Bon Iver—Shepherds Bush Empire 11/09/08 via Flickr (I was 13 at the time)

Bon Iver—Shepherds Bush Empire 11/09/08 via Flickr (I was 13 at the time)

I Started Listening To Justin Vernon In Grade School. Now, He’s Retiring As I Turn 30.

16 min read

There’s a particular violence in watching someone retire from their life’s work when their life’s work has been the soundtrack to yours. I was eleven when Justin Vernon became Bon Iver. I am twenty-nine now, watching him audition his own replacements in a music video that feels like a wake disguised as a comedy sketch.

PROLOGUE: The Mythology of Overnight Success

The mythology goes like this: heartbroken man retreats to father’s hunting cabin in frozen Wisconsin. Records an album in isolation. Emerges with a masterpiece. Instant success. Roll credits.

But mythology is just lying by omission. In reality, before the cabin, there were six years of trying. Before Bon Iver, there was Mount Vernon (1997), J.D. Vernon’s Home Is (2001), Self Record (2005), Hazeltons (2006), and DeYarmond Edison’s two full-lengths and a breakup scattering him like shrapnel. Vernon moved to Raleigh with his bandmates in 2002, then fled back to Wisconsin in 2006 after the whole thing collapsed. The band, the girlfriend, the plan.

He was twenty-five years old and had nothing to show for nearly a decade of work. Except liver disease, mononucleosis, and a car full of recording equipment he’d been too defeated to unpack for two weeks.

This is where we always start the story. But I want to start somewhere else. I want to start with the iPod shuffle.

via Bandcamp

For Emma, Forever Ago (2007–2010)

The Screenless Device

My first-ever music player was an iPod Shuffle. Teal. Tiny. Clipped to my little denim jeans on the playground at Alexander Ferguson Elementary School with knotted white corded earpods. No screen meant no control, just whatever shuffle decided you needed to hear.

The album arrived the way most things did in 2007, burned onto a disc, ripped to iTunes, synced via cable. My birthday present alongside Green Day’s American Idiot and The Beatles’ One and YouTube-to-MP3 rips of Daft Punk’s Discovery and Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope.

A girl in my class named Anna told me I was weird for listening to this kind of stuff, and she meant it as an insult. I decided to look her up recently and found out she now writes music journalism for actual publications.

Vernon didn’t plan to make an album in that cabin. He thought he was making demos. Rough sketches to send to labels, hoping for an advance to record something “real.” The gear sat in his car for two weeks before he even brought it inside. When he finally did, when he finally pressed record, he was listening back to Vienna Boys’ Choir recordings he’d absorbed months earlier. Appalachian folk singers using falsetto. Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke and the Staple Singers. Black vocalists had pioneered the terrain he was now stumbling through in the dark.

“Flume” was written before the cabin, at his girlfriend’s house in Raleigh. The song that made him leave. Everything that followed was documentation—a record of the event of writing music during a certain time and place, which Vernon would later clarify wasn’t necessarily bittersweet for him, despite how everyone else insisted on reading it.

The first real attention came from My Old Kentucky Blog in June 2007. Then Pitchfork. Then CMJ. Then Jagjaguwar. Then suddenly the songs were everywhere. “Blindsided” and “Flume” in One Tree Hill, “Skinny Love” in Chuck and Grey’s Anatomy, “The Wolves” in The Place Beyond the Pines. Even “RE:Stacks” in House MD. The album that was never supposed to exist became the sonic wallpaper of prestige television’s emotional crescendos.

I didn’t understand the lyrics. Still don’t. Vernon’s falsetto blurred words into the intangible, syllables dissolving into something pre-verbal. Shoegaze by way of folk. But I understood the ask:

And I told you to be patient
And I told you to be fine
And I told you to be balanced
And I told you to be kind

Instructions for a life I hadn’t yet lived, downloaded onto a device with no screen, no way to skip forward to see what came next.

Anna was right. It was weird music for an eleven-year-old. But she’d become a music journalist anyway, writing about these same bands years later, and I’d like to think, maybe delusionally, that playground conversation planted something. A seed that took.

via Bandcamp

Bon Iver, Bon Iver (2011–2015)

The Bus Stop Baptism

The first guitar note of “Perth” felt like being born. I was fifteen, waiting for the bus to junior high, purple 5th gen. iPod nano now upgraded from the shuffle. I’d pirated the album the night before (don’t pretend you didn’t, either) and synced it in the dark of my basement bedroom.

I was standing on the sidewalk as I heard the opening. Clean, direct, a single guitar line that immediately multiplies into itself. Then the horns, the drums, the whole gorgeous cacophony. Vernon knew immediately this would open the album, that “weird artistic click” where you don’t choose the structure so much as recognize it.

Many people incorrectly argue this is peak Bon Iver. The lush instrumentation, the full band, the haunting falsetto now complemented by strings and brass and percussion. The maturation from solo cabin project to proper studio album. But this reading misunderstands what Vernon was building. He’d converted a veterinarian clinic in Fall Creek, Wisconsin into April Base Studios—built mainly over the defunct swimming pool—and spent three years excavating something deeper than polish.

“Perth” was recorded in early 2008. The album wouldn’t release until 2011. That’s more archaeology than perfectionism.

The song that hit me hardest was “Calgary.” I live here now, twenty-nine years old, writing this essay in the city Vernon had never visited when he wrote a song romanticizing it as a wedding vow between two people who haven’t met yet. I can’t help but feel Jungian synchronicity. That sense of being called forward into a life before you know you’re living it.

But also “Beth/Rest,” which Vernon called his favourite song on the record. The one that sounds like a wedding band covering a power ballad at a Holiday Inn. People hated it. Vernon loved it. “It’s just happy,” he said. “I want to play this song all the time.” There’s rebellion in choosing joy in a catalogue built on beautiful sadness. Choosing a fucking saxophone solo when everyone expects strings.

via YouTube

The AIR Studios session became my personal liturgy. Just Vernon and Sean Carey at two grand pianos—neither one’s primary instrument—remodeling the songs into something skeletal and strange. “Hinnom, TX” and “Babys” stripped down to falsetto and space and the occasional unexpected flourish. They covered Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and it was nearly as devastating than the original.

I must have watched that video three hundred times. Maybe more. I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Working on-call janitor shifts in anonymous offices, coming home to my apartment, pulling up that video on my laptop, headphones on, lights off. The way Vernon’s voice would crack on certain notes. The way Carey would look up at him between phrases, this silent communication between musicians who’d been playing together so long they’d developed a private language.

Vernon later admitted the success of For Emma had been “scary,” had produced “a general anxiety.” This second album was an excavation, reaching back into his brain to pull out his own creative monster. He said something about how “the invitation of sadness” in his twenties had destroyed him a little, but by this album he was “mending and can now enjoy the peace.”

I didn’t know what that meant then. I was still in my twenties, still inviting sadness in like a welcomed guest, still thinking devastation was the price of making anything worthwhile. The lyrics I remember most is from Beth/Rest,

I ain’t living in the dark no more / It’s not a promise, I’m just gonna call it.

Which is maybe the most honest thing anyone can say about recovery. Not a guarantee. Just a phone call into the future, hoping someone picks up.

via Bandcamp

22, A Million (2016–2020)

The Alienation

Here’s where Vernon lost people. And he wanted to.

I was twenty years old now, streaming now instead of pirating. How profane, right? Trading ownership and effort for convenience. My phone was my music player. My headphones were wireless. Everything untethered, floating in the cloud, accessible and less real.

Vernon had his first panic attack while trying to write this album in Greece. Nearly gave up music entirely. “I had mental stuff,” he said, in that infuriatingly vague way men talk about their own suffering. “Stuff I felt needed healing.”

The album that emerged was compared to Radiohead’s Kid A—a radical departure, experimental, alienating to casual fans. But more accurately it resembled Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz. Proof that the sappy hipster couldn’t be pigeonholed or contained.

Vernon and engineer Chris Messina built a custom synthesizer called The Messina—a machine that allows real-time vocal harmonies, so Vernon could play a keyboard while singing to create vocoder effects simultaneously. One song contains 150 saxophones in its mix. Another was recorded over a cassette copy of Neil Young’s Unplugged to make it sound murky, distorted, aged before its time.

The number 22 followed Vernon through his life: his jersey number in sports, the minutes he’d set on alarms, the age he’d felt most alive and most destroyed simultaneously. A million was the Other. The infinite. The space between self and everything else. “You can never have one thing without the other,” he explained, diving into Taoist Philosophy about the paradox of duality.

via YouTube

The NPR Music Front Row concert at Pioneer Works is where this album crystallized. Brick walls from a Civil War-era ironworks warehouse. Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife Sarah—my love for you is deathless—echoing before the band took the stage. Vernon in a Tipitina’s T-shirt and high-tops, seemingly uncaring but absolutely in control. Two drummers, a saxophone ensemble, voices masked, faces hidden in darkness.

Bob Boilen called it transcendent. I know it’s the best thing Vernon ever did. Better than the studio album. Better than anything before or since. The way the processed sounds and acoustic instruments bled into each other. The way “715—CRΣΣKS” sounded even more raw and exposed in that cavernous space.

Love, a second glance, it is not something that we’ll need
Honey, understand that I have been left here in the reeds
But all I’m trying to do is get my feet out from the crease

I was twenty-three by then. Vernon was singing about drowning in slow motion. About how the things that save you can also trap you. About how being seen—really seen—is terrifying and necessary and sometimes the same thing.

After this, I drifted. i,i and PDLIF became curiosities rather than cornerstones. He was (rightfully so) collaborating with Taylor Swift now instead of Kanye West. Things were changing and even I, the devoted fan from the teal iPod shuffle days, felt the distance growing.

via Bandcamp

A Blur? (2019–2024)

The Distance Growing

Some eras don’t crystallize until they’re over. Some music doesn’t land until you’re ready for it to land.

I listened to i,i and appreciated it technically. But by now, my devotion calcified into respect, which is what happens when you grow up alongside someone’s work. Eventually you stop needing it to define you.

I saw Bon Iver live once during this period. Vancouver. The show was good. Great, even. The feeling of being in a room with thousands of other people who all knew these songs by heart, and somehow that collective knowing made the experience less intimate rather than more. Not to mention my enochlophobia**.**

Maybe that’s what Vernon meant about the anxiety. About playing a part. About how success—the thing you supposedly want—can feel like wearing someone else’s skin.

via Bandcamp

SABLE, fABLE (NOW)

The Final Album

The electricity began to swell in Vernon’s chest. Literal physical symptoms from the anxiety, from the constant pressure, from “playing a part” as Bon Iver for nearly twenty years. The conceptual genesis happened on 2.22.22—because of course it did—when Jim-E Stack arrived at April Base with Danielle Haim and got snowed in for multiple days.

SABLE represents near-blackness. An externalized projection of turmoil. fABLE came later as the hopeful counterpart, the dialectic, the Taoist duality Vernon had been obsessed with since 22, A Million.

via YouTube

I watched the “Day One” music video alone in my study. Jacob Elordi, Cristin Milioti, St. Vincent, Jenn Wasner, Dijon—all auditioning to be “the next Bon Iver” in a sketch that plays as comedy until Vernon himself appears near the end, weary smile, and suddenly it’s not funny at all. There’s a lyrical callback to “Skinny Love”:

I told you to be patient / I swore that I was wrong / So why can’t we both just now get to understand? And I found myself crying. Hard. Not because the song is sad because of how cyclical it all is. How Vernon the musician has been in conversation with Vernon the man for two decades, arguing about who gets to exist and how and for how long.

In his interview with The Times, Vernon admitted: “I don’t know how much is left. I’ve expelled a lot of it. For the first time since I was 12, I’m not writing songs. There aren’t any in here.” He pointed at his heart.

He’s forty-four years old. I’m twenty-nine. We’ve grown up together in the way you grow up with anyone whose voice soundtracks your becoming. I know more about the interior landscape of Justin Vernon’s emotional life than I know about most of my actual friends.

EPILOGUE

What We Carry Forward

Before the cabin, before the mythology, there was Mount Vernon at a Wisconsin high school jazz camp in 1997. Their first project released in 1998. Then college at UW-Eau Claire, where Vernon majored in Religious Studies and minored in Women’s Studies, saying he “hadn’t been ready to study music.” Then J.D. Vernon, then DeYarmond Edison, then the move to Raleigh, then the collapse.

We always want to skip to the transformation. The cabin. The masterpiece. The success. But Vernon spent most of his twenties failing at music before he succeeded at it. And now he’s spent his thirties succeeding at music while feeling like he’s failing at being himself.

via YouTube

There’s a mixtape on YouTube called “Ceiling In Our Garden.” Mashups of songs across Bon Iver’s entire discography. Calb spent hours splicing together different eras, creating conversations between Vernon at twenty-five and Vernon at thirty-four. It’s illegal. Copyright infringement. But it’s also the most pure distillation of what Bon Iver has been. A man arguing with himself across time, using music as the medium.

Vernon once talked about crows as omens. How for a long time he’d see them in trees and feel dread. But over the years, he said, “you start to realize maybe it’s not all bad. You don’t need to be sad anymore.”

I’m twenty-nine years old, the age Vernon was when he released Bon Iver, Bon Iver. The album about place and belonging and the emotional geography we carry inside ourselves. I live in Calgary, the city he romanticized without ever visiting, the place he imagined as a site for promises between strangers who would somehow become intimates.

My iPod shuffle is long gone. Probably in a landfill somewhere, that tiny teal clip outlasting the music it contained. I stream everything now, own nothing, have access to the entire history of recorded music but somehow feel more disconnected from it than when I had three albums burned onto a disc.

Vernon’s retiring the Bon Iver name after eighteen years. He says it feels like his last go around. “It’s been a ride,” he lamented, in that understated way that carries the weight of thousands of shows, millions of streams, a catalog of music that defined a generation’s relationship to sadness and beauty and the space between.

What will I keep? What will I carry from a decade and a half of Vernon’s voice in my ears while I walked to school, rode the bus, worked in that hospice kitchen, fell in and out of love, failed and succeeded and failed again?

Be patient. Be fine. Be balanced. Be kind. I ain’t living in the dark no more. It’s not a promise. I’m just gonna call it.

You don’t need to be sad anymore. You can choose joy even when everyone expects strings. You can retire from your life’s work before it kills you. You can let something end while it’s still beautiful instead of waiting for it to become tragic.

Vernon made a record of the event of writing music during a certain time and place. I made a record of becoming a person while that music played. Neither of us knew what we were documenting while we were doing it. That’s the point.

The crow in the tree has never been an omen. It’s just a bird. And the music is about paying attention to your own life closely enough to find the language for it. I think we’re both finally ready to leave the cabin.

Brennan Kenneth Brown is a Queer Métis author and web developer based in Calgary, Alberta. He founded Write Club, a creative collective that has raised funds for literacy nonprofits. His work spans poetry, literary criticism, and independent journalism, with over a decade of writing publicly on Medium and nine published books. He runs Berry House, a values-driven studio building accessible JAMstack websites while offering pro bono support to marginalized communities.

Support his work: Ko-fi | Patreon | GitHub Sponsors | Gumroad | Amazon Author Page.

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