![]() ![]() Vernon’s falsetto is piercing and alien, his guitar playing sounds unusually brittle and his lyrics are cryptic and difficult to parse. ![]() For Emma, Forever Ago, despite its spare acoustic instrumentation (a la Iron and Wine), is a strange, experimental album. While that description is technically correct, I think 22, A Million is a more accurate reflection of Vernon’s spirit as an artist. ![]() I eventually got the CD as a gift that Christmas, and it now ranks among my favorite albums.īon Iver is often regarded as the archetypical “sensitive folkie” artist a flannel-clad, bearded man who retreated to a Wisconsin hunting cabin to spend a melancholy winter recording frost-covered ballads about heartbreak and loneliness. The songs hit me like a ton of bricks I was still trying to recover from returning to America that summer after 9 months in London, and the emotions and lyrics in some of the songs mirrored what I was thinking and feeling. Once the album was released, I went through it, song-by-song on the Youtube mobile app, on a Greyhound from DC to State College, PA. They sounded nothing like his first two albums, full of glitchy beats, processed vocals, and bursts of white noise. It barely registered when Vernon released some new songs in the fall of 2016, my senior year, but finally I decided to give them a listen. I then proceeded to forget about Bon Iver while I was in college. I eventually grew to appreciate it, along with Vernon’s 2011 follow-up album Bon Iver, Bon Iver. My parents bought me Bon Iver’s debut album, 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago, whose acoustic one-man-and-his-guitar stylings seemed completely different from “Woods.” I liked “Skinny Love,” (because who didn’t like that song), but shelved the rest of the album until years later. I was attracted to the song’s densely layered, otherworldly quality it sounded like a choir of sad martians singing a round way out in a snowy forest. ![]() I first listened to the music of Bon Iver (the project fronted by Justin Vernon) when “Woods”(off 2009’s Blood Bank EP) was recommended to me on an “iTunes Essentials” playlist (do those even exist anymore?) that featured songs with vocoder and autotune. Bon Iver- 22, A Million (2016, Jagjaguwar) ![]()
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