Londoners Magazine

Dear God of Music, bringer of all things mystical and wondrous,

Thank you for giving us Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago.

I know we don’t write to you often, and we’re shamefully ungrateful for all the lovely gifts you’ve bestowed on us. That’s why I’m making a special effort to write, thanking you for this one.

In 2006, you broke Justin Vernon’s heart. You stripped him of his band, which broke up, and his relationship, which fell apart.

You sent him from his place in North Carolina to his old home in northern Wisconsin, where he fled to his father’s old snowy cabin in the woods, dragging his recording equipment with him.

He was there, on his own, for three months. To top it all off, he was sick, recovering from a heavy bout of glandular fever.

You’re mysterious in your ways, but no one could accuse you of not having a plan.

Nine of the songs he recorded there became For Emma, Forever Ago. He released it under the name Bon Iver, a deliberate misspelling of the French for “good winter”.

You must have done something to him out there in the cold winter woods, because this is an album for the ages.

Formed almost entirely by a lonely, beaten up guitar and layers of Vernon’s soft, occasionally Jeff Buckley-esque falsetto, the songs are distant but unbelievably intimate; sad but streaked with rich veins of warmth.

Listening, you feel like a ghost eavesdropping on the cabin wall as Vernon’s guitar echoes around the candle-lit room.

“Lump Sum” starts with almost Gregorian vocal harmonies, which mix with a simple, insistent guitar strum. “The Wolves (Act I and II)” meanders beautifully, with soft waves of 12-string guitar and an earthy, bluesy vocal melody.

As the song reaches its frantic crescendo, the recording device crackles and snarls, as if all Vernon’s demons are pounding on the cabin walls trying to reach him.

Most inspiring of all, there’s redemption and hope among all the sadness on this album. This is most aptly demonstrated by the resolute final lines of closing track “re: Stacks” : “This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realisation/ It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away/ Your love will be safe with me.”

It suggests that crafting these songs allowed Vernon to deal with his pain and come back into the world again. Like I said, it seems you had a plan all along.

But you know all this. You helped make it happen. Vernon himself admitted it in a later interview. “I recognise that the record is enigmatic and special in a strange way,” he said. “I can’t take full credit for it, and I was the only one there.”

So thank you. I’d ask you to inspire Vernon to create another such masterpiece, but I don’t want to push my luck. If For Emma, Forever Ago was the last thing he ever recorded, I’d still be a happy man. And a grateful one.