1 week Ago By Dan Condon and Zan Rowe
Justin Vernon is 43 years old and five albums into his best-known musical project, the multi-Grammy-award-winning Bon Iver. He's also newly in love, an important note when considering his new album Sable, Fable, an album dedicated to his new partner. "The whole concept is me reaching out to my counterpart, to the person I'm looking for in my life that could actually hang out with me, that I actually could do the story of life and love with," Vernon tells Double J's Zan Rowe in an exclusive Australian interview.
"It's a dedication to a person. They'll hear it all Friday for the first time. They've heard bits and bits and bobs, but yeah.
.." Going back to move forward Without context, that person may be alarmed by the album's beginning.
Its first three songs, which were released as the Sable EP late last year, see Vernon go back to the sound of his acclaimed 2007 Bon Iver debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. On his fifth Bon Iver album, Justin Vernon accepts what troubled him about his early fame and approaches the future with wide eyes. "I would like the feeling gone, 'Cause I don't like the way it's looking," he sings in the album's first verse.
"I think those three songs are very intense," Vernon says. "They're very heavy, and they're asking a lot of the listener. "They're asking the listener — they asked me, certainly — to shed a lot of blood and shed a lot of weight and energy.
"I wanted people and myself to start this whole album process looking backwards and reflecting, and looking at the present and making a choice, looking at a fork in the road. I wanted people to have time to do that." Spoiler: the album's mood shifts significantly from here.
Sable, Fable has a distinct, though not entirely linear, emotional progression, which reflects Vernon's own soul-searching of recent years. "I wanted me to have time to absorb what it felt like to put those three songs out in the world, and then to be able to really show that the passage of time was really valuable in trying to make a change in your life." Even though his work on the album is done, Vernon's path to emotional enlightenment continues.
"In the six months between Sable coming out and Fable dropping this week, I've healed a lot. I've grown a lot, and I think I really have to hang it on some of this art I've been making." In a musical sense, the Sable songs had fans clamouring to exalt that the "old" Bon Iver was back.
After a string of warped, sometimes challenging records that highlighted Vernon and his collaborators' hunger for experimentation, these three songs felt like a return to the man in the woods who made that iconic first album. "I think I needed to do that for myself," Vernon says of revisiting those indie folk roots. Ego is not a dirty word Vernon is not the first man in his early-40s to embark on a journey of self-discovery, but not many men have lived the bulk of their adult lives in the public eye.
Moreover, not many artists as successful as Vernon have been as at odds with what we consider to be the classic persona of a rock star. "I think I'm a pretty humble guy," he says. "Growing up in Wisconsin, we're taught to be humble.
We're taught to make sure that people around us know that we're humble, I think that's a really great way to grow up. At the same time, we're not immune to ego." The realisation that ego has unwittingly informed some of your life's decisions and personal code is a tough one to face.
As Vernon proceeds through his current emotional journey, he's starting to learn more about his younger self. "I think I took a bit of pride in, in the whole jungle of the music industry, being one of the nice guys. One of the people that didn't need any of this for my ego at all.
" In 'Awards Season', one of the tracks that appeared on the Sable EP, Vernon sings: "I get caught looking in the mirror on the regular. What I see there resembles some competitor." "I think that line means two things," he explains.
"One is me accepting that there was a part of my ego that was getting served by all of this. "Even though I'm like, 'I don't need the Grammys, I don't need this, I don't do interviews, I just love the music,' I am susceptible and not immune to the pitfalls of some of that stuff. Also, not all of it's all bad.
It's OK to accept who you are and to love yourself and to think that you have something to offer the world. "I think the other part of that line is, we compete with ourselves, or we compare ourselves to our friends and other people that we see, and it's just a nauseating, endless battle that you'll never win." Two sides to a record While the emotional progression on Sable, Fable is not entirely linear, these two parts of the record do clearly represent very different moods.
"Sable is that darkness and Fable is this blast off of happiness and joy," Vernon says. "Then, by the end, there's sort of a resolve, that it's all part of the same cycle. There's a rhythm to everything, there's never a green pasture that you will endlessly rest in.
Life and energy is ever ongoing, and there's an acceptance to that that I try to find here." As the first three songs that make up Sable fade away, the Fable chapter begins. The shift of mood first comes via 'Short Story', where exultant chords blast some light into the record.
Learning he has the power to change his life has been a powerful revelation for Justin Vernon while making the latest Bon Iver album. Then, 'Everything Is Peaceful Love' cranks the blissful vibes up further, sounding like 70s Philly soul processed through the Bon Iver machine to make it slightly gnarled while retaining its limerence. "Hopefully, a lot of us have felt that sort of shiny, new-love feeling," Vernon considers.
"Sometimes in very dark periods of your life, those moments where you're in that thing with someone that you're falling in love with, it can be very, very powerful. Because maybe the rest of your life isn't really put together. "A lot of those ecstatic ecstasy-like feelings, much like the drug, they're a little bit of a trick, even though they're beautiful.
"That song is not about necessarily all vapid love, or that it's all going to come cascading down and nobody should believe in love or anything like that. It's just that acceptance of that overwhelming feeling of ecstasy." Ever since his debut album, an era-defining platinum record that inspired a generation of lovelorn indie balladeers, people have seen themselves in Vernon's work.
While he's flattered to learn when he's inspired others, it wasn't always easy to accept the part he played in a stranger's emotional wellbeing. "I just struggled a lot with the attention," he says. "I struggled a lot with over exposure.
"I think what you see in Sable is me finally accepting that, that it's all been OK, and that I'm still here, and that I can change what my life is. "If I'm not OK, it's my duty, if I have the privilege, to change my life moving forward. It takes strength and courage, and hopefully that strength and courage can also kind of be inspiring for other people.
" Sex tends to go hand-in-hand with romantic love, and 'Walk Home' ensures Vernon has that part of the new-found love journey covered. "There's always been sex in my songs and this kind of imagery and nods to the sexual," he says. "But I think this time, I was like, 'We're just gonna come out and say it.
Let's get in bed.'" While it's not WAP, lines like "Pull me close up to your face / Honey, I just want the taste" are pretty frank for Bon Iver. "It just kind of came out naturally that way," Vernon says.
"I wasn't thinking like, 'Now it's time to be sexy.' It's just sort of where I've been at, coming out with it and not having it all pooled up inside and trying to make it all shadowy. It's like, let's just call it what it is.
" Arriving at this point felt liberating, as Vernon realised he finally had the confidence to put this part of himself out there and not wince at the reception. "One of the most powerful things in the world is not giving a f*** anymore," he says. "You can't just say you don't, you actually have to.
I think that's in that song too. There's a bunch of stuff going on there." Good for the goose Sable, Fable is out today, and fans are already devouring its luscious sounds and amorous themes.
For Vernon, however, the album has already achieved what he wanted it to do. "Even since finishing the record, I've grown so much and learned so much," he says. Justin Vernon says he is coming to terms with the struggles he faced early in his career.
"I recognise I was trying to find a way to tell someone how I feel about them, how much I'd been going through before I met them [and] when I met them, and now getting to know them for the rest of my life. "Once it's out there, my work with these songs is done and that's just a really clean feeling. It's a really great feeling.
I know that these songs are going to mean something to people because the chance is, if they mean this much to me, there's going to be people out there that get something out of it.".
