“Gotta be careful about nostalgia,” Justin Vernon cautioned a few songs into Saturday’s concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, muttering more to himself than the audience. And, by and large, he has been. Early on, Vernon recognized the power of his debut album’s creation myth—heartbroken dude retreats to a cabin in Wisconsin, writing and recording songs that channel the loneliness of the trees around him—as well as its potential to overshadow his music. Nearly everything he’s done since has felt at least in part like an attempt to erase, or at least complicate, his image as a sorrowful woodsman.
Across the last 10 years, he’s contributed to myriad side projects, including the experimental Volcano Choir and the soft-rocking Gayngs, expanding his repertoire along the way. And then there’s Bon Iver’s latest, 22, A Million, a garbled cryptograph of a record that seems to understand it’s asking more from listeners than most are willing to give (nobody requests 22, A Million songs at a Bon Iver concert—and not just because they can’t pronounce their titles).
So if Saturday’s one-off concert at a Milwaukee basketball arena felt a bit out-of-character for Vernon, he sought to make the night something more revealing than a routine “artist plays their most popular album” show. Flanked by past and present members of his band on an oftentimes crowded stage, Vernon used the show as an opportunity to commemorate Bon Iver’s early years. The setlist was modeled closely after their For Emma tours, including a couple covers the band retired long ago: Graham Nash’s “Simple Man,” sung by bandmate Mike Noyce, and North Carolina folk singer Sarah Siskind’s “Lovin’s for Fools,” performed with Siskind herself.
The show put Vernon’s perfectionist tendencies on display, with many songs reworked with enveloping, pastoral arrangements in the spirit of Bon Iver’s self-titled second record. Despite the potentially unforgiving acoustics of such a large venue, the sound was pristine. Vernon performed wearing a seriously hefty pair of headphones, signaling a sense of internal concentration. For Emma was always a more ornate, idiosyncratic record than its folky reputation suggested, and Vernon exposed just how much work went into it; it’s ironic how many musicians it takes to make music sound this lonely.
Distinctive as his songwriting on For Emma may be, Vernon’s use of digital vocal effects may become his greatest innovation. In the years after For Emma’s release, he was one of the first indie songwriters to fully harness the emotional power of electronic vocals, demonstrating that such manipulation could be artful and expressive—not just a cover-up for a weak voice, but a means to further heighten a great one. It was his inventive embrace of Auto-Tune that caught the ear of Vernon’s most famous collaborator, Kanye West, and led to the likes of James Blake, Frank Ocean, and Francis and the Lights employing similarly slurry effects. This futuristic side of Vernon was displayed on one of the concert’s few solo showcases, when he performed “Woods,” from 2009’s Blood Bank EP, alone onstage. Sans any instrument other than his layered, heavily processed voice, he looked machinelike in his stillness, as lights strobed across him like jolts of electricity.
For all of his subsequent zigs and zags, nothing Vernon has done since For Emma has had quite the same impact. The album stands as one of a handful of independent releases from the last decade or so that resonated significantly beyond indie circles. It not only set off indie rock’s renewed interest in humble strumming, but it helped kindle a more blockbuster folk resurgence, as acts like the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons filtered some of the same ideas through the sensibilities of a Target commercial. For evidence of how far up the record industry Vernon’s music has reached, look no further than Ed Sheeran’s arm, which features tattooed lyrics from For Emma’s closer, “Re: Stacks.” But while many have copped his early style, none have done it with such personal conviction. This was clear during Vernon’s intimate solo performance of “Re: Stacks,” when he seemed to shrink the silenced, darkened arena to a fraction of its size.
