Header_BonIver_19.0831

Ever since the door swung shut on that north woods cabin, we all felt like Justin entered
a future we had imagined as kids. It was an obsessive, simple dream we shared as
teenagers growing up in Wisconsin: just music, always. For me that started with Justin
asking: “Trev, wanna be in a band?” as we passed each other in the hallway in front of
our high school’s trophy case. From then on, along with five of our closest friends, we
played anything together, giving everything a go. From jazz standards and ska vamps,
free improv freak-outs and marching band anthems to writing our own music. Through
these musical experiences, we began to find and form our hearts collectively. All
together we assembled musical materials that reflected and produced a shared
consciousness that continues today: how we respond to certain tonalities, how to create
atmospheres and what we want them to do, which harmonies bring forth places we seek
out, how particular articulations can explain more than words can even begin to attempt.
Motion and thoughts aligned. Collective goals formed piece by piece. This was how the
dream began.
But dreams adjust in new realities. Bands came and went. Time passed in Wisconsin,
people moved apart and pursued inner impulses that had been set-aside during our
youth. Maybe we should have trusted ourselves more, but all we knew was music and
being together, so we rightfully questioned how we could stand as individuals. Many of
us moved to North Carolina, I was on the other side of the ocean. For a few years I only
heard small vignettes of my friends’ new life down south. And then my heart split when I
heard that Justin was leaving North Carolina to return to Wisconsin. I watched from afar
as my friends began to tear apart. What could have happened? I felt helpless. And then
For Emma, Forever Ago emerged. When I read the album title, my heart sank again. My
reaction was more worry than anything. I knew Justin’s recourse to isolation and the
past, almost a crippling nostalgia that prevented him from moving onward. This title was
a beacon looking back. But when I finally heard the music, I felt relief – it was Justin,
raw and vulnerable, as the music had always been. In fact, it was almost normal in how
extraordinary it was. Something had shifted with this set of music, something had been
lit. For Emma, Forever Ago broke open that fantastic dream into a reality. And before the
harness could be thrown over that realized dream, Bon Iver, Bon Iver cemented its
animation.
Throughout these last years I have met many people in different parts of the world who
have been enchanted by Bon Iver. No doubt it has been thrilling to witness but it has
also been odd at times. Perhaps it is the widespread exposure of our lives, this
community of friends. Hearing someone sing along to “I’m with Hagen”, a sign of our
personal alliance, or “3rd & Lake, it burnt away”, a disappeared place of countless
hangs, makes one curious about how a thing can be shared. In my most cynical
thoughts, I wonder: How can this be relevant to someone else? However Justin has
managed to connect such intimate, banal, and forgotten moments to many people.
These moments are now shared widely and no longer belong only to us. But who owns a
memory?
When your voice is responded to in the world’s cosmic conversation, when your words
and sounds travel to the depths of strangers’ souls, life’s dream can carry you forward at
a pace you had never travelled at before. The collective excitement pushes your foot to
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the gas because isn’t this the only thing to do? Isn’t this exactly what we had imagined or
hoped? It became too much to handle for Justin. Something was left behind in such a
mad dash over the course of these recent years. The music stopped giving back. The
acceleration, repetition and exposure transformed that coveted dream into what felt like
a mind-numbing theme park. What is this for? What are we even trying to accomplish
here? The teenage fantasy, that shared memory of the future, was now in disguise. A
shapeless figure, present but unrecognizable.
This spectacular upheaval of life after these albums provoked an inner storm, a mental
sickness of anxiety for Justin. Of course it did. The dream had taken on its own life. It all
came to a head on an empty Atlantic beach. I bore witness to my best friend crying in my
arms, lost in a world of confusion and removal. Justin could barely even talk. It was only
days before, on a misguided solo trip to an island off the coast of Greece, that he had
recorded the opening words of 22, A Million, “It might be over soon”, into a portable
sampler. The forecast that begins this next Bon Iver undertaking is a reminder of our
fragile existence. How when everything appears stable, it may crumble and fall through
our fingers. How do we hold on to what is important? How do we make sense of the
events that rip us apart? What choices do we have and how do we make them? It was
the beginning of an unwinding of an immense knot inside. When confronted with
daemons one must hold up the mirror in order to see the other side. For Justin, that
begins with 22.
22 stands for Justin. The number’s recurrence in his life has become a meaningful
pattern through encounter and recognition. A mile marker, a jersey number, a bill total.
The reflection of ‘2’ is his identity bound up in duality: the relationship he has with himself
and the relationship he has with the rest of the world. A Million is the rest of that world:
the millions of people who we will never know, the infinite and endless, everything
outside one’s self that makes you who you are. This other side of Justin’s duality is the
thing that completes him and what he searches for. 22, A Million is thus part love letter,
part final resting place of two decades of searching for self-understanding like a religion.
And the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding. When Justin sings,
“I’m still standing in the need of prayer” he begs the question of what’s worth
worshipping, or rather, what is possible to worship. If music is a sacred form of
discovering, knowing and being, then Bon Iver’s albums are totems to that faith.
Yet when it came time to make a new album, the music was all exhausted. After Bon
Iver, Bon Iver, it felt as if the well had gone dry. Confronting himself also meant facing
this loss of direction sense in his music. Through different groups of friends—close,
passing, new, old—he began to assemble proto-melodies, vague textures and specific
moods from hundreds of hours of recorded improvisations. These were the skeleton
keys to unlock not just how 22, A Million could sound, but how it was felt, what it was for,
what is was about: the power of human connectivity through music. The poly-fi record
formed at the congruence of a bold yet delicate sonic palette. These sounds were the
way out from the suffocating enclosure and captivity of anxiety.
The ten songs of 22, A Million are a collection of sacred moments, love’s torment and
salvation, contexts of intense memories, signs that you can pin meaning onto or
disregard as coincidence. If Bon Iver, Bon Iver built a habitat rooted in physical spaces,
then 22, A Million is the letting go of that attachment to a place. “I’m taking deeper
consideration in another kind of place–our friendships and connections to other people.”
Justin proclaims this shift in ’33 “GOD”’: “These will just be places to me now”. Rather
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than places we encounter a collection of numerical relationships: binary code, mystic
ages, Bible chapters, math-logic, repeating infinities. Inside these numbers are a sonic
distillation of imagery from the past years of turbulence and how to recover. We hear
about positionality (“Down along the creek”, “In the stair up off the hot car lot”), strategies
(“I’d make myself escape”, “Steal and rob it”), situations (“Carrying his guitar”, “Sent your
sister home in a cab”), new lexicon (“Astuary King”, “Wandry”, “Paramind”) temporalities
(“The math ahead, the math behind”, “It might be over soon”) and repeated visuals (“Five
lane divers”). These words reveal the riddle of dualities: pain and love, suffering and
redemption, omens and happenstance. Such ambiguity and interpretation is the core of
how Justin composes words: there are always two ways to see something. Beneath this
Daoist-impressionism, we hear the footsteps of a process, the relationships that have
kneaded the album’s cause. A locked horns angel, empathetic ears and sagely
blessings—friends who have provided themselves in different roles to mold this music
into form.
To narrow this album down to the next step within an “artistic career” would be to miss a
far grander purpose of this music—or any music for that matter—and the cultures of
friendship that sustain us in our capacities to even play music. Although 22, A Million
emerges from a swirling context of transformation in Justin’s recent life, it is based on
how we have always approached what music can be or do. It is not the perceived power
of money and fame that will change the course of events in one’s life, but empathy.
Music is a pathway that allows us to listen to ourselves and the people that surround us.
It is a pathway to understanding that actively creates change in real-time. Music, even in
its most intimate moments, is a pathway between us all. It is the nuts and bolts of
humanity as well as its totality. It is made sacred between people and in return makes
those relationships sacred. It is the buoyant substance that we grab onto when the water
rises above our heads. The answer has been here the entire time: just music, always.