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The three songs that comprise Bon Iver’s new record SABLE, emerged from a long-gestating breakdown. Think about the journey Justin Vernon has been on across the past two decades: For Emma Forever Ago, high profile collaborations on records by artists like Kanye West and Taylor Swift, throwing music festivals in his city, and the increasingly layered and elaborate touring and recording machine that Bon Iver became. An electricity began to swell in Vernon’s chest. Being Bon Iver meant playing a part, and intentionally leaning into that role meant frequently pressing hard on a metaphorical bruise. He developed literal physical symptoms from deep anxiety and constant pressure. At the end of his rope, maybe done with music, and thinking increasingly about the process of healing, he finally found the time to unpack years of built-up darkness just as the lockdown began.
While there are the usual collaborators on this record providing pedal steel (Greg Leisz), fiddle (Rob Moose), saxophone (Michael Lewis), and trumpet (Trever Hagen), SABLE, is largely defined by Vernon’s voice and guitar. The dense layers of i,i are nowhere to be found, as Vernon bears the weight of these songs largely on his own. It’s a retreat and reset. Stripped back to the primary elements that the project was founded on, the intimacy of SABLE, is perhaps most prominent on “S P E Y S I D E,” recorded in such a way that individual guitar strings resonate in individual speakers. It’s a song that spilled out of him as an apology to a couple of people he loved and hurt, written in 2021 during a moment of reflection and clarity while decamped in Key West. Listening from the guts of his guitar, his lyrics are autobiographical and direct; gone is the veil of maximalist mystery from albums’ past. He can’t make good, can’t go back, can’t undo what he’s done. “I really damn been on such a violent spree,” he admits.
Recorded in the April Base compound in Wisconsin, these songs were each written at different periods of processing. “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” came first in 2020, born of the restless anxiety and facing up to everything that leads to it. Written almost as a surprise while he was unsure of his future as an artist—a meditation on the process of unpacking the contexts that inform his contexts—it stares down the long road of putting oneself back together. “AWARDS SEASON” is the most recent. He wrote entire stanzas on long walks around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis last year. It’s a song that takes stock of a major and wrenching change.
These songs are reflections of unfinished business, of guilt and anguish. “I’m a sable/ and honey, us the fable,” he sings in the record’s closing track. Some of Vernon’s best songs are the saddest ones, and there’s a kind of unintentional toxic reinforcement that comes when everyone praises your most depressed instincts. SABLE, is named for near-blackness, the record an externalized projection of his turmoil. This trio of songs represents an unburdening from one of the most trying eras in Vernon’s life. There was a time not long ago where Vernon intentionally hid his face. Here, the blinds are open.
Tracklist:
1. ... (0:12)
2. THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS (3:20)
3. S P E Y S I D E (3:29)
4. AWARDS SEASON (5:16)