Justin Vernon of Bon Iver has travelled several lifetimes since his days as an American abroad in Galway, where he worked in a mobile-phone shop by day and sampled local fast food by night. “I must have eaten at Supermac’s every day. I had a lot of snack boxes,” he said in 2011, reflecting, with a certain stunned ruefulness, on his time in the west of Ireland. “And somehow I managed to lose weight.
A sensitive artist cannot live on snack boxes alone – though a few have certainly given it a go – and within several years Vernon had exchanged the carefree life of a phone vendor for a state of melancholic man-angst, the emotional condition conjured in heady qualities by his 2007 solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago.
That album made him the reluctant face of left-field folk-pop. Over time it would also serve as a welcome rejoinder to the idea that when a whiskery white guy picks up a guitar, things will inevitably go all Mumford & Sons. He was the anti-Mumford, a sincere young man who imbued his largely traditional folk music with a rich vein of Radiohead-style mournfulness.
Vernon emerged from the success of For Emma an awkward star, happy for his songs to reach millions but not all that keen on having his face up in lights. (“I was overwhelmed with emails. It all happened so fast I’m still trying to come to terms with it,” he said.) That was one of the motivations for records that later deconstructed Emma’s homespun folk and reassembled it in fascinating and aggressively unconventional ways.
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He didn’t say as much out loud, but there was a sense of an awkward customer trying to chase away the casual fans who knew all the words to the For Emma favourites Skinny Love and Wolves and had little interest in the glitchy oddness that existed in the hinterland of his sound.
Eighteen years later he remains one of the great paradoxes of his generation of artists: a songwriter who fills arenas and has duetted with Taylor Swift yet whose driving ambition is to make weird, woozy records for weird, woozy people.
But perhaps it’s time for a new chapter. With the beautifully autumnal fifth Bon Iver album, Sable, Fable – produced with the Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek collaborator Jim-E Stack – there are hints of mellowing and a sense that Vernon is open to reconnecting with the shy young songwriter who retreated to a cabin in Wisconsin to make For Emma.
Sticking to largely traditional song structures – first the verse, then the hook – he has returned to his past with a project that plugs into the dudish angst that was the driving force behind his early songwriting.
That isn’t to say he has remade his first record. That LP was largely acoustic, whereas the textures of Sable, Fable are mostly electronic, occasionally burnished with saxophone and steel pedal. What Vernon has done, however, is re-engaged with the idea of songs as things with beginnings, middles and ends rather than just vibes and bleeps.
How revolutionary and how very off-brand. But that’s how the album starts, with a twinkle of guitar introducing its opening track, Things Behind Things Behind Things. Another departure is that he has resisted layering his vocals so that it’s hard to work out what he means (other than that he’s clearly miffed about something). “I don’t like the way it’s looking,” he croons, sounding like a sort of dystopian version of 1990s alt-country figures such as Smog or Will Oldham.
Advance press has described the LP as Bon Iver’s “sexiest” yet, which is misleading. It’s sensual the way birdsong or wind blowing through trees is sensual – which is to say not at all – but there’s a lot of romantic yearning as Vernon traces the arc of a relationship from infatuation to connection to contentment, a journey that he explores via blissed-out yacht rock (Everything Is Peaceful Love) and fuzzy Radiohead-style dirge rock (If Only Could Wait, a duet with Danielle Haim).
Bon Iver is temperamentally incapable of making a “happy” record. The upbeat moments on Sable, Fable are inevitably followed by deep longueurs. Nonetheless, the abiding feeling is one of peace. Decades after Eyre Square and snack boxes, a lifetime since that log cabin and For Emma, Forever Ago, Vernon has charted a course for somewhere unexpected: he has gone home.
