February in West Texas. The light low and the days still warm and sweet. The air bright with red-tailed hawk and blue bunting, with the shink and rattle of the green jay. On a pecan ranch east of El Paso, its orchards running down to the Mexican border and the waters of the Rio Grande, a thrum of activity — song, saxophone, dancers, drums, guitar, synths; the sound of something taking shape. Here, 1500 miles from Wisconsin, from where this all began, a new season.
When Bon Iver released For Emma, Forever Ago in early 2008 it introduced Justin Vernon as one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation and revealed a sound that was distinct — tethered to time and to place, to a season of contemplation and the crisp, heart-strung isolation of a northern Winter. Its successor, the self-titled Bon Iver, Bon Iver, brought something more frenetic, the rise and whirr of burgeoning Spring, of hope and sap and movement. In 2016’s 22, A Million, Vernon came to see something different again: “it was,” he says, “our crazy energy Summer record.”
The band’s fourth album, i,i, completes this cycle: a Fall record, Vernon says, autumn-coloured, ruminative, steeped. “It feels very much like the most adult record, the most complete,” Vernon says. “It feels like when you get through all this life, when the sun starts to set, and what happens is you start gaining perspective. And then you can put that perspective into more honest, generous work.” The relocation to Sonic Ranch in Texas gave Vernon and his band new range to work on songs that had been gathering for years — many even pre-dating 22, A Million. “The medicine of changing scenery truly spoke to us,” he says of those six weeks. “I feel like the landscape made my body and mind calm. It allowed us to feel confident and comfortable, to be completely free of distraction. I don’t think I left the property in six weeks. And in many ways the story of the album is the story of those six weeks rather than the almost six years of some of the songs.”
For those weeks, Vernon says, “we made an art camp of it”. Inspired by his experiences of collaborative creative immersion – from Gayngs to the Funkhaus festivals to recording with Kanye West in Hawaii, Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s Music NOW and his own Eaux Claires festival, he invited down his regular bandmates, Sean Carey, Matt McCaughan, Mike Lewis, Andrew Fitzpatrick, and newest member Jenn Wasner, and a host of collaborators including Zach Hanson, Marta Salogni, BJ Burton, Trever Hagen, Naeem, Phil Cook, Velvet Negroni, Rob Moose, Buddy Ross, and the members of TU Dance, hoping for inspiration, cross-pollination, a kind of multi-discipline creative conjugation. “Not every day, not every moment is a success in that scenario, but nothing’s in vain,” says Vernon. “Getting those folks together and feeling the power of a different musical perspective, a different musical language.”
He cites as an example the glorious “Holyfields,”, a song that began as a half-accident amid some 15 writing sessions with producers and close collaborators Brad Cook and Chris Messina. “And it came out of nowhere. At 10:30 in the morning, something happens and there’s a song there. But it’s about an abundance of trust and an abundance of free creative space until something spills out.”
For Vernon, this new way of working, across five studios and 2300 acres, amid the musical industry of his peers, allowed a return of sorts to a creative impetus that had been obscured over the course of the last decade by the responsibilities of being Bon Iver’s frontman, bandleader, songwriter.
“When I made For Emma it was just me on my own,” he says, “and ever since then it’s been understanding that I need to put people around me to help me be successful. I was trying to find out a way to share this stuff. But as soon as you do that, and you start sharing your studio space every day with people you love and people you collaborate with, you lose that solitude and that quiet that I found much easier to work in during that early period. And I didn’t really find it in the last 10 years. Until now I was never was able to get my way out of this controlling centrepiece position.”
In making i,i he was finally “in the chair I was supposed to be sitting in. And not sitting in more than one chair. Not filling more than one role.” It meant that rather than dwell on details of drums, or brass or synths, he was able to focus on the heart of each song. “I could concentrate on sitting down and singing,” he says, “on working on lyrics and having my own space for a change.”
Bon Iver album titles have always included a comma — two thoughts, two pieces. This time, these matching thoughts reflect squarely on the process and purpose underlying i,i. “The title of the record can mean whatever it means to you or me,” says Vernon. “It can mean deciphering and bolstering one’s identity. It can be how important the self is and how unimportant the self is, how we’re all connected. Rastafari scholars talk about “INI” as an expression to totalize the concept of oneness. Growing up studying religions of different cultures, I never saw an expression say so much with so little words.” i,i’s lyrical focus is also an echo of the delicate balance between the individual and the broader community, and the space, or lack of it, between creation and inspiration.
This recalibration of priorities, this sharing of the creative load is something Vernon’s learned after the harrowing experience of finishing 22, A Million and a time during which everything, every day felt heavy and panicked and wrong.
Much of the rebuilding of himself and the construction of this album came through the support of his fierce friend and former bandmate Brad Cook. “Even though our band broke up 10 years ago, I always called Brad and asked him what he thought of anything I wrote,” Vernon says. “And eventually in the last couple of years he kind of came on as an advisor, a muse, a perspective-holder, a friend, but also a producer.” A musical producer, but also producing the team. “Brad’s like the head coach,” he says. So I’m shooting a lot of shots but I’m not coaching.”
Cook has encouraged a steadiness in Vernon, a confidence and perhaps a return to self. The most direct example is that on i,i, his voice carries little of the electronic distortion of the last record. “Brad’s take on it is that I was distorting my voice because I was scared,” Vernon says. “He said the music is cool, but that’s not what is really going to get into people’s hearts. I just really want to hear you sing.”
Some days on the ranch they would stop recording, stop writing, singing, playing, dancing, and walk out across the land, head south, to the river, to the border. There is a wall there, half-built, a structure that stops, abruptly, at the point where the money ran out. “You can touch Mexico,” Vernon says. “You can stand on the land and touch Mexico, and touch the wall.”
It was a strange thing, this point of division, and failure, and hope, and connection. Behind him the ranch, his collaborators, the music they were making together; the realisation that this moment demanded something new and generous and unified. “I think,” says Vernon, “that it was time for me just to be a little more whole.”