Latest news with #ForEmma
Irish Examiner
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: A process lies behind every perfection, it's why we jump through hoops
"For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun." — John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, The East of Eden Letters. I have seen the band Bon Iver many, many times. So many times, you could say I discovered them long before they became de rigueur for deep-thinking empaths with a penchant for lumberjack shirts. Yeah, I was there when Justin Vernon — the band's creative north-star — lived above an Eircom store off Eyre Square in Galway way back in 2001. He does not know it, but I'm pretty sure we chased the same girls, and certainly locked eyes more than once over a Taco fries in the wee hours outside Abrakebabra. I might even have been in Taaffe's the night he met Emma, the girl who broke his heart so bad he disappeared to the woods to write one of the greatest break-up albums of all time, For Emma, Forever Ago. Bottom line, I was there from the start — from before the start — so when Vernon and his band come to town, I'm there, the guy at the back who catches his eye during the encore and raises a glass to his tortured genius. I quietly sneer at his new fans — hipster dilettantes, all — and head for the exit early, content that I've kept up my end of a non-existent relationship. 'You've done good, kid,' I say aloud to myself, to him, to nobody. And indeed, he has. His latest album, Sable, Fable recently dropped to universal acclaim. One track in particular — 'Speyside' — provided the soundtrack to what was an incredibly brutal few months at the back end of 2024, as the world seemed to implode from within. One lyric hung like the perfume of an ex on a sweater you never want to wash: - 'As I fill my book/what a waste of wood/nothing's really happened like I thought it would.' Yeah, there's pain and there's poetic pain and then there's Bon Iver's music. A whole different kind of pain, all the more beautiful for it. Obsession with process One thing I've come to learn to love from Vernon is devotion to process. At a concert a few years ago, my eye was drawn to the side of the stage before the main event, and a pair of screens depicting a rather unremarkable scene; a man — maybe Vernon, maybe not — shooting a basketball in a backyard. In the corner of the screen was the shot count. Filmed in real time, the footage was set against a backdrop of daylight fading to evening, before receding to nightfall, the shooter backlit against a streetlight. The scene continued for almost half an hour before Vernon took to the stage with his band, scored by nothing but the expectant din of the thousands present. Understanding Vernon's obsession with process, I understood this was not absentminded filler, but a fable all by itself. The shooter was one of us, clearly amateur and imperfect in his motion; but, watching him as the sun set was to bear silent witness to mundane beauty; a silhouetted man clearly passionate about his own process, sometimes missing, often scoring, perpetually striving to be better. All the while nobody in the arena paid any attention. Watching it was the perfect prelude to what was to follow. Vernon, like the anonymous man with the basketball shooting hoops, has always been one of us, just set apart by a God-given talent that has often threatened to suffocate him A friend recently gifted me a copy John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel. Every working day for ten months in 1951, Steinbeck wrote a note to his friend and editor Pascal Covici to warm up. It was a way — he later said — to get his writing brain in shape 'to pitch a good game.' Well, it worked, as he got his best book out of it. While one wonders what a contemporary version of that journal might look like — 'Dear Pascal. Hit snooze button five times. Woke late. Scrolled X. Deleted X. Downloaded TikTok. Deleted TikTok. Bought dog toys on AliExpress. Don't have dog. Tried to buy dog online. Can't. Looked out window. No writing today. Best, JS' —the gift has proved the perfect accompaniment to my own doomed pursuit of perfection. If for no other reason, then to remind that we all want the same thing. Whether we write, read, or draft solicitors' letters for a living, each one of us engages in that thing we call 'process.' Artists — successful artists like Vernon — can often give the act a gravitas that makes it alien because, well, they're geniuses. But — and I think this is what I understood from the man with the basketball — regardless of talent or audience or ovations — most of our working life is spent underneath a streetlight shooting threes, over and over again. Maybe, 389 shots in, we discover something. And that is why we keep going.
NZ Herald
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Music: Masters of reinvention fail to match their own ambitions
Advertisement Advertise with NZME. SALBE, fABLE by Bon Iver It's almost 20 years since Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) released his breakthrough country-folk album For Emma, Forever Ago, a collection of personal songs born of three months' isolation in a snowbound Wisconsin cabin, where he considered his broken life in his mid-20s. Since then, the
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bon Iver Hits Hard and Soft With ‘Sable, Fable': Album Review
As big and outward-facing as his music can be, hibernation and isolation have always played a big role in Justin Vernon (a.k.a. Bon Iver)'s creative process. His breakthrough album, 2007's 'For Emma, Forever Ago,' was the result of several weeks spent alone in a winter cabin in the wilderness of his native Wisconsin, and its aching sound sculptures and multitracked voices perfectly evoke that setting and the breakups (of both a relationship and previous band) that inspired it. While he's made three more elaborate and at times considerably louder albums and collaborated with everyone from Taylor Swift and Kanye West to Bruce Hornsby and James Blake, the new 'Sable, Fable,' his first full-length release in six years, is the product of another inward period but also captures his emergence from it. In fact, it's actually two very different albums combined into one, with drastically different feelings. The opening, quieter 'Sable' segment — which was released as an EP last fall — is atmospheric, moody, largely acoustic and even a capella in places, its four songs recalling the mood of 'For Emma.' But after a pause, the album changes direction dramatically but unexpectedly smoothly, shifting gears into an almost R&B album, complete with falsetto vocals, Motownesque melodies and some early-Kanye-esque sped-up samples. Its final three songs (not including the ambient, instrumental closer) drop the R&B and veer into a vaguely pop direction, centered around 'If Only I Could Wait,' an aching duet with Danielle Haim that is embellished with a gorgeous string arrangement and, according to the press materials, was the starting point for the album. It's followed by what may be the most pop-leaning song on the album, the soulful 'There's a Rhythmn' (the album continues his penchant for eccentric spellings and punctuation — the title is styled 'SABLE, fABLE'). More from Variety See Bon Iver and Todd Snyder's New Clothing Collaboration (EXCLUSIVE) Bon Iver Announces New Album 'SABLE, fABLE' With John Wilson-Directed Music Video Bon Iver Returns With the Stark 'Sable,' His First New Project in Five Years: EP Review But all of the above genre descriptors fall short for an album that is uncategorizable every step of the way, a combination of R&B, rock, ballads, alternative and more, with arrangements and instruments — electric piano, pedal steel guitar, percolating beatbox — that throw a wrench into an attempt to pin a genre on it. Yet no matter the music's mood, the album's emotions are strong and often conflicted. A stylistically sprawling but surprisingly cohesive album, 'Sable, Fable' contains nearly all of Bon Iver's multitudes. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Euronews
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Bon Iver's ‘SABLE, fABLE': Euronews Culture's verdict
ADVERTISEMENT Listening to Bon Iver brings to mind a quote from Julie Buntin's novel 'Marlena': ' I want to go home but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place. It's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? ' That feeling, of searching for some intangible comfort, has always been core to the band's output. Ever since the solitary creaks and layered vocals of debut album 'For Emma, Forever Ago', recorded in a remote Wisconsin cabin, Bon Iver has become synonymous with a woodsy, folkloric feel — their music a liminal space in which quiet transitions emerge and emotions thaw. It's an identity that frontman Justin Vernon has been trying to escape throughout his almost two-decade career, each new album more distant from the last via increasingly abstract electronic experimentation. Related Bon Iver's 'SPEYSIDE': Euronews Culture's verdict From the dense dreamscapes of 2011's 'Bon Iver, Bon Iver' to the prism pop of 2016's '22, A Million', listeners are always being taken somewhere new - yet the feelings conjured remain the same. Few other artists have the ability to capture longing in the same way; the endless cycles of our minds attempting to find acceptance. Six years after 2019's 'i,i', it feels like Vernon has finally reached the place he's been yearning for. Told in two parts, 'SABLE, fABLE' is Bon Iver's most optimistic album yet - a sparkling embrace of change, hope and the beauty to be found within life's ephemerality. Composed in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the first three tracks — released as an EP last year — mark the beginning of an emotional arc, starting from a place of anxiety. In 'THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS', Vernon tries to expel it — his trademark repetitions turning thoughts into noise into nothing: ' I would like the feeling / I would like the feeling / I would like the feeling gone. ' This restlessness settles as we transition into 'SPEYSIDE', a calming contemplation of contrition that cradles guilt while letting it gently slip away into acceptance: 'I really know now what had hold on me'. While the discomfort lingers, the music slows — and learns to sit with it. Many of Bon Iver's best, and most notable works have emerged from regret and heartbreak — caught in the gentle swells of tracks like 'Skinny Love' and 'Wisconsin'. But 'SABLE, fABLE' is the first time we hear Vernon truly move beyond that cycle. It's a sadness broken by the scattered solidarity of piano keys and saxophone wails of 'AWARDS SEASON', lyrics flickering with a new-found hope: ' I can handle / Way more than I can handle. ' The rest of the album is vibrant with the sweetness of being in the moment, the funky fizzles of 'Everything Is Peaceful Love' hitting like warm rays. That soaring croon of ' And damn if i'm not climbing up a tree ' reminds us we can rise above the wreckage of painful experiences — and find contentment. Even when wrestling with the confusions of desire in tracks such as 'Walk Home' and 'If Only I Could Wait' (a collaboration with Danielle Haim), there's serenity to every tumbling harmony and tender piano melody. The familiar elements are still there: glitching soundscapes and falsetto, but no longer imprisoned in the wilderness of rumination. If Bon Iver's music once felt like grasping for a feeling, 'SABLE, fABLE' is the release — a recognition that true comfort comes from being at peace with the present. Wherever that may be. Bon Iver - 'SABLE, fABLE' Jagjaguwar 'SABLE, fABLE' by Bon Iver is out now.
Telegraph
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
In a world of fluff and mayhem, we need Bon Iver more than ever
Since Bon Iver 's last album – 2019's I,I – the American band's frontman and mainstay Justin Vernon has collaborated with Taylor Swift, Charli xcx, Beyoncé and Travis Scott. The glitchy, folk-inspired songwriting through which Vernon made his name on his 2007 debut For Emma, Forever Ago has become one of the dominant sounds in pop. All of which makes Bon Iver's fifth album, Sable, Fable (stylised as SABLE, fABLE), a tantalising prospect. Will Vernon embrace his status as pop royalty's go-to collaborator or will he continue to get progressively more experimental, as he has done on every album since For Emma? This intrigue is only heightened by Vernon's assertion that Sable, Fable will be Bon Iver's 'epilogue'. Its certainly radically different to anything he's done before. All the weird noises, dense layers and sonic obfuscation that characterised Vernon's recent few albums are gone. In their place is the most emotionally honest and musically straightforward album Vernon has ever released. Sable, Fable – produced by Bon Iver (pronounced like the French for 'good winter') and Jim E-Stick, who has worked with current rising stars Lola Young and Gracie Adams – is an album in two parts. The first three songs – previously released as the Sable EP last autumn, named after the colour black – deal with heartbreak. Sparse acoustic arrangements and forefronted lyrics dominate. Speyside is a stripped-back ballad about regret in the Neil Young vein, while Awards Season is a gorgeous song about creeping acceptance, sung almost a cappella over featherlight waves of synth and piano tinkles. 'Oh how everything can change/ In such a small timeframe/ You can be remade/ You can live again,' Vernon sings before a choir of saxophones unexpectedly envelopes the track. Vernon sings that he'll be seeing the song's unspecified subject on TV during the titular awards season, which some internet sleuths have taken to mean that it's about Swift although I imagine the song is a far more conceptual ode to moving forward in life in general. Then everything pivots. The rest of the record – the 'Fable' section – is upbeat. After the palate cleanser of Short Story, with its line that 'January ain't the whole world', we segue into the uber-commercial Everything is Peaceful Love. It's a song about the joy associated with meeting 'the one'. Over a luxurious skitty backbeat that sounds like the 1980s soul of Sade, the track's massive chorus has shades of laidback Prince. The UK's Jacob Collier appears on From, a song so slickly produced that you half expect he hear Phil Collins beseeching us to think twice because it's just another day for us in paradise. Happiness suits Vernon, although the contrast to the first three tracks is profound. 'Keep the sad s--- off the phone/ And get your fine a-- on the road!' he sings. Has Bon Iver become the new Barry White? It's all quite the turnaround, even down to the fact that these songs have proper titles. The tracks on Bon Iver's 2016 album – 22, A Million – were called things like 10 d E A T h b R E a s t ⚄⚄. And now he's singing about nice bums. Despite the album's occasionally jolting stylistic shift from darkness to light, there's something reassuringly well-crafted about Sable, Fable. In a world of fluff and mayhem, it feels solid, needed even. It ends with an instrumental called Au Revoir. Which only makes you wonder where on earth Bon Iver, loved up and high-spirited, finally, will end up next.
