(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Albums: #13: Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (2008)

But first, a backstory!

Justin Vernon moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in 2005 with DeYarmond Edison, an indie foursome made up of himself and three friends (two of them now a member of the freak folk group Megafaun). Unfortunately, they fell apart before they even got going. Suddenly, everything around him started to fall apart as well: a girlfriend made like a banana and split and he came down with mononucleosis that was unkind to his liver. Clouded with an uncertain future, he secluded himself in a hunting lodge in Wisconsin for three winter months but, really, it’s without an agenda on hand. He hibernated and adopted the life of a hermit not because he wanted to legitimize the atmosphere felt in (t5!)’s thirteenth best album of the zeroes, not because he wanted to escape from today’s extremely interconnected world, but because he just wanted to clear the cobwebs in his mind.

But For Emma, Forever Ago was composed, and there’s no doubt that it’s a result of Vernon’s winter vacation. Bon Iver’s music is unclothed, steadily hushed, and innermost; his worn-down lyrics is not the result of cabin fever, but the work of a musician inspired by a creative aura that only untainted isolation can only provide. “I crouch like a crow/contrasting the snow/For the agony, I'd rather know” cry feebly out of “Blindsided”—his heavenly falsetto kisses the starry night sky—cut over strummed acoustic guitar with percussions thumping mimicking a heart that’s about to falter. And in “For Emma”, his loneliness and his hatred is playing tug-o-war with his frigid heart: “With all your lies, you're still very lovable.”

Vernon also suggests in his songwriting an observation of man’s relationship with nature. In “The Wolves” he howls of misery like the animals in the song’s title. In “Re: Stacks”, he explores more creatures as he sings of a black crow dangling his keys, even faking a toss. It’s no question that this could also be the byproduct of his seclusion, a newfound appreciation of nature and its fauna and flora.

So far, there hasn’t been a follow-up to For Emma, Forever Ago, other than a four-track EP Blood Bank which was released in 2009. And I’m certain that it all has just begun, and his future in the ten’s look propitious. However, with a narrative as rich as the one that surrounds his debut, I can’t imagine how he can summon himself to pen another nine songs as intimate and as affecting as these, a combination of Will Oldham’s desolation and Sam Beam’s lo-fi-ness. Maybe another trip can inspire him, a trip to Miami perhaps to make a salsa album.