Bon Iver's Cabin Fever

Taking an opportunity to wax lyrical with Justin Vernon amidst a sound check in Glasgow, the romantic in me is keen to confirm, if nothing else, that the creation of his startling debut For Emma, Forever Ago was every bit the exorcism that the tales surrounding it suggest. As Vernon enters the room, bottle of mineral water and apple in hand, smiling languidly and sinking his six foot-plus frame into the couch across from me, I realise that I’ve fallen victim to the folklore of For Emma as much as the next person. I’d expected a man meek in appearance and nature with frost-burned skin; thin boned and socially closeted. That the creator of such beatific frozen-lake folk should look closer to a professional athlete than a life-whipped troubadour sets The Skinny off balance.

I start by asking what he makes of the romanticism bestowed upon the album, and whether Vernon feels that the story of its making has overshadowed the music. He’s very sure that the media's assertions are - if not quite inaccurate - at least a sugared versioned of the truth, though he does convey the sense of a man who has indeed been on a journey; geographically, emotionally and creatively. And whilst he’s keen to play it down, for those who haven’t walked such a path, the album's romanticism seems as stark as the landscape in which it was created.

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"I was struggling with the break up of my band, and I was thinking 'what the hell am I going to do?' And yes, that story has gathered its own force, but for me, going to the cabin wasn’t about leaving society, or any of that garbage or mythology, but rather it was about re-approaching myself." This isn’t delivered with any venom, more just a casual sweeping aside of critical conjecture. However, he continues, "In order to do that I needed a lot of time alone, a lot of time in the middle of nowhere," and the music press's ideals of an isolated exorcism seem to ring true.

As with this personal journey, it seems that the creation of Vernon's music itself was also rather grounded. Hoping that he’d confirm that the songs were the product of an epiphinal moment, rising from the silence of the woods, Vernon admits that he was unsure of the merit of the whole process. "By the time I’d left the cabin, I still didn’t feel as though I had a record. I had eleven or so songs that might fit together." In fact, rather than bounding from isolation reborn, he was still somewhat confused about his direction: "I was thinking, 'I don’t want to be the guy with the guitar, I don’t want to do that. I don’t have any shows. What am I writing for?' I was very nervous about the whole thing."

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Now, in the light of day, with the certainty of underground success validating his efforts, Vernon appears at ease with the pressure of being a new folk icon, and with the weight of expectancy which his sophomore effort will need to buoy. "When the time comes, I’m just going to sit down for eight weeks and make a record, but the success of For Emma has given me the confidence to not feel that I have to repeat it. It’s my duty as a musician to make a record that is current, that isn’t influenced by the record before it, but rather my emotional context at that time."

Whatever that context, whatever the story of that time, one suspects that Bon Iver have more to offer than For Emma, For Ever Ago’s isolated brilliance.