Famously recorded by lead singer-songwriter, Justin Vernon, while spending 3 months alone in a remote cabin in northern Wisconsin, its generally claustrophobic feel was the perfect soundtrack to my time spent stuck on a plane.
I’ve only recently come to this album after purposely ignoring it for so long. I missed its original burst onto the scene, and when Bon Iver came to play our local rock festival, Rock the Garden, I opted to volunteer during their set, as I had no interest in seeing them. Everyone started raving about this album and it became so hyped that I lost all interest.
I love my acoustic, folky, singer-songwriters, but being that it’s a genre that is overrun with artists (including myself), I get bombarded with so many options that some people slip through the cracks. This was Bon Iver.
I was forced to purchase the song, “For Emma”, last year after joining a local all female choir group and this was one of the songs that was chosen to sing. It grew on me so quickly, that I ended up purchasing the entire album and kicking myself for not getting it long ago. I’m always so disappointed to discover music long after the fact and then knowing I could have been enjoying it for so much longer.
Since its discovery, it has not left my iPod and it was one of a small selection of albums I chose to take with me on my trip. And it was absolutely perfect to listen to while stuck on a plane.
The album has the eerie quality to immediately transfer you to some other place. When I listen to it, I can almost feel my thoughts begin to drift and suddenly I’m not paying attention to anything. Not even the song, really. Just sort of nothing. Completely lost in my own head. And then Justin Vernon’s voice will pick up and shake you back into reality and you start to listen. Or a lyric will burst out of the nonsense and you think, what the hell? Where did that come from? That’s brilliant.
It's also the perfect album to soundtrack a place or time. Now when I hear it, it takes me to being crammed in an airplane seat, desperately trying to fall asleep, stuck in a tiny space with no place to go, breathing stale air, air so dry that you feel like you're suffocating. And that may sound like a terrible thing for a great album to remind you of. But for me, it brings me to a very happy place. Because beneath all of that "misery", I was so incredibly happy. I was suffering in order to be able to do something I enjoy. And there's really nothing miserable about that at all. And I kind of feel like that is the whole spirit of the album. It is a sad album recorded in a very solitary way in a very solitary space, but the end result is so beautiful that it can only bring you joy.
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