Folk CD filled with feelings
Bon Iver’s debut album pulls at the heart strings with raw emotion
Posted on February 21, 2008
Bon Iver’s debut album, For Emma, Foerver Ago is lonely. It needs you to listen to it, with perhaps the most evident reason of all being its beauty. Called “irresistible” by The New York Times, For Emma, Forever Ago is a cascading blend of folk songs that elegantly and wistfully touches on the ever emotional subjects of guilt, distress and heartbreak. The album’s accompanying sense of nostalgia adds an air of removal and acceptance to the work, as if one is listening to age-old emotional wounds that are finally being exposed — healed, but not forgotten.
These overtones aren’t the only reasons for the album’s feeling of remoteness. Justin Vernon, the man behind Bon Iver, moved to Wisconsin after the breakup of his previous band, DeYarmond Edison, to record the entirety of this album in a small, secluded cabin in the woods. Vernon is able to turn this potentially hampering setting into an acoustical strength, using the walls to amplify sounds rather than restrict them. On “The Wolves,” layers of the chorus “what might have been lost/don’t bother me” form an almost chant-like echo and creates a haunting yet ultimately serene effect.
The desolate setting surrounding the creation of the album even comes through in the lyrics themselves. The album embraces solitude right from the opening song in “Flume” which begins, “I am my mother’s only one/it’s enough,” before continuing on into more obscure imagery. The back-and-forth dialogue of highlight track “For Emma” has a crushingly personal feel, as does the “Skinny Love” line “Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?” which asks intimate and seemingly unanswerable questions.
One weakness of the album is the overly hushed nature of the lyrics. Vernon’s voice, while riddled with emotion, is often unclear, leaving the listener with an impression of sadness without a real explanation of its origin.
Vernon at times gives the impression of a lone wolf howling at the moon, with the chilling, somber wail of his voice. This, along with a simple, pulsing guitar lends perfectly to Iron & Wine or Jack Johnson comparisons.
It’s been written that “there are worse things than being alone” and For Emma, Forever Ago revels in this truth, managing to acknowledge solitude as a fact of life while sounding great doing it.
