The Mic’s new editor-in-chief, Caradoc Gayer, dives deep into the indie canon to locate the cryptic and ongoing importance of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago as it passes its 15th anniversary. Join him as he untangles Vernon's lyrical web and highlights his continuous presence in today's popular music.
In November 2006 a 25-year-old musician named Justin Vernon drove from North Carolina to Wisconsin. He was enduring personal struggles: he’d recently split with his band, broken up with his girlfriend, and been diagnosed with glandular fever. He arrived at his father’s Wisconsin hunting-cabin, with a guitar and recording equipment in his car. Through the winter months, he stayed in that cabin and made an album called For Emma, Forever Ago. Fast forward fifteen years; nowadays Vernon is an indie household name, with four studio albums and multiple Grammy wins as the frontman of Bon Iver. Since the project’s debut, the music has gradually moved in an art-pop direction and, now playing with multiple bandmates, Vernon’s somewhat abandoned the ‘folksy-white-guy-of-the-woods-with-guitar’ archetype. The influence of For Emma, therefore, is subtle and almost obscured by the rule-breaking abstractness of later Bon Iver records. However, the romantic story of the record’s origin is still just as compelling and keeps fans coming back to the album, to undergo a nostalgic journey to Justin Vernon’s humble roots. Therefore, it seems suitable to return to For Emma, upon its decade-and-a-half anniversary, to examine the songs in specific, and look at how they’ve continued to retain their magic all these years.
Love-it-or-hate-it, Justin Vernon’s song-writing style is uniquely unparalleled, and the world first glimpsed it, in all of its imagistic glory, in For Emma Forever Ago. If later albums, like 22 A Million or I, I had grand, metaphysical themes, then For Emma is about solitude, retreating into your own thoughts, whilst healing and thinking about your past and future.
We hear these lyrical threads in songs like Flume in which Vernon surrounds himself in Icarus-like imagery, and describes only having the sky, the moon, and a forestry flume for comfort and protection. In Re: Stacks Vernon faces down his anxieties: “There’s a black crow sitting across from me, his wiry legs are crossed, and he’s dangling my keys, he even fakes a toss, whatever could it be that has brought me to this loss?” These songs express a sense of despair, but there’s also a sense of hope for recovery. Lump Sum expresses this kind of atmosphere, in fragmented lines like “…or so the story goes,” and “we will see when it gets warm.” Creature Fear also looks to the future, with Vernon singing about “foreign worlds’, and ‘territories, ready to reform.”
“It's extremely fulfilling, in the end, to try to understand the world from another person's perspective, and put a bit more effort in than usual to do so.”
Of course, it’s not easy to glean these ideas from the lyrics upon first listen, as they’re a bit bizarre. They’re based upon phonetics and sound more than explicit meaning. Many such, somewhat fair, criticisms have been made to Bon Iver albums, in that they’re difficult to connect with, but in other ways, this is why For Emma is so special. When somebody’s telling you how they feel or expressing their emotions, they might not do it that coherently at first. However, it’s extremely fulfilling, in the end, to try to understand the world from another person’s perspective, and put a bit more effort in than usual to do so.
But it’s not only the lyrics of For Emma which embody ideas of solitude and the desire to connect with others. The instrumentation, and the way that the songs are performed on the album and live, are also very important. The record is filled with ghostly vocal-harmonies, a quintessential convention of folk music. For Emma is relatively unique in that the vocal harmonies feel artificial and crushingly lonely. This differentiated Vernon from other indie folk contemporaries like Fleet Foxes; he conjures up phantom versions of himself to sing alongside him. Resultantly, lyrics like “Someday my pain will mark you,” and “What might have been lost” in The Wolves (Act 1 and 2) sound even more powerful, and emotionally affective. The huge drum crescendo, towards the end of that song, makes things seem even more poignant. It creates the illusion of other musicians, when in actual fact Vernon’s alone with his emotions.
But, notably, soon after the album’s release Vernon had real musicians to tour with. In 2009 he performed at Glastonbury, alongside the first three members of Bon Iver. On YouTube, you can watch their performance of, the now-classic of indie folk, Skinny Love, in which Vernon’s guitar playing and falsetto singing is accompanied by an explosive three-person-drum-beat, and vocal harmonies from drummer-Sean Carey, which make the performance all the more powerful and poignant. These days, Vernon performs songs like The Wolves alongside 5-7 multi-instrumentalists. In their 2019 performance, at Northside Festival in Denmark, the final crescendo sounds absolutely huge. Vernon’s use of an ever-changing roster of musicians, to stylistically reinterpret the music he made by himself back in 2006, is a powerful and influential thing. Arguably, it’s a phenomenon that had hitherto not been seen in the US-indie-folk-pop-world, which makes For Emma, the album where it all began, seem all the more fantastic.
Vernon’s capacity for reinvention over the years cast a significant influence over the 2010s indie landscape. Kanye’s fifth studio album, 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, saw Vernon lending his vocal and production talents, contributing to a pivotal album in US hip-hop. Other pivotal figures in those spheres, who were influenced by Vernon’s work, include the genre-straddling pioneer James Blake, who has had a long-running collaborative relationship with Vernon: from his 2011 Enough Thunder EP, to his 2016 single I Need a Forest Fire, to Bon Iver’s 2019 single iMi. Frank Ocean’s R &B revolutionizing album Blonde has Bon Iver in its DNA. Other echelons of Indie have felt no less of an influence: the regular folky fixtures of the Spotify Boho + Chill playlist, like Ben Howard, Angus and Julia Stone, and RY X, and other, more-recent giants of indie pop, like Phoebe Bridgers and The 1975.
It seems clear then, however humble and unassuming For Emma, Forever Ago is, it’s certainly achieved classic status in the indie canon. It’s not an old album, so our lack of hindsight might prevent us from fully comprehending its influence. Yet still, For Emma’s cryptic lyrics, introverted instrumentation, and powerful emotional undercurrent, were no doubt pivotal in the mid-2000s context. In a decade when the growing pop-ethos seemed to be bigger = better, Vernon reminded us to find poignancy in the littler, more subtle aspects of life.
Caradoc Gayer
Edited by: Roxann Yus
Cover image taken from Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago album artwork. In-article image courtesy of the Grammy Awards. In article video courtesy of YouTube.