Bon Iver leader Justin Vernon and menswear designer Todd Snyder may seem like unlikely collaborators, but the pair of Midwest natives were in perfect sync when they convened tonight (April 1) at the latter’s flagship New York store for a conversation about the new Bon Iver album, SABLE, fABLE, and the power of both creativity and community.
On April 10, the day before SABLE, fABLE arrives from Jagjaguwar, Vernon and Snyder will team for the release of limited-edition salmon-colored beanies and hooded sweatshirts, with further details to be announced.
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Those twin pillars heavily informed SABLE, fABLE, which Vernon told the invite-only crowd took root after he wrote the song ‘Everything Is Peaceful Love’ in 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the music industry to essentially shut down. “It was the happiest thing I’ve ever made since I wrote a song called ‘The Happy Song’ when I was 17,” he said. “I got that and I was like, this is different. Maybe I could like feel like this, because I wasn’t feeling so good for a while. Part of the process is also suffering through your doubts and identity and anxieties. I got that song and I was like, let’s turn this ship around. I’ve spent the last five or six years working at trying to come up with a new direction. It takes effort to grow. When you challenge yourself and you ask the hard questions of yourself, you get better as a person and as an artist.”
Snyder asked Vernon about his close friendship with the National’s Aaron Dessner, with whom he’s made two Big Red Machine albums and collaborated on a host of other projects, including Taylor Swift’s acclaimed releases folklore and evermore.
“Aaron showed me about community and collaboration when I was first coming outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin,” Vernon recalled of his first trip to the MusicNOW festival in the Dessner brothers’ hometown of Cincinnati. “He showed me how to build it and how to take charitable causes into it. He showed me the ropes on so many things. When we started Big Red Machine, it was literally just kind of by accident. He was doing the National and I was doing Bon Iver, and we just didn’t have enough outlets. When you sit and stew in your own stink, if you will, you can run out of juice. For him and I, it became about, let’s never practice, let’s only be free and let’s only have fun. I mean, we were getting on stage at festivals and dropping LSD and going wild. We needed to get all that out, because even being independent and nobody’s really telling us what to do, we still needed to shake some of that gravity off.”
Without revealing specifics, Vernon said Big Red Machine is indeed at work on “some new kind of things now” that are somewhat different in approach, but that the project is “always going to be a source of newness, of growth, where we can shed everything that’s weighing us down and then just shred through it.”
As SABLE, fABLE nears release, it hasn’t been lost on Bon Iver fans that Vernon has no tour dates on his schedule at the moment, or that the group hasn’t played live in nearly two years. Indeed, when Vernon appears tomorrow on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, it will be only as a couch guest.
“I’m not going to sing for a while. I’m going take a second. I sang plenty on this record, man,” he said with a laugh. “Let this record be the performance. I’ll figure out how to sing in front of people again later. Why play a new version? You worked five years on it. It would be like putting a new chore coat out and then spray-painting it yellow the second day it was available.”
Reflecting on Snyder’s admission that he has stopped staging fashion shows, Vernon said, “I’m not saying I’m not ever going to tour. I’m definitely going to play shows of some kind again. I want to be out there and I want to do that whole thing. But I think taking the license to decide that something’s not for you is another one of those things. It may be painful and strange to not do the thing that’s expected of you or that other people who are successful do, but I do think that’s a little bit of that Midwest ethic. I grew up never expecting to have the kind of career I have now. I was hoping that I could hawk CDs out of the back of my Honda CR-V and go home to my little house with a wife and kids. It hasn’t turned out that way, but when you make those hard decisions, they bring rewards.”
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