What we got here is a Bon Iver song called “Hey, Ma.” To answer the question roughly 15 percent of you immediately thought to ask, no, it’s not a Cam’ron cover, though the Venn diagrams for Bon Iver and Cam’ron creep closer together with each passing moment, a breathtaking solar eclipse, a tentative but inevitable union between gargantuan sad-sack indie balladry and all-pink-everything rap-adjacent swagger. The fourth full-length album from Bon Iver—the grandiose and intimate band led by grizzly-cuddly Wisconsin troubadour Justin Vernon—is called i,i, weird typography being a major component of Vernon’s swagger. “Hey, Ma” is the record’s biggest, brightest, warmest, most straightforward moment, though we are speaking, as with all things Bon Iver, earnestly and yet relatively, directly and yet obliquely.
What does—what will—this song mean to you? What does it mean to him? “I waited outside,” Vernon bellows at the onset, the electric guitar chiming, the digital-cornfield synthesizer purring, a sonar-like blip keeping time, a deep bass drone ensuring that you feel it all deep in your chest, and likely deep in your feelings. “I took it remote / I wanted a baaaath / Tell the story or he goes / Tell the story or he goes.” What primarily differentiates “Hey, Ma” from much of the rest of i,i is the mere presence of a chorus, gentle but fairly massive, an arena-rock fist pump amid an album of much weirder and subtler gestures:
Full time you talk your money up
While it’s living in a coal mine
Tall time to call your ma
Hey Ma, hey Ma
Tall vote you know you mope it up
Well you wanted it your whole life
You’re back and forth with light
It sounds beautiful, it sounds profound, it certainly sounds like it means something. Could Vernon explain this song if he wanted to? (He doesn’t want to.) Could you? Does the notion of explaining it even matter? (It doesn’t matter.) I have long resisted the too-perfect origin story of Vernon’s first album as Bon Iver, 2008’s austere and revered For Emma, Forever Ago. (Vernon, heartbroken over the loss of both a girlfriend and a previous band, recorded it in a remote Wisconsin cabin in the dead of winter.) But the spare, devastated beauty of “Re: Stacks” is finally starting to get to me, and given the sheer enormity and rustic-orchestral opacity of his music now, it’s striking to revisit an Emma jam like “Skinny Love” and confront a mere human bashing a mere acoustic guitar and bellowing mere breakup-type bromides. (“And I told you to be patient / And I told you to be fine / And I told you to be balanced / And I told you to be kind.”) Vernon is no longer content with moping it up; his music no longer evokes the cabin, but the endless wilderness that swallows it. He’s gotten ever bigger, and ever blurrier.
Kanye West helped, of course. Vernon experimented with Auto-Tune on the 2009 EP Blood Bank, aligning him both spiritually and sonically with 808s & Heartbreak–era Kanye, a mopey-titan summit only a few of us saw coming. Vernon, whom West described in 2016 as “my favorite living artist,” has indeed been your favorite rapper’s favorite robo-folk warbler ever since, a striking and frightfully logical presence on future Kanye landmarks My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus. Bon Iver, meanwhile, scaled up dramatically on its self-titled 2011 album, a crunchy and gauzy full-band affair that gave the world the meme-ready hyperballad “Holocene” and the monumental piano weeper “Beth/Rest,” a primo ’80s Bruce Hornsby–type heartland-rock anthem that overcame the modern impulse to treat anything that sounded like ’80s heartland rock as inherently ironic.
(My most profound musical experience of 2018 was eating Nachos BellGrande with my parents in a rural-Pennsylvania Taco Bell an hour after we’d held my grandmother’s hands as she passed. Bruce Hornsby’s “Every Little Kiss” was playing over the Taco Bell sound system. I couldn’t have told you if it was uplifting or devastating or bitterly ironic or what. Pure pop cheese can sometimes be the richest. #Holocene.)
The patchwork blueprint for i,i is right there in the third Bon Iver album, 2016’s 22, A Million, with its overlapping moans and cut-and-paste eccentricity, straightforward in stray moments (“I’d be happy as hell if you stayed for tea,” Vernon blurts out, before clarifying that he’s staying at the Ace Hotel) but by and large arty and beguilingly evasive as befits a man no longer content with skinny love. My single favorite thing Vernon’s ever done is probably the leadoff track, a choral rhapsody of pitch-shifted voices enrapturing enough that I am willing to type out the full song title, which is “22 (OVER S∞∞N).” Vernon, to his credit, will always reward your decision to indulge him.
There is nothing as singularly arresting on i,i, no. But with an expanded cast (including James Blake, the National’s Aaron Dessner, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, fellow Kanye pal Francis Starlite, and a horn section Vernon has long referred to as “Sad Sax of Shit”) and an even spacier outlook, this record is your ideal companion as “Sad Boy Autumn” approaches, rewarding however many dozens of spins you’re willing to give it just to wrap your brain around it. “It’s an expansive sound, it’s a much bigger sound,” Vernon enthuses in a new microdocumentary touting his upcoming no-bullshit arena tour, his speaking voice alone as deep and mystical as a didgeridoo. “We’re pushing more air.” It’s best at first to just let the wind whip you around, uncomprehending.
The quick and scrappy piano sketch “U (Man Like)” is a casting flex of sorts, featuring the stupendous singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and, yes, there he is, literally Bruce Hornsby himself, all content, like most of the record’s other guests, to contribute on a line-by-line basis:
HORNSBY: Well I know that we set off for a common place
SUMNEY: And the lines have run too deep
THE CHOIR: How much caring is there of some American love?
VERNON, ETC.: When there’s lovers sleeping in your streets?
Hmm, that’s not very oblique. Vernon is an art-rock troubadour at heart, his lyrics disarmingly plain but just distorted enough to resist asking simple questions or delivering simple answers. On “Holyfields,” which stutters and skitters like Radiohead at their spaciest, a romantic string quartet disrupts the atomized electro-pop vibe and very briefly spurs Vernon toward something approaching clarity: “Stay, go? / Better that you find a new way / Before my eyes? / Couldn’t learn it any other way.” And then the song just drifts away. For a band that is indeed touring arenas and coliseums and amphitheaters this fall, Bon Iver is not much interested in old-guard arena rock, though “Naeem” builds up to somewhat of a gallop, and Vernon builds up to somewhat of a roar: “Tell them I’ll be passing on / Tell them we’re young mastodons / And it can’t be that it’s all / And it can’t be that is all / I’m telling you that I do feel ya.”
You can always feel Vernon even if you can’t quite understand him, can always sense the eternal presence of the sad bearded guy in the hunting lodge imploring you to be kind, no matter how many fellow space cadets and voice modulators and whatnot he’s got in the room with him. Late in i,i comes “Sh’Diah,” a weightless, Sigur Rós–style galactic bubble bath borne aloft by Vernon’s unearthly falsetto and a mournful sax solo. You can take it as so much glorious ambient emptiness, or you can tool around the internet and confirm your suspicion that the title is short for “Shittiest Day in American History.” Vernon might tell you outright which day he was thinking of, but he can definitely make you feel it, and feel grateful that as far out as Bon Iver has gotten, he has always known the difference.
