Musician Justin Vernon, finished recording an album with his band ending in the band parting ways, experienced a hard break-up with his girlfriend, and had an awful battle with mono in the fall a few years ago. Feeling heartbroken, lost, and out of place, he decided to spend the winter alone in his father's cabin in northern Wisconsin. Alone, with all his personal belongings--some clothes, a four-track tape recorder, a computer, a couple guitars, a few microphones and a few other miscellaneous items--he spent a bleak winter there in the cabin cut off from the world. It was there, that he took the name Bon Iver (based on the French Bon Hiver or Good winter) upon himself and wrote songs chronicling his frustration, anger, and resentment towards the painful recent events in his life.
He recorded them himself, with only what he had,... a meager, incomplete home studio. He intended to send these song demos to record labels and hoped get a record deal with one, but when his friends heard the demos, they raved. At the insistence of friends and family, he pressed five hundred copies of For Emma, Forever Ago and had a concert and release party.
Soon, his music was all over the net. Soon he had a record deal, and deciding rather than re-record all of his music, it would be better to release the lo-fi home recordings as a album on label Jagjaguwar. Magazines immediately praised it. By the end of the year, several publications had placed it in their yearly "Best Albums of the Year" features.
What made the album so good? Why did people love it so much? Most of the music was pretty simple acoustic folk, not what you'd expect people to be raving about.
I believe it was because of the lo-fi production value. The majority of popular music today is very "produced"--meaning that there are lots of instrument parts, lots of digital editing, lots of effects. It sounds slick, commercial, and ready for radio. Not-so-long-ago, artists would record their entire albums on only a few microphones. Today, artists use multiple microphones on every single instrument, the layer parts on top of each other, duplicating the parts over and over again, to make a single guitar, or piano, or whatever sound huge, loud, and round.
Many people like this. They know when they pick up a CD or download a single its going to sound very big, loud, and super high quality. However, there are many people, who miss the inconsistencies, the imperfections of older music. Modern recording techniques can, and often do, sound sterile, unrealistic, and cold to a trained ear. Over the radio, they may sound great, but to a musician or music aficionado....not so much. Some even go as far to believe, that because of the way music is made these days, it has lost a lot of meaning, power, and mostly all its honesty and integrity. This is why vinyl records have enjoyed a resurgence in the last ten years. The gritty playback and imperfections of vinyl make the albums sound warmer, more real, and to many give them an almost live performance feel.
Bon Iver's music is simple and extremely lo-fi. Most of the album was recorded with a single, inexpensive microphone not especially well-suited for recording vocals or acoustic guitars. Because of the technological faults of his recording gear, the overall sound of the record is not the focus of the album. Its lyrical and musical intensity, its brutal honesty, and gut-wrenching performance by Vernon are central to the album. It is so sparse in spots, that really, those are the only things you can hear.
In a world where oohs, ahs, and la-la-las are more than commonplace in music, but are rather central to the composition of modern pop music, real honesty and substance aren't just a breath of fresh air, but, rather, a complete departure from the norm. Absent here are obvious lyrics about sex, partying, and dancing in clubs. Instead, we find metaphors of wolves compared to lovers and cryptic lyrics with depth, breadth, and life.
Listen to the following song. Its one of my favorites from the album. My favorite part is towards the end where a orchestra of drums and percussion join the song, smashing their way into an exciting climax, then suddenly dropping out to leave only Vernon's layered vocals, barely a hushed whisper, uttering pleading, out-of time fragments of, "Someday, my pain... Someday, my pain..."
Great story. TFS
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