Bon Iver - The Critics Choice

The Great Escape Festival, even in its short life time, has already garnered itself as a place to make or break bands thanks to its penchant for new music. Yet every year there is an act or two who are already on the runway with engines running using the festival season as a platform to launch themselves into the stratosphere that is the public consciousness. Whilst the Ting Tings were getting ready to top the charts the other must see of the festival weekend Bon Iver (pronounced Bonn eevair) was in the midst of a busy week breaking Britain. With a couple of Jools Holland sessions, two appearances at the Great Escape, and gigs in London and Sheffield sandwiched in between the man who can do no wrong did pretty well to find time to speak to TINTV just before he kicked proceedings off at Pressure Point. Right now Justin Vernon (the man behind Bon Iver) can do no wrong and if you haven’t seen or heard him in the past few weeks you may well have had your head buried in the sand. Even then, pictures cannot sufficiently communicate his gentle giant qualities.

Lounging on a sofa in the bar below Pressure Point, where he would later prove how different the live show is to the sounds produced on ‘For Emma…Forever Ago’, sporting an understated cap, jumper and jeans with rucksack in tow Justin Vernon looked every bit the travelling musician, “We just turn the record inside out, the songs are in the same sort of order as the album but the live show is a whole different concept”.

It took a second longer glance to see the man who went into the forests of Wisconsin in the depths of winter with a shotgun and a guitar and brought back the album of the year so far. It is amazing what a bit of alone time can do for some people.

Having read various articles, blogs and biogs that mention Justin in a previous life singing in Bruce Springsteen tones it was interesting to speak to the man himself about where the layers of vocal brilliance on ‘For Emma…’ come from. “It was very accidental at the time. When you are alone for that length of time you challenge yourself and try out different things and you don’t have anyone to tell you whether it is good or bad.” With his new found freedom he began to create songs rather than write them, going about the whole process without lyrics, a guitar or any structure “The songs started as layers of vocal building, sounds and syllables and were there in a certain form before I decided exactly how the guitar should be sound. I think this made the delivery of the songs more poignant and meaningful”.

On the subject of meanings I asked how much of the stories were true and who was the Emma who the record appears to be dedicated to. The question was met with a lot of ums and arrghs before the answer came. “It’s a hard question, one to which there is no easy way to answer. Emma was like my first love, who I thought I would spend my life with and then you get to your early twenties and go your separate ways; a lot of people have them. Well I spent a long time looking at this void in my life and blaming her, and then during the record I just realised it was as much me as anything else and this had started to come out in the songs. I had filled the hole and it was framing the songs that were already there and it framed and influenced the songs that weren’t. It summed up the record and I am big on titles, they are an important part of anything you create. It is supposed to be the start of a letter.”

A lot has been made of Justin’s successful winter and how it was the result of the break up of his former band DeYarmond Edison, but Justin insists their friendships stay strong. “It’s not that simple, there were people in that band I’ve been playing with since I was 11 or 12 and most of them I have been close to for the last decade. I still speak to them, I still miss them, I miss being in a band but for this I was musically better off with the isolation.”

Amongst the many myths surrounding the rise of Bon Iver is one that sits a little out of place with the old fashioned hunter gatherer way of life, the effect of Pitchfork Media and the internet is something to be thankful for, after all without it we may never have stumbled across Bon Iver at all. “It was crazy, we had sold 375 copies off our own backs over a period of time and we were already talking to labels, but then somehow Pitchfork got their hands on it, without us sending out any copies to the media or anything like that and the same day a review appeared in the New York Times and the last 125 copies of the record went that afternoon. All of a sudden we were talking to bigger labels with a bit more power and things took off.”

The album itself is a story from start to finish, and is proof enough that shuffle buttons are bad for music, each song appears more powerful when surrounded by its partners. “Like I said, the songs are framed by what they represent and as a whole I see them as sort of a bloodline, a family of mine that I made behind closed doors and came out with this vibe. There was a lot of thought that went into ordering the songs and mixing them together; they are where they are for a reason.”

Just a few hours later this emotionally charged but often soft record was used as the main tool to rock the roof off of Pressure Point, instruments and artists were carried into the crowd, who joined in pitch perfect for “Skinny Love” and with/without the bands encouragement threw backing vocals in for “The Wolves”. Just as he had promised the live show turned the record “inside out” and with the help of some extra additions, including a guitarist who was given one night to decide to continue at college or go on the road with Justin, created, from the same roots of beautiful songs and spine-tingling timbre, a completely different spectacle.