#MoneyMusicMonday: Reflecting on what Bon Iver means to me, now and then
A touching piece by my music editor in college, Zachary Lee, was the inspiration for Gloriously Tight. It shows one man's vulnerability, and compelled me to respond in similar fashion.
Our first #MoneyMusicMonday is about two artists who profoundly changed my life, as dramatic and cliché as this sounds. The first was Bon Iver. I had never listened to any of Justin Vernon’s projects prior to reading a piece by Zachary Lee, my music editor at Swamp Records at the time, and the second artist I mentioned.
Below is my own two-part work, borne from a reaction to his and my reflection on it four years later. An excerpt of his work is below. I recommend starting there, but just to keep things interesting, I’m going to go first, otherwise he’ll tell me I’m making money off his likeness.
All content remains largely unedited since its initial publication. Music recommendations and reviews will be included starting next week.
Reflecting on what Bon Iver means to me, now and then - No more living in the dark
2016
I am not a humble man deep down, or really an emotional one. But recently, even if only for a short while, I became both. Swamp Records’ recently launched independent blog, The Florida Basement, covers the music industry. Its artists, its politics, its shows and its future.
Late last week, it covered more than that. Bon Iver’s album announcement stirred something profound in the editor and my fellow writer, Zachary Lee. A guy with unparalleled taste, a knack for taskmastership, and blessed with the same (and really only) two virtues I value in myself: humor and honesty.
Zach’s article is a winding, pensive, beautiful account of his life as a thirteen year old, now, and some of what lays in between. It is probably better than anything I have ever written, and certainly more relatable. His mother’s struggle with breast cancer, his relationship with his faith, and most poignantly (here I shudder, thinking just how profound the first two must be and yet this is still true), his appreciation for Bon Iver, an indie folk band I had never listened to outside of the occasional Kanye West team up.
I took his article’s advice, and since two days ago the only thing of any real value I have done is play For Emma, Forever Ago, and write this piece. I have mulled over the personal vignettes Zach shares against the backdrop of the album, trying to think of some of my own that match the chaos and laughter he describes.
The time in Switzerland I hauled ass down a goddamn mountain just to talk to my girlfriend at the time, leaving my grandmother to think I got myself killed by the remarkable beauty I was deciding to ignore in exchange for instant gratification, and the Swiss authorities to regret ever letting tourism become a thing in their country.
When I step into a conversation with one of my best friends, Christian, and he quietly looks at me and says with complete conviction “What if today is the day I tell you?” He is referring to the hypothetical day where he tells me our entire friendship is a lie, he really hates my guts — understandable — and everything we have done together was a con to destroy me at the right moment.
Sitting on the steps leading into Reid’s bedroom almost every day for two years, the two of us wondering in despondency what the hell we’re doing or what we even want. When Eric and I would play FIFA, me desperately trying to improve, him openly laughing at my feeble attempts to beat him. Mike and Ricky and I shitposting about the stock market and basketball, Ryan and I sharing our fears and dreams of being successful writers. I am blessed with many friends, and to share so many experiences with them. I am equally blessed with a supportive family, including two siblings I want to succeed, parents who have stewarded me with grace, affection, and most importantly, forgiveness I sometimes did not deserve. And last, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles who have provided for me in every way imaginable.
I have graduated, and I have moved to New Jersey, but I am back in Gainesville this weekend for the season opener. Like Zach and the haunting lyrics of the album said, both in words I couldn't find myself, I should not let this become just a place for me like I unknowingly tried to make it. I want to think of it as a city of my growth, a place where I have and still experience love, adventure, excitement, and challenge. Today Zach, with his story and with Bon Iver, reminded me of the magic of living, and humbled me with his candor and devotion.
2020
Looking back, the short piece above coincided with an emerging chapter in my life. I have left it almost completely unedited.
The chapter between then and now is not one I’m particularly proud of, actually, and haven’t been able to get away from. Maybe that’s kind of fitting, considering that’s exactly what Bon Iver’s first album is about, according to an essay for 22, A Million, written by one of Vernon’s best friends, Trever Hagan. “I knew Justin’s recourse to isolation and the past, almost a crippling nostalgia that prevented him from moving forward.” Hagan could be talking about any of us, just like Vernon does on For Emma, Forever Ago. Just like he’s talking about his best friend, Justin, in ways only he could.
Like everyone else, I like to think the music is talking about me.
When I first wrote this piece, I had never listened to Bon Iver or any of Justin Vernon’s side projects. Go ahead and slap that Willem Defoe meme here, because I’m something of an expert now. I wear this man like a fucking scarlet letter on my chest.
2016 was the year I spent on Morgan & Morgan’s marketing team in Brooklyn, and it was just Vernon (and Radiohead) on repeat, especially since 22, A Million had recently come out, a fact Zach mentions below. His third album, also like Hagan notes, completely upsets the paradigm Bon Iver set for itself, or “himself”. After the imaginative, soaring, painful, but ultimately earthly melodies and language of the first two albums, we get 22 and it’s mind-blowing. Not just a shift in sound, but a shift in thinking, a shift in time and place. An almost holistic reinterpretation of one’s being. If For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver were like building a house, this is the Interstellar version of an album where someone is looking at you from beyond your dimension.
And if you listen to it in the right mood, if you mainline the first three of Bon Iver’s albums at once, I promise it just infects you. You will know exactly what I’m talking about, or maybe you won’t, and unfortunately I can’t help you.
As I write this, “Tiderays” by Volcano Choir is on. “I Won’t Run From It”, from Big Red Machine, comes next, one of my favorite songs of all time and a constant reminder to myself. These are just his side hustles, his The Life of Pablo but under a different name, full of cascading melodies, riffing guitars, beating drums, serving as retrospectives on what he’s learned, and opportunities to build more. Vernon is like Tom Hanks or something. His average is anyone else’s best, and even if you don’t like his work, he never brings anything less than his A game. A lot of artists explore like this to varying degrees - Kanye and Radiohead above, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Dirty Projectors, Björk, just to name a few.
I won’t heap too much more praise on him, but there’s something special about being able to explore Vernon’s own honest catharsis, and use its power to seek the same deliverance from your own demons. I don’t think a lot of artists manage to toe this line.
At a recent wedding I went to, the DJ played five or six Bon Iver songs in a row. Before that moment, I felt like shit. I hear that first note and the air hums electric. I became electric. “Skinny Love”, “Hey Ma”, “Holocene”, “33 GOD”, “AUATC” spilled out of the speakers in quick succession. The first time I mention it to Kelsey, who is dating Ricky from above: “Isn’t this kind of a sad song to be playing at a wedding? Like the complete opposite of what a wedding is supposed to be about?”
Around the time we reach AUATC, the cake is ironically served, and I’m now fully involved like a five-alarm fire, my mission in life to make Kelsey slap me. Lines tumble out like “Did you know Bruce Springsteen does the background vocals for this? Isn’t that nuts? This is my favorite crossover episode of all time.”
One day I’ll have the grace to spare my friends the fanboying, but sometimes the universe makes it difficult. Until then, this is my idea of an exciting conversation.
I may only be four years older now, but it feels like a lifetime since Zach’s first piece led me down this path. I went from what I thought was my peak to spending the last two years searching for a way out, an escape from the accretion of suffering holding me back, avoiding personal responsibility, punishing my body, and spiraling out of control in ways I’ve kept almost exclusively to myself. I’m still searching for some answers, and so is Vernon, and so, I think, is Zach.
New songs like “Hey Ma” represent to me a relationship with my own mom that could be better. “AUATC”, an abbreviation of Ate Up All Their Cake, is as lighthearted-sounding a pillory of the global, particularly American capitalist system as one can get. This is perfectly on-brand for Vernon, who occasionally suffers under the eyes of some Very Online People who review music during a rare break from browsing Twitter. They lament how apolitical Bon Iver’s music manages to be in an era where politics MUST permeate every surface or medium it comes in contact with. To avoid politics is to indulge in your own privilege. But some people are fighting a completely different battle inside themselves, and it’s difficult to do both. Take this paragraph with a throwaway sentence about my mom and I’s relationship not being the focal point here as a perfect example.
I listened to Bon Iver’s fourth album i,i, just a couple of times. As with all artists, we tend to fall in and out of love with them and their work. The grass is always greener. I’ve found myself listening to Vernon cover to cover more than once, wondering with confusion at what led me to him in the first place. I’ll make a point to turn on i,i and give it a fair shake.
In the meantime I’ll hope for more artists like Vernon, and hope that more of us find Zach’s strength to share the most compelling parts of ourselves, however uncomfortable that recollection may be. It’s worth it, for everyone. Until then?
I ain't living in the dark no more
It's not a promise, I'm just gonna call it
Wherever I May Go - Zachary Lee (very Gloriously Tight person)
My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was thirteen years old. For the first time in my incredibly short life, I had been dealt a hand of cards I was totally unfamiliar. When you’re a child, riddles have answers. If you can’t find those answers, any adult is capable of finding them. But as we age, we realize that some of those riddles become unsolvable paradoxes, from which no real answers can be derived. As adults, we learn retroactively, feign confidence in their answers to children, who struggle at great lengths to understand abstract concepts. I had many questions to ask my mother in the duration of her sickness. She wasn’t able to answer most of them. This really frustrated me, a child tiptoeing around the cusp of adulthood, trying to make sense of it all without a sherpa.
Thankfully, my mother has been recovering well since this scare. She has since resumed her post as an elementary school teacher, where she loves educating young minds. Her smile is still inviting, her tone still gentle, and her cooking is, dare I say, still spectacular.
In the foreground of my life, I was studying for my bar mitzvah. I was not very religious at the time, and I remain at a very comfortable distance from my Jewish roots. My mom makes great matzoh ball soup, but that’s where I draw the line. The ceremony, one of simply reading some lines from our prescribed religious scroll, is supposed to indicate an archetypical bildungsroman. This “coming of age” ceremony is allegedly the physical embodiment of me spiritually crossing that now blurred line of child and adult, undertaking vast responsibilities that a 13 year old Jew would typically partake in: taming cattle, raising a family in the desert, and participating in communal sacrifices.
This mix of concern with my mother’s health with the religiously motivated desire to “mature normally” was one that started years of internal upheaval. Whereas my parents previously had all the answers, now they don’t. But no such problems exists, for the answers to my questions were found in some Great Beyond unfathomable to anybody’s mind, let alone mine, the mind of a child. I was unconvinced.
Then, from the abyss of shit that is pop music, I heard a song unlike any other. I was casually into music that any typical 13 year-olds were into at the time: Linkin Park, Eminem, Sara Barielles (“Love Song” is still is catchy as fuck), Finger Eleven, and Lil Wayne. But Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” had slipped through the cracks of my dad’s radio and somehow found its way into my pubescent ears. I was hooked. I went on Limewire that night, and downloaded the album from which it came: For Emma, Forever Ago.
For those of you who are not already familiar with this album, stop reading here and go listen to For Emma, Forever Ago. Listen to it from “Flume” all the way through to “Re: Stacks.”
The album opens dryly. Nothing ostentatious, nothing bombastic, and therefore, nothing like I’ve ever heard before on Top 40 radio. It creates the ambiance that we find for the rest of the album: vast, atmospheric, not empty, yet, not full. The opening lyrics? “I am my mother’s only one. It’s enough.”
Let me be completely honest with you, dear reader. I thought the opening lines to that song were “I am my mother’s only son,” which really stuck with me. I am my mother’s only son. Given my adolescent temperament, I was more than enough. I remember when I would storm out of the house, for several days, in an angered frenzy because my parents found legally questionable flora in my underpants drawer. I remember disabling the alarm on the window in my room so that I could escape into the night at odd hours, usually with the aforementioned flora, while my parents slept. I remember on a family cruise vacation we went on, there was a 1 a.m. curfew for minors. I got back to our room around 4:30 a.m., after having just lost my virginity. We laugh about the story now, but when I came back into the room, my mom was crying hysterically. She hugged me like I had just returned from the Eastern Front, and my dad walked in several minutes later with the Captain and head of security, who then took me into the hall, and verbally beat the ever-living shit out of me. They thought I was fucking overboard or abducted.
So, let the record reflect, I am not my mother’s only one. I have a little sister, who’s pretty cool (I said pretty cool, Alison. Don’t get ahead of yourself). But as I listened to this song, I was reminded immediately of all of the photos my family has of us around the house. I’ve always thought it narcissistic, and undeniably suburban, to do that. If you lived alone, would you have photos of you alone spread all over your apartment? Hopefully not, so why should a family display photos of themselves all around the house? I’ve always been told from friends and family that my mother and I look incredibly alike. Decide for yourself. Here’s a photo:
