BON IVER

The journey from “man in a cabin, sad bastard” to Grammy awards, stadium tours and the veneration of his peers has brought Justin Vernon success asBON IVER– but it came at a price. Yet a new album finds him in uncharacteristically positive and upbeat mood. What changed? “I started to feel like I don’t want to play this character any more,” discovers Laura Barton. “This is the new era for Bon Iver.”

T HE Chippewa Valley lies just to the west of central Wisconsin, a stretch of pasture and prairie and deep woodland; of maple and aspen, basswood and pine. Justin Vernon spent much of the pandemic here, on the property he bought several years ago, not far from his home city of Eau Claire. It was a steady time; quiet and undemanding, and somewhere during those months he found himself out alone in the woods, asking himself a question: ‘Do I want to do this at all any more?’

The ‘this’ was the life he had built as Bon Iver, the project he had started in 2006 and that had swiftly bloomed into a platinum-selling phenomenon, bound to the familiar cycle of album release, press campaign, global tour. It had won him Grammys, critical adoration and the veneration of his peers – including Taylor Swift, with whom he has recorded two duets and who has described him as “the most talented person in the world”. Over the years, Vernon had struggled with the notoriety and expectations that success had brought, calling on a range of mechanisms to help him through, from EMDR to LSD, concealing his face to cancelling tours.

Now, in the pleasure of unexpected space, he found it hard to contemplate a return to the old life. He turned the question over in his mind. “And the answer inside was, ‘Absolutely not,’” he says. “When I answered it, I felt this drainage of toxic possibility out of my body. I felt this big relief.”

Already he had felt the glimmer of something new. In 2019, disjointed and despondent, he had written a new song he called “Everything Is Peaceful Love”. It was a strikingly upbeat track, filled with horns and harmonies and pedal steel, Vernon’s voice falling glad and sweet and soulful over a refracted beat. It struck him, then, as “a mood that I really wanted to cultivate”. He sent it to his bandmate, Jenn Wasner. “‘This rules!’” Wasner told him. “‘This doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever done before! It’s so catchy, so light and it has this percolating Arthur Russell-y energy to it…’” She had no idea what he intended to do with the song. Nor did Vernon. But he took it as a sign of what was possible; of a new kind of songwriting. “I wanted it to be basic, I wanted it to be loving, I wanted it to be easy,” he says. “I wanted it to encourage joy, versus the other stuff that we’ve done.”

This month, Vernon releases the fifth Bon Iver album, SABLE, fABLE. It is a stunning work. Spare and ruminative songs give way to radiant pop, to explorations of desire and hope and visceral love. There are contributions from Danielle Haim, Dijon and Jacob Collier, along with more familiar collaborators such as Wasner, S Carey, Michael Lewis and Greg Leisz. It is co-produced by Jim-E Stack, known for his work with Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX and Kendrick Lamar. It is by turns basic, loving, easy; the most joyful and most encouraging work of Vernon’s career.

There is no tour planned. No arenas. No long stretches away on the road. He is speaking today on a visit to London, where in lieu of a musical performance, he is holding a live Q&A at a 600-capacity theatre in Hackney. Backstage, his demeanour is relaxed and engaged, sipping a beer, discussing the charms of butter carving and the Minnesota State Fair. Gone is the woodsy plaid. In its stead: white trousers, a green hoodie and a pair of salmon-pink trainers.