BON IVER:
Anywhere from Here

A ROAD LESS TRAVELED
    Justin had to leave here, though, to eventually reach his artistic breakthrough by coming back. With DeYarmond Edison, a crescendo-packed, power-folk band with three other members of Mount Vernon, Justin played to an enthusiastic and ever-growing fan base in Eau Claire for five years. After recording their second CD, they decided to take their shot. The band relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina, hoping a bigger music scene would help them get noticed nationally. And it worked…in a very roundabout way.

    While the move to Raleigh was successful for the rest of the band, both musically and personally, Justin felt he had lost his own songwriting path, and to an extent, himself. Nothing was working anymore; for him the music stopped moving forward. After a year, the natural thing for the band to do was separate, and they did so mutually, after 10 years together in DeYarmond Edison and Mount Vernon. In addition, Justin’s relationship with his girlfriend also tanked. While the remaining band members formed Megafaun, Justin packed up his loss and regret and moved home. His dad offered the family hunting cabin as a place he could spend the winter. It was a place Justin could set himself straight, do chores, and decompress by writing and recording. He was making songs for himself – and exorcising some personal demons – unaware that these songs would actually become a full-fledged release. It was the freedom from expectations and the north woods solitude that brought out the most original, honest, and cathartic work of his life.

    The first thing he did, in an act of skin shedding, was abandon his usual singing and writing styles. “The way I started writing for this album was more opaque and more based on subconscious stuff,” Justin says. “The way that songs used to come out was much more straight from my-heart-to-my-head-to-the-page. And in this case, I tried to sort of cloud the head part of it and ended up getting some stuff that was somehow more meaningful.”

    The dense lyrics offer the listener something new with each listen – and that goes for the singer, too. “That’s what’s allowed me to continue to play the songs this year and not get sick of them…because they’re still mysterious to me, yet I know what they’re about,” he says. “And everyone kind of knows what they’re about, but everyone’s still not sure…so it just kind of worked out.”

    Justin referred to the more traditional DeYarmond Edison songs as “too sturdy” and “painting the same picture every time.”  “I still get people who say ‘As Long as I Can Go’ is my favorite song,” he acknowledges. “And I’m not going to take anything away from that, but that song for sure is about one thing – and one thing that is beautiful and sacred. And it’s too big of a subject to roll in.” 

    And while the DeYarmond material was more accessible on the first listen, a lot of the songs on For Emma don’t have traditional beats, verses, or choruses. Add in a different singing style and dense lyrics, and many of his old fans haven’t warmed to the changes. It’s funny how it worked. After being loved locally and ignored by the rest of the world, now he gets international praise while some locals are still stingy about the record:  “What’s with the falsetto?” “The lyrics don’t make a lick of sense.” “I want to like it, but I can’t.” “I saw him on Conan and I couldn’t understand a word he was singing.”

    Justin sensed it coming. “I haven’t heard anyone complain yet, but I heard myself hearing them complain,” he admits. “It’s something that came into my head and then kind of dissipated because I was like, ‘I’m so happy with it I can’t stop.’ I can’t avoid this thing that came out of me as it did.”

    Actually, Justin had a revelation when a close friend listened to a demo of the record and admitted he didn’t “get it.” “I realized I was doing something I was proud of when he said he didn’t get it, and it didn’t bother me,” Justin says. “Because I respect that guy and when I heard him say that and I didn’t go, ‘Oh man. What did I do wrong?’ I knew I was doing something that was satisfying me.”

    And I’d like to say that I was on the forefront, calling Justin’s success early, but it was the opposite. For each of his previous releases, I figured some type of breakthrough or national recognition was only a lucky break away. I pushed the discs and live shows on friends. There’s no reason these guys can’t hit it big, I thought. From performances I saw, from the clubs to the classroom, there was an intangible quality that drew people in.

    But when I listened to For Emma: Forever Ago, I dismissed it as an “off” record. Other than “Skinny Love,” I put it aside hoping he’d be back on track with his next one.

    A couple people told me it was incredible and that I should “stay with it,” as if it was some kind of workout regimen. Because I respected the rest of Justin’s music so much, I kept giving the songs more chances. Still nothing. Then the national praise started flowing in, which was perplexing, to say the least. Music benchmark setter Pitchfork gave it an uncharacteristically high 8.1 rating – raising the antennas of independent music lovers everywhere. Mojo and Uncut magazines both gave it 5/5 star ratings. It was rated as one of the top 10 records of the year by NPR, and it was recently named #4 Record of the Year by Paste, only a couple of months after they put Justin on the cover. From cutting-edge blogs to Entertainment Weekly, everyone was buzzing about the CD recorded in a cabin by the deer hunter.