SABLE,
The three songs that comprise Bon Iver’s new record SABLE, emerged from a long-gestating breakdown. Think about the journey Justin Vernon has been on across the past two decades: For Emma Forever Ago, high profile collaborations on records by artists like Kanye West and Taylor Swift, throwing music festivals in his city, and the increasingly layered and elaborate touring and recording machine that Bon Iver became. An electricity began to swell in Vernon’s chest. Being Bon Iver meant playing a part, and intentionally leaning into that role meant frequently pressing hard on a metaphorical bruise. He developed literal physical symptoms from deep anxiety and constant pressure. At the end of his rope, maybe done with music, and thinking increasingly about the process of healing, he finally found the time to unpack years of built-up darkness just as the lockdown began.
While there are the usual collaborators on this record providing pedal steel (Greg Leisz), fiddle (Rob Moose), saxophone (Michael Lewis), and trumpet (Trever Hagen), SABLE, is largely defined by Vernon’s voice and guitar. The dense layers of i,i are nowhere to be found, as Vernon bears the weight of these songs largely on his own. It’s a retreat and reset. Stripped back to the primary elements that the project was founded on, the intimacy of SABLE, is perhaps most prominent on “S P E Y S I D E,” recorded in such a way that individual guitar strings resonate in individual speakers. It’s a song that spilled out of him as an apology to a couple of people he loved and hurt, written in 2021 during a moment of reflection and clarity while decamped in Key West. Listening from the guts of his guitar, his lyrics are autobiographical and direct; gone is the veil of maximalist mystery from albums’ past. He can’t make good, can’t go back, can’t undo what he’s done. “I really damn been on such a violent spree,” he admits.
Recorded in the April Base compound in Wisconsin, these songs were each written at different periods of processing. “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” came first in 2020, born of the restless anxiety and facing up to everything that leads to it. Written almost as a surprise while he was unsure of his future as an artist—a meditation on the process of unpacking the contexts that inform his contexts—it stares down the long road of putting oneself back together. “AWARDS SEASON” is the most recent. He wrote entire stanzas on long walks around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis last year. It’s a song that takes stock of a major and wrenching change.
These songs are reflections of unfinished business, of guilt and anguish. “I’m a sable/ and honey, us the fable,” he sings in the record’s closing track. Some of Vernon’s best songs are the saddest ones, and there’s a kind of unintentional toxic reinforcement that comes when everyone praises your most depressed instincts. SABLE, is named for near-blackness, the record an externalized projection of his turmoil. This trio of songs represents an unburdening from one of the most trying eras in Vernon’s life. There was a time not long ago where Vernon intentionally hid his face. Here, the blinds are open.
fABLE
Bon Iver’s three-song collection SABLE, was an act of vulnerability and unburdening. Written and recorded at a breaking point, they were songs of reflection, fear, depression, solitude, and atonement. The word “sable” implies darkness, and in that triptych, Justin Vernon sought to unpack some long-compounded pain. Then, at the tail end of its final track “AWARDS SEASON,” there’s the barest thread of a lighter melody—a drone, a glimmer, an ember, hope for something more. SABLE, was the prologue, a controlled burn clearing the way for new possibilities. fABLE is the book. Stories of introduction and celebration. The fresh growth that blankets the charred ground. Where SABLE, was a work of solitude, fABLE is an outstretched hand.
Compared to the sparse minimalism of its three-song table setter, fABLE is all lush vibrance. Radiant, ornate pop music gleams around Vernon’s voice as he focuses on a new and beautiful era. On every song, his eyes are locked with one specific person. It’s love, which means there’s an intense clarity, focus, and honesty within fABLE. It’s a portrait of a man flooded and overwhelmed by that first meeting (“Everything Is Peaceful Love”). There’s a tableau defined by sex and irrepressible desire (“Walk Home”). This is someone filled with light and purpose seeing an entire future right in front of him: a partner, new memories, maybe a family.
While not as minimal as its companion EP, fABLE’s sound appears to walk back the dense layers of sound Vernon hid behind on records like i,i and 22, a million. There’s nothing evasive or boundary-busting about this music. It’s a canvas for truth laid bare. Much of the album was recorded at Vernon’s April Base in Wisconsin after years of the studio laying dormant during a renovation. The album’s conceptual genesis happened on 2.22.22 when Jim-E Stack, Vernon’s close collaborator and guide throughout the creative process, arrived at the base with Danielle Haim. Snowed in for multiple days, their voices intertwined for the ballad “If Only I Could Wait.” Suddenly, Haim gave voice to this crucial perspective—the one Vernon seems to hold in sacred regard across fABLE. Accompanied by Rob Moose’s strings, it’s a track about weariness— about not having the strength to be the best version of yourself outside the glow of new love.
There’s something undeniably healing about infatuation. Cleaving to someone else can feel like light pouring in from a door that’s suddenly swung wide. But there’s a reason SABLE, is of a piece with fABLE; even after you put in the work, the shadow still rears its head from time to time. On “There’s A Rhythmn,” Vernon finds himself back in an old feeling, this time seeking an alternative instead of erasure: “Can I feel another way?” There’s an understanding that even when you’ve reached a new chapter, you’ll always find yourself back in your own foundational muck. A fable isn’t a fairy tale. Yes, there’s the good shit: unbridled joy, trips to Spain, the color salmon as far as the eye can see. But fables aren’t interested in happy endings or even endings at all; they’re here to instill a lesson.
As the album winds to a close, he acknowledges the need for patience and a commitment to put in the work. There’s a selfless rhythm required when you’re enmeshing yourself with another person. The song—and by extension the entire album—is a pledge. He’s ready to find that pace.