EAU CLAIRE, WIS. - With the sun bouncing off the icicles and snowbanks along the Chippewa River, Racy D'Lene's coffeehouse feels like a much warmer environment than the isolated hunting cabin where Justin Vernon spent last winter.
Sporting a beard and a vintage Emmylou Harris T-shirt that shows off the row of Navajo and Buddhist symbols tattooed on his forearm, Vernon says with a gregarious grin, "You can see why I'm more comfortable in Eau Claire than anywhere else."
Just off the college bar strip, Racy D'Lene's lies just a block away from the Joynt bar where Vernon's parents met, and where -- an apparent point of pride for the former high-school football captain -- tap beer is still just 40 cents at happy hour. Five more blocks away sits the $76,000 house that the songwriter bought the day after Christmas. A good chunk of the down payment came from the nine songs he recorded out of life-saving desperation last winter, music that now seems poised to change his life.
"For Emma, Forever Ago" is a haunting and starkly personal collection of experimental, fragmented, loopy folk music that Vernon self-released under the pseudonym Bon Iver last April. It caught fire over the summer on the indie-rock blogs, and now it's due for a national re-release on Feb. 19.
The record is as good as the story behind it. Vernon, 26, made "For Emma" after breaking up with his girlfriend and his band, DeYarmond Edison, in Raleigh, N.C. He packed his things and headed to his dad's 80-acre spread in a remote, woodsy part of Dunn County in western Wisconsin in October. He didn't emerge until February.
"I never intended to make a record," he said at least a half-dozen times in an interview. "I had no plan to do anything except to just be there, eat venison, work outside and do nothing."
After a week or two of going down a list of chores, he said, "The quiet really set in. And that's when it all started unrolling." The songs "mostly all started with the sounds, and I pulled lyrics out of the sounds. Those lyrics are still vague to me in a lot of ways."
Delivered in an eerie falsetto that sometimes edges on a miserable moan, many of the songs on "For Emma" are indeed hard to decipher lyrically. The element that's all too clear, though, is the emotional outpouring on the album. The record sounds as isolated and icy as the setting where it was made. Vernon sings most of the songs with a simple, off-tuned acoustic guitar. He repeatedly overdubbed his voice to create layered, often shimmering choruses. The songs come off like search parties for a light at the end of the tunnel. The most fractured among them offer pure catharsis.
