Review: Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver – “For Emma”
(from For Emma, Forever Ago)

This is the kind of creative awakening all of us romantic, moony creative-types wish for: a retreat to the north, a burst of lightning in a field of deep meditation, a fully realized work of art borne from the soil, fresh and whole, edifying like a baptism.

What happened here? Justin Vernon spent a few months in a cabin in the woods, never intending to make a transformative album, or any album at all. But weeks went by, he took up his guitar and his four-track and looked at the snow and, one can only imagine, this heartache-lovely piece of poetry poured forth intact.

In the real world, Vernon released For Emma, Forever Ago independently under the name Bon Iver (French for “good winter”) last fall; it was scooped up by Jagjaguwar records and re-released this February. In the real world, yes, For Emma has been prattled on about at length. You kids out there in the real world probably know about it already; maybe you’ve listened to it a few times yourself. But as soon as I put this album on, friends, I leave that world –the snarky, self-conscious sphere of who knows what and when and how well, where all that ever happens sincerely is second guessing and spilling coffee.

It’s not just the album’s spare-ness, or how lonely it is, or the fact that you can hear a chair scooting over creaking floorboards and sirens howling miles away or Justin Vernon coughing or dropping things. It’s not just the eerie whistling, the gentle hand-claps or the expansive, echoing harmonies.

It’s the way I can’t understand half of the words the man sings in his warm, wide voice, but every lyric seems nonetheless mysterious, precise and true. It’s the gradual piling-on of layers and volume that build to irresistible breaking points and the sudden bursts of percussion and exclamation that seem, amidst tall wells of reflection and doubt, to be unforgiving in their affirmative joy. The killer opener, “Flume,” is as welcoming in its sadness as the moon on the river in November; the title track, “For Emma,” is like the sun coming out in the spring: lazy horns, bright and pulsing strumming, a far away slide guitar line.

Much has been made of Bon Iver’s Walden-esque, man-in-the-shack conception myth, as has the inescapable winter’s tale the album tells, and you can hear all of that, if you’re listening for it. But in every cadence of this album I hear so much Wisconsin, Wisconsin in every season, and maybe that’s why it hits my heart so hard. There are sunsets over old train towns in For Emma, walks through dark streets, highways carving through big rolling hills, seagulls diving through fog on the lake, diner coffee too early in the morning, secret creeks and Indian mounds, menacing bare trees, hot summer evenings on wooden porches.

For Emma, Forever Ago is as gorgeous as an opera and as fitful and simple as a song you don’t know the name of that you hear on your car radio in the middle of the night. In the real world, I might be writing this review months too late, but I am writing it out of love, which is the only way to write about anything like what it is.