I wrote this note about 3 months ago saying I'd write a blog about 3 albums that have changed my life. I've written about my junior year of high school, spending late nights listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco. I wrote about the senior year sunny swagger of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement. But this one's different. I bought those records 4 or 5 years ago, while I got this one a few months ago; Bon Iver's Bon Iver. How do I know it's "changed my life" if I've only liked it for a matter of months? Maybe my life, or at least my mind, has changed in that amount of time. I definitely can't say this album's my absolute favorite of all time, but it's my favorite thus far from the 2010's, and since it's had a more recent effect on me, this blog post will be a lot longer than the other 2. It also might be the most personal thing I've ever written, so beware. Here it goes.
This album was released in July of 2011. At this stage in life, I was serving a 2-year LDS mission, currently serving in the city of Langley. For the record, I was not allowed to listen to anything but soft instrumentals and church hymns for these 2 years, so I never actually heard this album until latter 2012. My mission had been a rough venture through mental health Hell. Not being able to explain the feelings of loneliness and being overwhelmed from before my mission, I entered the field self-consciousness beyond all reason, losing feeling and excitement by the day while experiencing annoying physical pains. I was about 6 months in when a doctor in Vancouver diagnosed me with General Anxiety Disorder. I was convinced I should just go home by November 2010, but something just kept me hanging in there. I was in Langley when I started to feel a sense of comrade re that I kept throughout the mission. But I still struggled to feel any intense emotions or focus on things. This struggle stayed with me throughout the mission and even afterwards. I was on anti-anxiety medication up til October of 2012.
I got home from my mission almost exactly 1 year from today. The first thing I felt like I had to do was to catch up with all the music I missed! It was a harder process than I thought. I tried listening to old favorite hipster stuff- Wilco, Pavement, Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective- but I couldn't actually feel it like I used to. After my emotional mess which was my second summer at Redfish Lake, I started studies at Utah State University. Things got better, and I was getting into bands, but nothing really hit me. I even remember listening to Bon Iver and I didn't get it at all. "Holocene" was one of my favorite tracks just getting off my mission, but I wondered why the rest of the album didn't sound like it. Anyways, I was dating a lot, going to lots of social events, talking to lots of people- I was doing a lot of really confident things without ever feeling confident. I was scared of the upcoming winter, knowing that my moods always change with the bitter weather. November came.
November 2010 was spent in darkness and anxiety, spending too much time with my head over the toilet bowl, trying to get myself to FEEL something. In November 2012, I did feel something. I was just walking on campus through the snow when all the sudden, I had "Michicant" got stuck in my head. Now I get songs stuck in my head all the time, but there was something about this song being in my head with snow falling around me that was magical. I later had "Calgary" in my head and it gave me this calming feeling, like everything around me was real again. So I had to listen to the album again and it sounded TOTALLY different this time! I saw why Pitchfork called the album of 2011, but I actually cared more about- like- as cheesy as this sounds- how it made me FEEL. I will always remember this record for being the first music I could naturally feel for the first time in years. I mark it as the end of my struggle with clinical anxiety.
First off, I'd like to say this album is a miracle in engineering. In this area, I'd rank it next to Kid A or OK Computer any day. The sound is like an album within an album. Each song sounds like its meant to be louder, but there's a thick, soft blanket covering each track, and it never actually breaks through. The crashing guitar climax of "Perth" has potential to be a Doug Martsch anthem, but is actually very comforting. "Beth/Rest" could be the cheesiest, most epic adult-contemporary hit of the 80s, but is almost the furthest from cracking the ice. There are always different sounds to listen for, hiding in the songs- mostly a crackling sound, like ice fizzing in a cold drink. It's oddly experimental- almost every song contains a saxophone(!), trumpet section(!), and/or steel guitar (???), with some random synth sounds in there as well. Lyrically, the album is incomprehensible, which is what alternative music is all about. (I dare you tell me what each song is specifically about!) My official decision is that the album's central themes are memories and story-telling. There's a combination of mystery and reality in the song titles alone, half the tracks being named after geological places, half of these places not even existing. Justin Vernon's voice is amongst the most distinct voices of our time, if not all time. 6 out of 10 songs have him singing words that start with "cl" and you have to hear it to understand why I am deeply in love with it. I didn't get this album at first, but you can't really understand it's emotional heaviness until you try to sing along with it. It's soul food.
The songs? I could go on forever, in case you couldn't tell. I have a million things to say about each one! But I'll just narrow it down: "Holocene" is one of my favorite songs of all time. It's a song to play when you wake up in the morning, it's what you play when you go to bed. It's a song to cry to, a song to make you happy. It's like- THE song. Instrumentally, it's glorious, and maybe random. The first chorus features these covered/cuffed hand-claps that I feel like I've been secretly waiting to hear my whole life. And I couldn't name every instrument! Based around a repeated Nashville-tuned acoustic guitar riff, Vernon just gets the whole gang together for this one. It's the definition of brooding. "Holocene" is actually a scientific term referring to the state the earth was in within its first billion years. So this song could be about the beginning of freaking time. Although it's epic enough to fir that title, he sings mostly about his adolescent memories. "Someway baby, it's part of me, apart from me... and at once I knew I was not magnificent... but I can see for miles, miles, miles." This is what life is all about- looking back, feeling humbled, then looking forward. And though the rest of the album doesn't sound like this, most tracks on here don't sound alike anyway. Bon Iver is the album that brought me comfort in my days of intense stress. Still today, I get stressed to an extent beyond what I was comfortable with in high school. But everyday, I learn more about myself and find more ways out. Amongst any spiritual and psychological reasoning, Bon Iver is the soundtrack to my recovering mental health.
Thanks Bon Iver.
