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I don't consider myself a solitary person but I've definitely experienced some of that. I needed it to gain perspective; I needed to get a new face and to shed skin. I got down to something personal and examined it, and maybe that perspective, that sort of minutiae or fish-eye, up-close look is maybe what people are reacting to. -Justin Vernon |
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 Bon Iver |
"I think I was always frustrated with myself as a songwriter because I'd write a song too quickly. Now, I'm trying to avoid patterns [you use] just to get done with a song. I really think you need to squeeze or wring a song out more," Vernon says. "I think the important thing to do as a musician is to not click yourself into any pathway. It seems very wrong. Whenever I hear something I open my ears. If it's the Dixie Chicks or Mendelssohn or Steve Reich or John Prine, you gotta listen to it all in the same perspective. It's an emotional context thing. It's music - it's not some fashion statement. I open my ears to everything and I allow myself to interpret things emotionally through my mind. Then I try to turn around and spit music back at people."
There are folk skeletons to some cuts. For example, "The Wolves (Act I And II)" could easily be a mournful bluegrass tune in other hands. It's how Vernon has dressed things up – or stripped them down in some cases – that differentiates his work from the coffee house set. There's an unpremeditated, organic character to the album that eludes easy categorization.
"I think people sometimes jump to conclusions about what a song's gonna be before it's done, and that shouldn't happen in the recording studio," says Vernon. "It's hard to do because the audience gives you bread but you can't shape it around that because that's not what people really want at the end of the day."
Vernon played almost every instrument and sang every note, facing the challenge of hearing how things harmonize and second guessing the insertion of piano or some other sonic element. The final product is remarkably consonant, a feel that pervades without ever settling into one groove.
"The reason I do it like that is almost to save myself the worry of boring someone else. I'm an alright musician but most of the time I'm picking up an instrument and trying to do something on it I'm not capable of. So, it's a long process to figure out what I want to play and then be able to play it with the phrasing and quality I want to hear it at. It's a very repetitive process. I wouldn't even call them 'takes' because I'm usually not sure what it is I'm playing," laughs Vernon. "One of the reasons I like working alone is because if somebody else is there I might skip through things because I feel bad they have to sit through this process. It's carving away and finding out what's in your subconscious. Rather than perfect one style of instrument I guess I just wait until the songs dictate what I want to do, and then battle each part as it comes."
The subconscious is an important aspect of For Emma, which taps into things we can't usually access consciously.
 Bon Iver |
"I think that's where I found a lot of the most meaningful stuff. When you're writing a song you're writing yourself a lesson or something. So, when I was experimenting with things, I found I was getting a lot out of accessing things right under the surface. Sometimes when they manifested they were strange and kind of obtuse and jagged but they made sense to me in the way subconscious mind stuff makes sense," says Vernon, who keeps the ragged ends of life's threads dangling wonderfully in abrupt tape cuts or distorted crackles. "I definitely wasn't thinking consciously, and the way Emma got constructed was very un-mindful. I wrote twelve or thirteen songs and found that eight or nine of them sort of belonged together. I was lucky that they belonged to this sort of shared pathway that felt like a record to me. They felt like the most accurate depiction of this event or time or recording process."
Taking this one-man, dearly private production into the live setting with a full band has actually proven to be a pleasurable experience for Vernon.
"It's fun because the guys understand me. Mike [Noyce] has known me for a long time – I was his [guitar] teacher – and Sean [Carey] has listened to my music for a few years. They aren't hired guns or anything but they recognize [the album] is a very concise statement, that everything that was there needed to be there," observes Vernon. "So, what we're trying to do is just delicately unwrap the layers of the songs, maybe exposing new directions of the songs as we play them live. They unfold in, dare I say, more masculine versions [laughs]. They take the same care I do in approaching unwrapping these extra layers of skin. It's very nice."
Bon Iver - Skinny Love (Live at Later... with Jools Holland
JamBase | Eau Claire
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