Songwriting, Smartphones, & Seclusion
by Kinzy Jansen
On July 8 2007, the first icy notes of Bon Iver’s self-released For Emma, Forever Ago were just reaching the Internet. Ten days earlier, a much bigger wave broke on our collective shore when Apple released the world’s first smartphone. Though underestimated at the time, the iPhone’s influence would become tsunami-sized, revolutionizing our society within just a few years.
If you don’t yet know the origin story of Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver, or haven’t heard his music, know that they are indivisible: Man goes into a hunting cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin. Man chops wood and writes music. Man records best-selling album, without intending to. Man emerges, blinking in the sunlight, to applause and rave reviews.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Vernon’s hibernation story has retained its mythical quality eight years after For Emma. Since then, smartphone usage has ballooned: by April of this year, 64 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, and a quarter of the world is expected to have one by 2016. The devices have dazzled us and entertained us and even saved our lives, but they’ve also ushered in a host of heretofore unnamed problems, from text neck to technoference. To me, Bon Iver’s recuperative wood-splitting venture marked the end of an era, an era when people could wander into the woods without having to decide whether to take iPhone along.
To read the rest of this story, head on over to The Riveter Magazine
