Latest news with #JustinVernon
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
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Listen: Bon Iver releases 'SABLE, fABLE' album, 'There's a Rhythmn' video
April 11 (UPI) -- Bon Iver released a music video for "There's a Rhythmn / Au Revoir," a pair of songs from the new album, SABLE, fABLE, also released Friday. The video sees Bon Iver front man Justin Vernon walking in front of various locales, staring in snowy woods and ending in a tropical paradise. "There's a rhythm to reclaim / Get tall and walk away," Vernon sings. The video ends with the musical outro "Au Revoir," the final track on the new album. "There's a Rhythmn / Au Revoir" can be viewed now on YouTube, while SABLE, fABLE is out on platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Have the courage to walk away': Bon Iver on romance, retirement and his rapturous new record
Justin Vernon would rather not be doing any of this. Releasing a new Bon Iver album, promoting it. He absolutely isn't going to tour it. 'I don't need to do this any more,' he says. 'I want to be done with this whole thing. But I am dead serious about these songs. That's how much I care about them, that I'm going to do something I haven't been comfortable with to put them out.' As soon as Vernon hit the public eye in 2008, he started pulling away from its obsessive glare – and from the caricature of him as the lonely woodsman who made his era-defining debut, For Emma Forever Ago, in a hunting cabin in his native Wisconsin. His sound grew cryptic and mutated, though he was no less popular for it. Kanye West and Taylor Swift wanted to collaborate. But anxious from the demands to flay himself for entertainment, he clouded his image. He intimated that he would retire, which only created more distorting attention. As Vernon puts out his first album in six years, he knows better than to make such declarations, though he 'might peace out' after releasing Sable, Fable. If he is going to give these pivotal songs a chance, he wants to go all out. As well as an album, he's selling a salmon-hued – to him, the colour of life – T-shirt bearing the image of a giant salmon, plus a tinned smoked salmon collaboration, and a fragrance (not salmon). 'I'm not gonna hide my face any more,' he says. 'I'm gonna be out here full-bore, full-scene. I wanna see how bad it feels.' It's why the 43-year-old songwriter is sitting cross-legged on my sofa in north London in mid-March. He's kicked off his 'footies' – hand-sprayed in salmon – freeing the ankle he recently sprained playing basketball. Wearing a blue hoodie advertising a hometown brewery, he relays the dark and light of his past half-decade with dude-ish enthusiasm and ease. Sable, Fable documents a period when what had felt like irrevocable darkness became light. The Sable part arrived as a three-track EP last autumn: lovely, straightforwardly sad songs about hitting a wall. 'I wanted to try to be basic,' says Vernon. The last of the three, Awards Season, is a pivot, as new love enters his life: 'You can be remade,' he sings. The revelation invites the radiantly funky secular gospel of nine infatuated songs that make up the remaining Fable part of the album, made with Jim-E Stack and, often, Danielle Haim. The lyrics have strikingly simple repeated internal rhymes, like nesting dolls. 'I just want it to feel good and feel happy,' says Vernon. 'To have a song about sex where the only way to listen to it is to move rather than be like, let me introspect.' Vernon wrote Everything Is Peaceful Love, Fable's centrepiece, in 2019. It has a beautifully silly chorus that crests like a sunrise: 'Damn if I'm not climbing up a tree right now!' – childish ecstasy meeting the fear of what you do once you get that high. 'It was almost like, I feel so good I don't know what to do,' says Vernon. He wanted to harness that mood. 'We put it on the wall to see what else gathered around it.' The feeling was mostly aspirational. Then, the future really 'looked like a brick wall that I didn't have the mechanics to go around', he says even‑handedly. 'I didn't have suicidal ideation, but I remember telling my therapist: if a bus hit me today that would be a fucking relief.' Vernon's body had been 'buzzing with anxiety for a dozen years'. After his massively successful debut, making 2011's Grammy-winning followup Bon Iver, Bon Iver, was almost a lark. 'It was so funny to me that we had blown up so hard. It was almost like I couldn't lose, so I had all that courage: y'all are crazy. I'm gonna do a record where it starts out like metal and ends as 80s sex rock.' But by the time Vernon got to the symbol-laden 22, A Million in 2016, he was 'struggling with not really having anything new to say'. Profound anxiety meant he cancelled a European tour: 'I couldn't even leave the house.' Performing drained him. 'Not to say I'm special, but some of my music, you have to get down in there to find the source, to actually speak the music,' he says. 'That's a mechanism like anything else. It breaks down and needs recuperation, and it just wasn't getting enough.' He managed to 'get back in the groove' for 2019's expansive i, i. His mental health was 'patched together, and I loved the touring family so much'. The pandemic soon prompted Vernon to ask himself some 'hard questions' about the future. He was back in the Wisconsin woods again, and wrote the incantatory Things Behind Things Behind Things. 'I would like the feeling / I would like the feeling / I would like the feeling gone / Cause I don't like the way it's / I don't like the way it's / I don't like the way it's looking,' he sings. 'It was like, this feeling sucks,' he says, dejected. 'Kind of prayering it out, summoning it so that you could throw it in the wind and have it blow away like dust.' Still, Bon Iver got back on the road in 2022. 'I was excited for about a week, then immediately started having this panic, exhaustion.' He felt trapped until the tour ended. In September 2023, he definitively sold or donated all his live gear: 'If I didn't, I was almost afraid that I could get pulled back into it accidentally.' He still felt unwell for another year. There was one immediate improvement: he attended a five-week programme to quit smoking. He had started in his mid-20s while working as a chef, which he hated. (Quitting that, and his then-band, brought Bon Iver into being.) It worked: Vernon replaced smoking with nicotine toothpicks, which he tweaks as we talk. It was another 'big brick wall', he says. But this time, 'all the good parts of me kept going and all the shitty parts kind of hit that wall.' Smoking became a metaphor for other ways Vernon wanted to better himself. He asked: 'What validation was I getting from being this sad, bruised boy? The attention came to me and of course I'm going to react, like: I'm worth it, or something. Then, subconsciously you steer towards a little more self-destruction.' Vernon questioned whether fame and his fried system had made him a 'shithead': a bad brother, boyfriend, friend. 'I don't really want to talk about Kanye,' he says – having worked on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus, long before the rapper's heel turn – 'but it's a good example of observing when people have their head up their ass a little bit, or they're so busy, and so needed, that you start getting soft.' He concluded that his problems weren't 'that hard'. If touring was the problem, then 'Just stop it,' he says. 'I know there's a lot of pressure on you, but the answer is either yes or no, and if it's no, you better get the fuck out of here because you can't keep acting like this. I could see the quality of my character slowly diminishing from trying to be too much to too many people.' He believes the world needs more hard decisions. 'My buddy Trevor says: 'Hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life.'' Vernon faced that scenario again with the new love he sings about in Awards Season. 'I wasn't feeling too good about myself, and this person made me feel really good about myself,' he says. 'Like everything I had done to this point had been OK.' Then came the classic next step: 'Let me just give you everything. I need that feeling. Please give it to me constantly.' He had to pull back from the relationship. 'Where's the personal growth? How much can you depend on another person? What parts of me are just rushing to conclusion?' Vernon says that the relationship is neither over nor ongoing, 'and I don't mean to be vague', he says. 'This person is a central part of my life. But it wasn't in the cards to be like, now we're together.' That's the Fable part: 'Little lessons about what happens after that' – messages he's still getting from the songs. His favourite is the gleaming benediction There's a Rhythmn. 'It says: I don't know what's gonna happen. It might not matter whether we're together or not because you changed me for the better. We shouldn't squander what didn't happen. We should just be thankful for what we do have.' Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion The experience overhauled his idea of relationships. 'Since I was eight years old, I could not wait to get married,' he says. 'And here I am, 43, far away from that being a possibility, which saddened me for so long. Growing up with such a strong family, every day since I left the house at 18 was kind of a letdown. So was I looking for that relationship because I wanted to have that peace? I have to make that for myself before that can ever happen.' Fittingly, when Charli xcx asked Vernon to appear on her Brat remix album last year, he refashioned I Think About It All the Time, about whether career and motherhood are incompatible. 'What she's talking about in that song, like, I'm always two steps ahead of myself, it was really easy for me to react to that,' says Vernon. 'It was great timing because it felt like a coda for all the lessons I've been learning.' Vernon might be technically middle-aged, but he's stopped feeling as if he is running out of time. 'I've done enough personal work where now I feel young,' he says. 'When I was 33, I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna die soon – like, life is short. But now, I've got my health. I feel like I've got a lot of years to live. To be able to say that and feel truthful, I feel like I really overcame some shit.' He knows some listeners might hate this sea change: after all, everything today is not exactly peaceful love. 'I'm not really afraid of that,' he says. 'I know that I need to do this for me. I would hate to think it feels like a distraction or that I'm ignoring the problems of the world to sell myself. But I give myself permission to put this kind of art into the world because it is about love, and we're animals out here.' Days before Sable, Fable's release, I speak to Vernon again: he has just flown to a cottage he's been renting in Los Angeles, where he's been splitting his time, after seeing Bob Dylan play Eau Claire at the weekend. Dylan was apparently in the mood to play It Ain't Me, Babe in the style of Irving Berlin's Puttin' on the Ritz. 'I didn't like it? I wasn't having a good time?' Vernon says over a video call, questioning himself. 'And yet, every time words start to come out of my mouth, I'm like, you don't need to say anything about it! The guy is a free fucking spirit.' In LA this week, he has a few more promotional duties, including hosting a basketball tournament. ('I bought ankle braces today.') A month of being 'full-bore' turned out to be all right. 'I barely recognise myself,' he says, reclining in a black T-shirt. 'I don't think I would do this for ever. I don't know if I'll do it again. To have really given myself a gift – to not be getting ready to do the whole touring rigmarole, and to have been present enough to talk about something that I worked hard on for a super long time – has been really rewarding.' His system finally feels calm and reset. Friends have noticed the difference. 'They're like: 'You seem good,'' he says. As much as Sable, Fable reflects a radiant period, it also, fundamentally, emerged from depression, as did all Bon Iver records. Vernon has been learning to handle it differently. 'I haven't had a bad day since New Year's,' he says. Back then, for the second year running, he was ill, home alone and miserable. Then his friend Aiden suggested: ''How about 2025 – no defeatism?' It was like a switch went off,' says Vernon. 'What the fuck have I been doing? What do I have to feel sad about?' With any anxiety since, he says, 'you notice it, you absorb it, you consider it and you breathe through it'. Vernon hopes that anyone initially drawn to the lonely woodsman of For Emma might find similar solace in Sable, Fable. 'Running away to a cabin is very powerful because it's an example that you can choose to do anything,' he says. 'That's the crazy part of having any freedom in this world.' Quitting touring or accepting a relationship's end is no different. 'In There's a Rhythmn, I sing: 'Get tall and walk away.' Have the courage to walk away from something that seems to be the greatest thing on Earth, but it's not serving you. Have courage to do something bold, not just for bold's sake, but because you have the patience to locate what's wrong.' It didn't initially dawn on him that both Sable and Fable contain the word 'able'. If the album is about aptitude, he says, it's: 'Can you conceive of having the strength to move forward?' Next he might start a new group, make an album with Tobias Jesso Jr, reunite with Hadestown's Anaïs Mitchell (who cast him as Hades in the original album) or create 'a secular music church with the greatest sound system in the world', he says. 'What can I take from what me and my team have accomplished to break down the format of this tired thing that is touring? I'm in my early 40s. It's a good time to still be young and to try to rattle the cage.' It's why he can't diss that weird Dylan show. 'This motherfucker is not of this planet. And just because I was uncomfortable with everything musically, I still watched something real, at least.' Vernon thinks he has now taken all he can from Sable, Fable. 'It makes me quite emotional, because it's therapy,' he says. 'It's me constructing this giant map and then staring at it, and the wind is about to blow it away and then it will be for everyone else.' It's another fable: just because a moment might not last, doesn't mean it's not meaningful or worth doing. Vernon had resisted being Bon Iver again, but he's showing up for it, for love. 'That's it,' he laughs. 'That's what I'm trying to do.' Sable, Fable is out now on Jagjaguwar
The Independent
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
On SABLE, fABLE, it's cool to hear Bon Iver having fun at last
Despite opening this album with the admission that 'I have been afraid of changing', indie-folk miserablist Justin Vernon really gets his groove on with SABLE, fABLE, his fifth album with Bon Iver. After all the years of circling his lo-fi anxiety, it's lovely to hear him break out of the log cabin of his own head and breathe in the wholesome wonders of the outside world. Although he's spoken of making 'radiant pop music', his version of that (with the help of producer Jim-E Stack) is to brighten his earthy, acoustic landscapes with synths and drum pads. It's not dissimilar to what Sufjan Stevens likes to do when finding the silver linings in his own clouds. Single 'Everything is Peaceful Love' finds him exalting the ordinary world. 'Damn, if I'm not climbing up a tree right now!' he sings, falsetto notes reaching skywards over the slinky, sexy, soulful roll of electro-acoustic fusion. You can almost feel the soft, supple rubber of the 80s-style drum pads flexing beneath Ben Lester's easy-going pedal steel solo. Explaining his new philosophy in a Spotify interview with Lil Yachty, Vernon said: 'Somebody came into my life and rearranged it.' As a consequence he 'started to repair the past', quit smoking and realised that 'maybe I shouldn't put true love on a pedestal, maybe I should put it down here where it is'. To set the mood, the album opens with the three 'heavy' songs that appeared on the SABLE EP. It's a 12-minute triptych of 3am self-reckonings. Vernon is competing with the man in the mirror over the flute and trumpet of 'THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS'. Over the solo man 'n' guitar lament of 'S P E Y S I D E' he acknowledges that he 'can't make good' on the pain he's caused others. The pressure begins to alleviate with the warm piano, stretched steel and golden sax of 'AWARDS SEASON', a song reaching for hope but still somewhat stuck in the circular thinking loops of internal rhymes. The upper-case pressure in the song titles gives way to a gentle embrace of lower case across the next nine tracks. Vernon cedes the mic to Kacy Hill, Sean Carey, Jenn Wasner on 'Short Story', allowing the trio to hail 'Oh the vibrance! The sun in my eyes!' before some sour candy synths slide us onto 'Everything is Peaceful Love'. There's a likeable hint of upmarket Eighties dad rock (think of Bruce Hornsby's work with Peter Gabriel's So era) to 'Walk Home' and 'Day One' (feat Dijon and Flock of Dimes) with its earnest delivery, car stereo flooding bass, piano chords and pitched up vocal and hook. Country radio geetar and click track mellow things out on 'From' while a Prince-indebted R&B horn section and layered backing vocals (that sound like the singers are swaying in tube dresses) snakes its way though 'I'll be There'. The track builds to a motivational hymn to keeping 'the sad s*** off your phone' and getting 'your fine ass on the road'. A cool-headed Danielle Haim joins the party over the crunchy electric riff of 'If Only I Could Wait' before the jazzy keyboard of 'There's a Rhythm' finds Vernon asking 'Can I really still complain?' before deciding the best plan is to 'get tall and walk away'. Apparently, he's launching this record in LA by participating in a basketball tournament (sending fans into a frenzy of speculation about which other introspective musos might turn out to surprise us by proving themselves hoop-shooting aces). It's cool to hear Vernon choosing fun at last. It's a decision that's opened up a whole new court for his melodies to play in. A slam dunk.
