Unearthly: The Bon Iver Experience
How Justin Vernon hair, as well as his new album — 22, A Million, are the work of aliens
Justin Vernon, frontman of indie folk group Bon Iver, is notorious for his unusual balding. Neither a case of old age revealing itself in symmetrical widow peaks, or stress manifesting in small, bald spots across the crown, his hairdo consists of one barren oval at his apex, and one hunk of thin, colorless straw swooping across his forehead. Odd for a 35-year-old man from Wisconsin, a place known for cheese and not for irregular, hipster-esque forms of male balding patterns; certainly odd for a man who wrote his first album, For Emma, Forever Ago in complete self-isolation in his father’s cabin during a painfully dreary Midwestern winter. At his concert at Oakland’s historic Fox Theatre, I find myself thinking that perhaps aliens burned a crop circle into the top of his head, because, in fact, listening Bon Iver’s new album, 22, A Million, is a bit like listening to Vernon in cahoots with something extraterrestrial. Standing in complete sound-washed awe at his concert at Fox Theatre, my stoned friend whispered to me, “I am traveling through space.” Pot alone does not do that to you.
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In concert, Vernon has gotten into the habit of playing his experimental, end of September album from start to finish. The first song, “22 (Over S∞∞N),” is a compilation of unearthly noises that repeat, quiver, press into each other for support before proceeding alone. A wavering major 7th chord blares out ceaselessly through its entirety, taking form as a steady circular radar pulsating into open water, picking up esoteric voices unaware of being recorded, and so, shimmering unconsciously. It is a good opener — a great opener in fact; the major 7th chord feels like a lighthouse gently guiding the eclectic Thursday night crowd into the historic Oakland venue, each distinct, arcane voice an encouraging nudge forward. In this first song alone, Vernon’s voice throbs in an unfamiliar way, not in the falsetto to which we have grown accustomed on earlier albums, and not in the highly synthesized force characterizing a great deal of the rest of the album. It is nearly his real voice: pure, woodsy, faintly Midwestern, the only human in a chorus of nonhumans. An androgynous robotic voice warns, “It might be over soon,” followed by a high-pitched, faster and more feminine robot with the same ambiguous message, “It might be over soon,” — despite the fact that the concert, and the album, has just begun. And while his voice seems to be the steadiest, most confident it has been, the song itself is hardly steady. Each line ends in a vague discrepancy between music and technology, a glitch on the “en” of “confirmation,” “happen,” “station.” Vernon too warns, “It might be over soon,” and a deep, soulful female voice cuts in and purrs, “All these yeeeeaaaaars.” The androgynous robot croons, “Toooo” or is it (two?), and Vernon picks up the crooning himself. “Toooo, toooo, tooo,” — “two, two, two?” As men with thick beards and women with multiple ear piercings sway around me, I cannot help but notice that Vernon has exceeded spatial limitations, has created music at once futuristic but occurring within the present frames of the concert hall.
He finishes up his first song and continues into the second, which, like the rest of the album, uses a title torn from the same indecipherable cryptology: 10 dEAThbREast. He isn’t looking at the audience as he begins this futuristic army march, consisting of a static drumbeat unevenly mixed with what can only be described as the scattered cries of cyborg crows. Rather, he is raising his shoulders in small, even motions above a soundboard that houses his magnificent assemblage of auditory oddities. He’s got a flat-rimmed baseball cap on backwards; a series of tattoos on his forearm are the only thing decorous about his appearance. If I ran into him at a bar in my own Midwestern hometown, he would probably be nursing a PBR — what my male friends lovingly call Blue Collar Ribbon — getting caught in his beard while deep in a conversation with the bartender and other regulars on the disappointment of Johnny Manziel or whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow.
“How many beers have you had?”
“Two, two, two,” he would warble.
His third song, “715 — CRΣΣK,” comes in as smoothly as the last two. He barely breaks between songs to breath, emphasizing the continuous and circular nature of the album. At first a croaking of an unspecified creature, emanating from under layers of muddy creek water, it is the cause of his voice being uniquely synthesized by the software invention of his own engineer, Christopher Messina. With Messina Software, Bon Iver is able to both harmonize voice and instruments live. The warbling is brief; it tapers out into Vernon’s characteristic melodic falsetto, a temporary sweet lullaby following up each subsequent croak like a soothing aftershave. The song begins slow, punctuated by whole silences in the narrative. It speeds up passionately in a climax of knowing frustration, “I had you in my grasp…Oh, then how we gonna cry, because it once might not mean something.”
Vernon whispers. Known for his one-liners, his piling up of odd images like misshaped sticks for an impending nighttime fire he leaves images both obsolete yet precariously open for the interpretation of his listeners. When he moans, “It once might not mean something,” I recall how it feels to see an ex long after you have been disabused of the notion of their magic. I see myself standing next to my first boyfriend at our first Christmas back from school, wondering how his embrace could no longer feel like the most urgent thing in my life, how once loving feelings could be replaced by an intangible nothingness. I feel my own consciousness bleeding into the songs; it muddies and crystallizes Vernon’s.
The fifth song will unknowingly, become my favorite song on the album, as well as serve the halfway marker of the album — “29 #Strafford APTS.” A reprieve from the saturation of synthetics, it temporarily opts for a woodsy, country-style narrative — a soft strumming of the guitar and Vernon’s once again authentic deep voice. I see my best friend Jackson and his older brother in the second floor of their house late one winter night, sipping lager and harmonizing. Vernon’s synthesized alter ego seamlessly cuts in to comprise the chorus, followed by honey-sweet chirping before he unleashes one of the most esoteric metaphors of the album, “Hallucinating Claire,” — and then the subsequent echo of his voice and no further explanation of who Claire may be. When I was younger, I used to shout into parking garages, amazed that my voice could be transformed into such great multitudes. In the song, we get a sense that Vernon is doing the same; he has impressed even himself with all the ways he can manipulate his voice. He cannot just make it higher, lower, a bit melancholic and a bit hopeful, but also scratch it, jumble it, mutate it to the nonhuman. Like a well-loved record player reaching us through the off-colored sounds of a black-and-white film, Vernon finishes off the song with a high squeal and scratch of the word, “butterflies.” Nabokov nods approvingly in his grave.
22, A Million is ethereal; it is a grown man given a child’s keyboard with a collection of bizarre noises, and interweaving them into space travel. It’s folksy techno, the calm of after the rave — a comedown from Ecstasy. At the pinnacle of the concert, song eight on the album, “8 (circle), Vernon abandons the keyboard for a classical piano. Lubricated by slowly preaching saxophones, he croons out a ballad and asks us, “What on Earth is left to come?”
After the folksong of “8, Circle,” Vernon messes around with some heart-vibrating saxophone; it rambles under his nonchalant sing-songy voice in “___45___.” The last thirty seconds consists of him soothing their deep-seated anxiety with the soft strumming of a banjo, like upset children and their consoling father. The final song, “0000 Million,” comes from a distance, perhaps shouting through a tube, a wall, any sort of division separating our extraterrestrial traveler and us.
As the concert comes to a close, the lights come on and Vernon takes his baseball cap off. He gives us a deep bow, making us privy to the premature balding of his head. The work of aliens, certainly.