Mark Beaumont - Bon Iver

Copyright 2013 Omnibus Press
This edition 2013 Omnibus Press
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EISBN: 978-0-85712-864-5

Cover designed by Fresh Lemon
Picture research by Jacqui Black

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F ROM the lighting rig hang antique cloths, brown and tattered as old fishing nets or an acre of sackcloth. The front of the stage is lined with silver rods that resemble a metallic cornfield. After an age, darkness falls on this calm and peaceful scene, until ticking clocks and chiming bells mark the coming of the time.

From the wings stalk nine men, settling into a broad landscape of instruments dual drum kits, percussion pods, pianos and boudoirs of brass. At their helm, centre-stage, a hulking figure of thinning pate and bushy beard, strapping on a guitar as the horns rise into volcanic turmoil.

Then this rickety shanty shack lights up.

The nets become ice caves, mountain ranges, sunrises and bloodbaths. The stalks glow like inverted icicles or flash like Christmas woodland. And just as the music of Justin Vernon had billowed out from a secluded woodland cabin, reaching far beyond anything hed ever dreamed possible, the beast hed blossomed into Bon Iver floods the arena with tremulous, tremendous noise.

Clarinets nuzzle sweetly against glitch beats and jittery guitars, saxophones turn maniacal for mid-song jazz interludes, lonesome guitar arias Justins fragile falsettos tinged with the soulfulness of Al Green build into rollocking mass folk chants. Holocene lands as delicate and urgent as a butterfly landing on a steam trains wheel; Creature Fear has grown trombone washes redolent of Elvis Costellos Shipbuilding; Towers twirls away into a vibrant hoedown. Theres humour Justin introduces a new song, we were going to premiere it on the BBC but decided to save it for you before playing ten seconds of avant garde freak-out he calls Ninja and theres scintillating communal empathy and Re: Stacks, stripped down to just Justin and a trio of singers from support band The Staves, finds 10,000 people holding their breath for fear of fracturing the ice-thin frailty of the song, the silence so thick you could choke on it.

Then, come the encore, a bold volte-face. Everybody fucking flip out, Justin demands, claiming its your duty to sing, and the arena becomes a howling choir for Wolves (Act I And II) and a chorus of lovelorn condolence for Skinny Love and For Emma. In a room so vast it usually takes lasers, floodlights and pyrotechnics to quake the back rows, Bon Iver do it with sheer sonic inventiveness and poetic emotional pathos. Wembley has never felt so intimate, so much like a cathartic confessional booth. In a crowd of thousands, every single one believes Vernon is singing his pained paeans of devastation and reconstruction specifically for them.

Its not just Wembley thats been swept away by the tidal wave that is Bon Iver the arena rock band. Across the globe, witnesses claim to have seen fans clutching their faces, dumbfounded in amazement at the transformation, this sparrow become a roc. Its staggering how seamlessly Vernons Bon Iver project has expanded from one man at a microphone in a forest hideaway in 2006 to tiny, seated acoustic shows in the back rooms of bars in 2008 Justin playing a bass drum with one foot as he taps along to his own acoustic to blasts of noise from a nine-piece band bulging arenas, topping Albums Of The Year polls, bagging multiple Grammys and exploding the possibilities of bearded, maudlin alt-folk into shards of psychedelia, shadows of post-rock and shots of hip-hop today.

But its wrong to call Vernons success rocketing, let alone overnight. His has been a slow-burning wildfire talent, fanned from a flicker over the decade before his famed retreat to his fathers cabin and the agonising birth of Bon Iver. Virtually from infancy Vernon has steadily perfected his art: honing his lyrics, refining his songwriting and altering his voice through a broad plethora of formative bands, collaborations and solo albums until one fateful heartbreak tipped him towards greatness.

Youd be wrong to think his story is encapsulated in Bon Iver too in the shattering, regluing and pumping full of life of a hollow shell of a man that one endeavour narrated. No, Justin Vernons story is one of dedication. To friends, lovers and bandmates old and new. To the wilds that reared him and the Wisconsin ice that cradled him and ultimately pierced his heart. To a pride in, love for and devotion to wherever you call home. And to an inclusive vision of musical communion, the inspiration of friends, the wonders of music shared and revelled in, art springing from the mingling of souls.

Bon Iver may have been born of a crumbling, but Vernon is the foundation stone of vaulting creative towers. And to witness its laying, lets ride the flume, back to a time when Emma was still a femme fatale of the distant future, to the very start of this quite superlative winter

S OMETIMES you just cant get far enough away from the world. When Otter Creek, Eau Claire County population 531 gets too much, take a drive northwest, out into the snowy wilds of Wisconsin, the Driftless Zone. Feel the barren aspens shroud and tower over the narrowing roads, the hills and forests suck you into their elemental calmness, nature engulfs you like a homecoming soul. Theres a power here, a belonging, a deep repose and a mournful threat. And, for someone attuned to its frequencies of isolation and enormity, theres inspiration.

Ninety minutes out into Dunn County, traversing the icy river valleys and lakeshores sprawled out between Medford and Menomonie, take a turning onto a dirt track, onto The Land. Beneath wintry pines that huddle together like crowds of ancient skeletal pillars, watched by wild wolves and turkeys from the snow-smattered undergrowth, cross The Lands 80 remote, overgrown acres to the very end of the earth: the cabin in the woods. A timber building in an alpine style, it emerges from between the trees like a lost slice of Midwest history, built in 1979 by a local university professor with a hankering for weekends in the wilderness, as a homage to a pioneer-era forest homestead. Its faithfully ramshackle the dirt floor was only covered over a decade after its construction, a lavatory plumbed in even later and its eaves are full of the noises of its years.

The crunch of knee on cone. The crackles and squeaks of conception. The buzzing of chainsaws, the crunch of logs dragged through bracken, the pop of hunting rifles and the bubbling of stew pots, the laughter of children. Nails being hammered, trees felled, family ties tightened.