Jagjaguwar Records Scores Bon Iver Re-Release

Bon Iver, an intentionally misspelled name meaning "good winter," is the stage name of Justin Vernon, the voice and instrumentalist behind For Emma, Forever Ago. The nine songs on the album are the products of a three month stint of seclusion in a cabin in the north woods, according to Margaret Reges of All Music, a fruitful period following the breakup of Vernon's former band DeYarmond Edison.

The nine-track LP, now officially released on Jagjaguwar Records, is composed of backwards-looking reminiscences and lyrical pleas for permanence from a lover long gone.

Digging For Fire

On the last track of the album, "Re: Stacks," Vernon sings:

"This my excavation and today is Qumran."

The day, the location of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the constant process, their excavation; what Vernon accomplishes in his lyrical looking-backwards and pervasive longing is a process of bringing the day to light, pulling up the roots of thoughts and emotions.

Excavation is the only accurate way to describe the process at the heart of this album, as the listener often feels that all of the songs and the thoughts expressed in them have been there all along, you just forgot, forgot to say them, forgot to dig them up again.

"This is not the sound of a new man or a crispy realization.

It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away."

Vernon's lyrical revelations are retreads, pacing backwards through the tracks cut in the grass by so much walking. Oftentimes memory-haunted, Vernon's narrator is challenging the two greatest enemies of the mind, loss and time.

A Love Song sans Schmaltz

"Skinny Love," one of the best cuts on the record, plays like a breathless lover, pleading with their relationship to weather the ravages of time; the speaker can't be quiet and still, however, needing to enumerate his list of "I told you so's":

"I told you to be patient / and I told you to be kind / and I told you to be balanced

and I told you to be fine / and in the morning I'll be with you / but it will be a different kind."

The song confronts the murky mess of love without providing a sunny, idealistic exit strategy; its a full-on embrace of the difficult and the thorny. Its a glimpse of the potential end, without the resigned bitterness of any sort of completion or resolution. Oen can't help but listen to it again with the hope that somehow, this time, they'll find a way out, or a better way in.

One Must Have a Sound of Winter...

Though his lyrics are concerned with the fight against time and forgetfulness, Vernon's instrumentation is created from a series of ever-denser layers, building guitar line onto guitar line, while the drums often resurface only to vanish out of thin air and surge forward once again, as on the swelling and receding "Creature Fear."

Within the aggregate of instrumentation, one finds Vernon's vocals frail and haunted, as much a wordless part of the ensemble as a central communicator.

For Emma, Forever Ago sounds like the letters you meant to write, like the remarks you make too late in the day, thinking of them only after the other person has left the room. It's not so much a memorial, though the album's title might suggest it, as it is a collection of the words that are left when looking at an empty bed.

Sources/Official Site:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll

http://www.boniver.org/

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