I am my mother’s only one,’ Bon Iver sings doubtfully on their debut solo album opener, “Flume.” His falsetto punctuates the solitary guitar strum that is the song’s prologue.
‘It’s enough,’ he decides. His voice trembles toward the end of each line. The tune is the moody introduction that sets the tone for the remaining nine tracks on For Emma, Forever Ago. The chorus captures a vivid, yet abstract image, ‘Only love is all maroon/Gluey feathers on a flume/Sky is womb and she’s the moon.’
Justin Vernon is the voice behind Bon Iver, his indie-folk musical project. Vernon’s early music-making began while still attending high school. In 1997, he formed the eponymous Mount Vernon. Later, at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, he founded DeYarmond Edison. The latter band moved to Raleigh, North Carolina with the promise of a more vibrant and lucrative music scene, but they officially broke up in 2006 with a Myspace post. Vernon went on to contribute to The Rosebuds, before working on his solo debut.
Bon Iver derives from the French greeting bon hiver, which translates to “good winter” in English. For Emma, Forever Ago was recorded and produced by the multi-instrumentalist in the remote woods of northern Wisconsin. Vernon self-released the album in July 2007, before a wider release on the Jagjaguwar label in February 2008. The record navigates Vernon’s grief after notable losses.
While in Raleigh, Vernon fell ill with mononucleosis that developed into a liver infection. Tackling poor health, the demise of multiple bands, and a recent split with his then girlfriend, he sought solace at his family home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Soon after, he moved further north to his dad’s hunting cabin in the snowy woods of Eau Claire county.
“Skinny Love” is the album’s most recognizable track and the band’s most popular to date. It increased in commercial popularity in 2011 when Birdy released a cover as her debut single. The track is a plea for patience, ‘Come on, skinny love, just last the year,’ Vernon beseeches, ‘Pour a little salt, we were never here.’ Both versions charted globally, but Birdy’s cover surpassed the original recording, charting number 1 on the Top 100 Singles chart in the Netherlands and peaked at number 2 on the Australian ARIA charts.
The uncertainty found on “Flume” gives way to a promise on the project’s most lyrically direct song. On the haunting “The Wolves (Act I and II),” Vernon pens a letter to his protagonist ex, guaranteeing ‘someday, my pain will mark you.’ The track features noticeably more Auto-Tune, percussion, and densely layered vocals than the rest of the record. Here, the songwriter teeters between ruminating on ‘what might have been lost’, and being dismissive, ‘don’t bother me.’
Vernon nears acceptance on “Re: Stacks,” proclaiming, ‘this my excavation and today is kumran.’ He memorializes this moment of clarity as equivalent to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The singer declares that ‘everything that happens is from now on,’ while still lamenting all the love lost to ‘a frozen ground.’ Vernon accepts that closure is rarely given, it must be unearthed, ‘This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization/It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away.’
The near flawless winter record ranked 461 on Rolling Stone’s 2020 list of greatest albums of all time. For Emma, Forever Ago is the break-up album the world was unaware it needed. Vernon took the remnants of loss, created a months-long cathartic process, and fashioned this timeless, watershed opus. Just as the Qumran manuscripts shed a new light on long-held beliefs, so too Vernon resurfaces from his self-exile not a new man, but a man unburdened by what he had to endure. G&S
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