.

This tension has resulted in some of Bon Iver’s most visceral work. Take “715 - Creeks,” from the project’s most experimental album, 22, A Million. The song is delivered a cappella, but also kind of not: Vernon sings into an instrument that takes his voice and splits it into several harmonies in real time. The effect creates an illusion of plenty, but when Vernon plays the song live, it’s still just him up there. When he sang it at the Pitchfork Music Festival last year, I spontaneously started to tear up. (I know crying along with Bon Iver is basically a meme, but I had never been so moved at one of their shows before.) It was because of how Vernon pushed his voice against the effects’ robotic grain, arriving at something hyper-human. It was because of the lyrics, which suggest a universal regret without being corny and literal. It was because, as a guy in his early 40s, I know what it means when things end, when memories of what used to be follow you like a ghost.

A couple of weeks after that Pitchfork performance, Vernon sang “Creeks” again, in Minnesota. About a minute into the song, his voice cracked, and he doubled over. He recently described this moment to The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich: “I became overwhelmed with anxiety and sadness. I got choked up and started to weep. [...] I’m crying—like, hard. Shoulders-heaving crying. And I feel unsafe, like this is not an OK place for someone to be. And the crowd is going wild, you know? I’m not mad at them. I would also be cheering for encouragement. But I was thinking, They want this.” Being a conduit for sadness, and making a livelihood out of exposing your innermost self night after night for thousands of strangers, takes its toll. Reading about this breakdown made me feel culpable. At the same time, I immediately searched for it on YouTube and watched the whole thing. I’m not proud of this, but I don’t regret it either. 

“Speyside,” the clear highlight from Bon Iver’s new three-song Sable, EP, once again finds Vernon almost entirely alone. It’s tempting to call it a return to that For Emma sound, but the song is wiser, more self-aware; if “Skinny Love” was a ripped-from-the-chest song about a doomed romantic relationship, “Speyside” is an ode to Vernon’s own tortured artist myth. It sits atop his plaintive, acoustic fingerpicking. So far, so folky. But he recorded the guitar in such a way that the sound of each individual string spreads across the stereo field, giving the music an astral weightlessness (as well as another illusion of plenty). His voice is reflective, understated. When he lets out a high-pitched holler at one point, it’s not a gregarious millennial whoop as much as a stately expression of past pain. The second verse wallops me every time:

It serves to suffer, make a hole in my foot
And I hope you look
As I fill my book
What a waste of wood
Nothing’s really happened like I thought it would

That first image—of shooting yourself in the foot only to draw attention to the wound—manages to be self-aware and raw at once, a potent songwriting sleight-of-hand. He dismissively alludes to his own stories and that famous Wisconsin cabin from which he emerged as “a waste of wood.” And yet, here he is, still: writing, singing, reflecting on mistakes so we can share in his absolution. He’s in total control. “Speyside” might not make you start blubbering like a baby whose ice cream cone just went splat onto the sidewalk. That’s good. It’s not a song for wallowing. It’s a song for being better.