Three years ago, it looked like the folk sensation known as Bon Iver was finished. After six years, two albums, two Grammies and being parodied on Saturday Night Live by Justin Timberlake — the kind of pop notoriety that feels extremely weird to coffee shop folk singers — Bon Iver’s leader Justin Vernon said he didn’t have it in him to write songs anymore.
And yet, on Wednesday, Bon Iver will play Taipei as part of a new Asia tour, a tour that may in fact be the only chance anyone in the entire world will have to see Bon Iver again, ever. Well, maybe.
“I’m so f***ing excited to play, honestly,” Vernon tells the Taipei Times in a phone interview two weeks ago.
Photo courtesy of Wikicommons
“I don’t have any plans to do anything with Bon Iver, other than to play these shows,” he adds. “A number of years ago, I just kind of needed to take a break. And I’m just picking up where I left off, and the first thing I wanted to do if I came back to this would be to go play shows over there [in Asia], because we never got to be over there.”
In the world of American music, Vernon’s unexpectedly “taking a break” was tantamount to a superstar bowing out on the brink of stardom. Vice, always more-hipster-than-thou, lambasted him in tar-and-feathers editorials with headlines like, “Pull Your Head Out of Your Ass, Bon Iver.” What they identified as Vernon’s great betrayal was his turning his back on a potential to swim “in an endless sea of naked hipsterettes” and become the “Pitchfork[.com] Wilt Chamberlain.”
“It’s hard, man. I never set out do this for any kind of major, major success,” Vernon says.
“You know, I was always just trying to play music on the weekends. Then all of a sudden, you’re handed the keys to this weird yacht — of your dreams. I never wanted a yacht, but somebody gave me a yacht. That is what happened with my success,” he adds.
If you’re a fan, the legend of Bon Iver is well known: the forlorn folk singer, recovering from heartbreak and illness, spending a winter in a snowbound cabin in Wisconsin, and emerging with a demo that was never supposed to go anywhere, then accidentally catapulted him to stardom.
Before he got the yacht (of his dreams), Vernon was a 20-something folk singer exploring the North Carolina folk scenes in Raleigh, Durham and Asheville with his friend Phil Cook, a banjo player and songwriter who went on to join the band Megafaun. They hung out with like-minded bands like the Mountain Goats and sought out people who could teach them traditional Appalachian music.
“We went down there to study music together. We didn’t enroll in any schools, but just decided to embed ourselves in whatever we could find musically. So Phil would go into the country and learn claw-hammer from all the banjo dudes, and then we’d all learn that. And we’d do these art residencies where we’d play Appalachian music,” Vernon recalls.
In the last three years of music industry silence, Vernon launched a music festival called Eaux Claires in the Wisconsin town where he was born. The first edition, held last August, drew 22,000 people.
When I asked if parents, relatives or friends from high school attended, he took a deep breath, then replied, “ I’ve thought about this. I probably recognized 5,000 faces that day, and I’m not exaggerating. That’s how many people who were there that I could probably tell you their first name,” he says.
“What inspired me was the Dessner brothers, Aaron Dessner and Bryan Devendorf from The National. They do a festival in Cincinnati, where they basically just did whatever they wanted in this old Civil War 2,000 capacity venue. They asked me to come down one year and do whatever I wanted, and I met all these crazy musicians and improvised and did a whole set of music — it was just wild. Anyway, it inspired me because they were people in a band who were also doing things for their community.”
In other words, Vernon wanted to start a music festival that wasn’t just about the biggest, hottest acts out there, but that is closely linked to the place where it’s happening.
“Reflecting on the community that brought me up, it feels important to me. It’s like what I brought home. It was really just an incredible experience. The community was so cool. Even our cops were awesome,” Vernon says.
So what’s next for Justin Vernon, and for Bon Iver?
“All I can really tell you,” Vernon says, “the biggest thing I’m working on right now is to figure out how to weave what Bon Iver is and has been to what Eaux Claires is. I’m trying to figure out how everything can benefit from weaving those things together — my life and everything else.”
■ Bon Iver performs on Wednesday at 8pm at the Taipei International Convention Center (台北國際會議中心), 1, Xinyi Rd Sec 5, Taipei City (台北市信義路五段1號). Tickets available online at NT$1,400 to NT$3,200, available at tixcraft.com/activity/detail/16_BonIver.
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