There was a time when listening to Bon Iver wasn’t seen as a cry for help.
In 2012, it’s a cause for concern in social circles, a red flag that you’re skipping meals for ice cream and rapidly losing control of your waistline – or at the very least in a very dark place, the kind that requires long, circular talks, certain Cameron Crowe movies and Saturday nights alone to remedy.
This is, of course, part caricature and part truth. The truth is that Bon Iver used to be that kind of band – in 2008. There’s no denying the sadness in the music. Much in the same way that Mary Kate and Ashley trafficked in perfume and straight-to-VHS releases, Bon Iver established themselves as arms dealers of sadness and isolation. And as we all know, there’s nothing like shared sadness to bring people together. (See 9/11)
The caricature is that “Bon Iver, Bon Iver,” the band’s sophomore album released in 2011, was frontman Justin Vernon’s way of reinventing his surprisingly famous pet project as an avant-jazz band. The album added energy to supplant his image as just another indie mope-ster – albeit one in the great tradition of James Mercer (The Shins), Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie).
This disc kept the overall feel of “For Emma” but added more texture and technicality. Though, when you pull the threads of “Bon Iver, Bon Iver,” the sweater unravels. Underneath there isn’t a man with a guitar, a song that you can play. This patchwork was a part of what made the album such a feat, but it has its limitations on imparting truth.
If sadness was corn, “Bon Iver, Bon Iver” would be a plate of nachos, “For Emma” would need to be sheared from the stalk.
And while Bon Iver is learning how to process his main ingredient – and getting increasingly lauded for it thanks to guest work for Kanye West and Grammy wins – it all started with the whispering-in-the-woods album art, the lumberjack bedroom pop and the song that peeled the skin off many a soft apple heart.
That aside, this leaves us with the question of this piece: what does “For Emma, Forever Ago” mean four years removed?
It’s best to start with that song: “Skinny Love,” to date the band’s best track. After all, it was what punched up from the underground like a zombie hand through dirt. I remember sharing that song with a friend in college, imploring him to stop studying in the wee hours of the morning just to listen. (It was the Jools Holland version, perhaps the definitive version of the track). Looking back, it was the kind of you-gotta-hear-this moment that now seems fitting, a worthy gesture, that, judging by his subsequent popularity of the song, was probably often repeated.
For my part, I ignored the entirety of “For Emma” for a while, focusing mainly on the “Blood Bank” EP and the handful of tracks that I enjoyed. What I didn’t know is that these songs would come to be my survival gear during one of the most turbulent times of my life.
When I listen to “For Emma,” I can’t do so objectively. It makes me confront this past self, like an embarrassing old photograph. As I lie here, I close the eyes and clutch the sheets, feeling a full heart feeling of melancholy, as if hot tea is ready to spill through me.
I see a brown-haired girl trying on my gym shorts. I feel a tongue in my ear as I look at DVDs in a comic store. I remember drinking Mad Dog and lying in the grass, sharing beautiful silence with a friend on dewy grass and crying over a copy of the Jean Claude van Damme resurrection vehicle “JCVD.”
In songs like “Flume” and “re: Stacks” those long-lost polaroids pop out, coming to life again, at once cringeworthy and endearing, a reminder of the strange days that sometimes surround us. Even still, as the songs play I can feel these things. I am really there. I can feel the book spines in the campus library, I can feel the college restaurant tables, I can feel her hair as if it’s in my hands, the community TV center and a car rental outlet nearby, and I can feel the grass as we lay there and drunken would-be scholars totter by.
In this way, “For Emma” is a great album. Its songs do what the best songs do, come incomplete like envelopes, waiting to be filled by whatever you need to add.
The best of the tracks on this album can bulge with any weight.
I saw Bon Iver and co. at a recent Boston show and I walked away feeling okay. They looked worn out, and their material, specifically the tracks from “For Emma,” struggled in the larger setting.
There was one girl in front of me though, reading and studying all through the opening act. She was near three other girls, all of whom were wearing various shades of hipster dress – non-prescription glasses, shirts with see-through backs and the like. It wasn’t until later that I realized that she was alone. That she had come here with her book to see Justin. To watch him play these songs.
This might not end up being Bon Iver’s definitive album, but these songs have power, these songs have meaning. I may have felt like I outgrew it, but she didn’t, she felt every word like the lick from a flame in some cold winter’s dark.
Verdict: Great. Time will tell if it’s essential.
Pete Rizzo can be reached at prizzo@thoughtpollution.com.