715 - CR∑∑KS by Bon Iver

or, modulated melancholia, or, melodic sundering

Way back, in those bygone days of Lust and Thunder, when I was a poor college student scrounging for food and doing drugs to help me lose my mind, my roommate asked me if I wanted to head to Electric Fetus—a record store in Minneapolis—to see Bon Iver perform.

We were feeling tired and lazy and decided not to. For Emma, Forever Ago had recently come out but most people hadn’t heard it yet, unless they listened to The Current or college radio stations or had a real hipster for a friend (I fell into the all three category). Like a lot of similar acts, we assumed Bon Iver would be bouncing around coffee shops or maybe 7th Street Entry for a long time. The thinking was that we’d have plenty of times to go see him play.

The next time he came to town, he was, of course, gigantic and getting tickets just didn’t happen. I’ve still never seen Bon Iver perform.

I think about that often, because that album—For Emma, Forever Ago—was one of the most important albums of college for me. I’ve mentioned before that I mostly listened to classical music during this period of my life, but I also found time for the kind of music my friends and peers actually listened to, and this one hit me powerfully, despite my distaste for guitar.

Much of it came down to Justin Vernon’s voice. And I could—and will!—write tens of thousands of words about that album, from the arrangement and production to the lyrics, but that’s not why we’re here today, dear children, my friends and digital vagabonds.

We’re here to talk about a single song from 22, A Million, Bon Iver’s third album. It was a return to the band for me, since I didn’t much care for their self titled second album that won universal acclaim and even a Grammy. But 22, A Million came in hot and I dug it but the years have gone on and it drifted on by until I stumbled across this song again.

To be specific, it wasn’t just this song, but the live version of this song, which I recommend watching below before I dig into the song itself.

It hit me like a brick to the solar plexus and I sat at my silly little desk trying to catch my breath.

And now over the course of a few days, I’ve listened to this two minute song probably a hundred times, just repeating it over and over, trying to catch this feeling, to grapple with it.

Down along the creek
I remember something
Her, the heron hurried away
When first I breeched that last Sunday

Before we dive into the lyrics themselves, we must dwell on the sound of this. Justin Vernon sings this without musical accompaniment, but he modulates and distorts his voice, turning his single voice into a choir. More than that, his voice comes out like he’s been trapped inside an organ.

And I remember an organ big as a church thrumming through me while Nosferatu played in that abandoned Irish cathedral in 2009 and the vastness of its sonic power seemed to press in and down and all around me, holding me in this impossibly large lungful of longing.

For that’s how an organ sounds to me. There’s a quality to them that I find cripplingly melancholic, filling me with beauty I have no words for. It’s a sensation as much as a sound, as much as an emotion. A tactile sensation like being swept away by waves and their current tearing me out to sea where the enormity of this everness all round threatens to consume me, to imbue me with those old savage gods—a promise of everything yet to come, all yet unfulfilled, all that vast expanse of nothing, of all things.

And I do not know why I feel emotions most raw when the human voice is manipulated and fractured, refracted through this robotic, inhuman element. My words so often thrash against technology and especially the way it needles into our daily lives, yet hearing a voice drowning in this modulation hits me all the harder.

Perhaps it’s some need to hide. For if his voice, here, was bare, it would still be beautiful. Still full of emotion and resonance. But by draping the technology over the yearning, the ecstatic reaching, I feel it thrum inside me, churning all that I am and ever was.

And it has always been so.

I remember when first I heard Imogen Heap and the way sound expanded inside me. This simple transmutation of a delicate beauty and swelling it cavernous enough to swallow me, distorting that purity of human voice so it hooks inside me, trembling, tearing, seeking—

And Vernon layers this over fragile lyrics that don’t entirely cohere. Even sonically. When I read these words, the poetics of it feel frail, barely holding together.

Down along the creak / I remember something.

When I read poetry, I seek the music in it. You can feel the flow and rhythm and musicality of words in your head, if you know how to read. Or maybe you can’t. I won’t speak for you. But I can. I can hear the song inside the assonance and consonance, the meter and the rhyme. But look at these two lines and tell me if you hear it.

Because I don’t. It’s not there. And even that I remember something is so vague, so weak, and yet—

Her, the heron hurried away / When first I breeched that last Sunday.

Here we get some nice consonance and a rhyme to unite these two lines, though the consonance, the alliteration, only lasts for the brevity of that first phrase. There’s no clear assonance at play either, to sonically link these lines, and definitely little to link the sound of these two lines to the first two lines of the stanza.

And so we have a stanza that’s almost anti-musical. That’s not a bad thing, mind. Many poets are not lyrical or musical and they’re just fine. But it’s interesting for a literal song to seemingly defy using the sound of words to some advantage.

And I’ve puzzled over this. The defiance here. I could say that it’s a weakness in his writing or any such thing, but a song is also more than simply words on a page, even one whose sole instrument is the human voice. And so we cannot consider the words in isolation, the meter and rhyme disconnected from the melody.

And even though the melody Vernon uses doesn’t really match the words or the sonic landscape they demand, the shape of these vowels and consonants in your mouth fighting against melody, and yet Vernon creates a melody here.

Down along the creek.

You can almost measure the topography of the melody here, the way it rolls like hills from a higher height onto the lower ones, his voice beginning with force until he meets the lowlands of the melody and that tumbling, rolling melody stretches long and his voice falsettos across the plains as the heron hurried away with her leaving and him breeching Sunday. But even this rising falsetto interrupts and breaks the rolling melody that his voice forces into existence.

A memory, all of it.

I was talking with my good friend Bart last night and I brought up this song that’s been consuming me and he brought forth an idea that solves the puzzle.

Despite the words and what they may sound like read from a page, despite even the peculiar melody—which we’ll talk about more—of this song, there’s a confidence to Vernon’s vocal performance that carries you over the broken landscape. We are swept up by his voice, pulled along ecstatically, never minding what should or shouldn’t be.

And it’s fitting that an a cappella performance like this should live and die by that voice. That voice that is at turns robust and delicate, fragile and assaulting, powerful the way a forty foot high organ in an ancient cavernous cathedral overpowers.

Low moon don the yellow road
I remember something
That leaving wasn't easing
All that heaving in my vines
And as certain it is evening 'at is now is not the time
Ooh

The pause between stanzas stuns me. I find myself drawn to it more and more each time I listen to this song. And I cannot quite grasp what it is. What that silence after Sunday and before Low quite does to me.

I scrabble in the dust for words to describe for you something that’s bonedeep, that hits my heart and shivers my spine. That simple pause. That moment of quiet between the organ lifts me back up.

And perhaps that’s part of it. Vernon’s voice carries me, lifts me up and brings me far away, and then, for a moment, a moment just slightly too long, long enough to threaten the melody, the silence hits and we plummet back towards the earth.

And though the lyrics are a bit vague, they’re evocative. For I have been on that moon donned road yellowed in the darkness on nights I couldn’t sleep when I was caught in memories aswirl within me. A lifetime aswim within my chest. When I was ten and fifteen and twenty, full of longing and hope but weighed down by melancholia, by thoughts unhealthy and dreams unreal, but I went along that road, breathing smoke.

I remember something.

Almost anti-poetical. For poetry lives and thrives on specificity, on the fragile moments of life when sensations meet emotions meet stains on a page. And yet.

I remember something.

It lives inside me. Bellowing. Thrumming.

All this trembling evocation. An invocation.

I remember something.

It’s a bad line, and yet I cannot escape it. Cannot get it out of my head. Cannot breathe without its shivering, without all my hauntings.

The heron hurried away and now we walk along this moonlit road, our memories astir within us.

That leaving wasn't easing / All that heaving in my vines / And as certain it is evening 'at is now is not the time.

Here, again, Vernon stretches his voice across the lowlands, allowing for a melodic mirror of the first stanza. The tumbling, rolling nature of the first two lines that then pools out across the landscape. But here, the energy of that tumble downhill becomes a speedier delivery of these lines but the harmonic modulation steadies that lowland leg of the melody apace with the previous stanza, smoothing over the long breath.

But here, too, we see the written sound working. These lines flow and sing and you can feel the rolling melody of them, the assonance of the many E and Ing sounds and the consonance of all those S and Ts that allow us as readers and internal music-hearers to feel the speed of the delivery demanded.

But, interestingly, rather than have this modulate the melody, this is the place where the melody is stagnant.

In every melodic choice, there’s a tension here. Lines that shouldn’t have music are given music. Lines that demand music are rubbed clean and bare and flat.

But never for a moment does anything seem out of place because of the sheer confidence of Vernon, the power of his single instrument.

These flowing lines of regret and loss feel like the Creek. Slowly picking up speed as it winds its way through the lowlands, filling us with melancholia, with sorrow, with heaving in my vines, which leads so cleanly into the opening of the next stanza.

Toiling with your blood
I remember something
In B, unrationed kissing on a night second to last
Finding both your hands as second sun came past the glass
And oh, I know it felt right and I had you in my grasp

Again, that pause following the vocal flourish that followed the opening rush of a creek growing in strength and power, though we may ask ourselves who is the creek, who it belongs to, if anyone.

This pause pregnant with sorrow, with memory.

Toiling with your blood / I remember something.

Again, the lines defy music, but they pierce through me.

Toiling with your blood

There’s some deep magic in toiling here. The use of a word like that here absolutely blows me away. First we’re down along a creek and then we’re along a moonlit road but now we’re toiling with your blood.

We’ve gone from nature to the body and we followed the heaving in his vines, which is almost only a misspelling of veins. And now we toil with your blood.

It staggers me, this toiling with your blood. My breath catches and my ears tighten focus and in my third eye I see it all so clearly.

An invocation. Something deep and dark and strewn with magic but given through this tech-warped voice to reach inside us. He’s in our blood, and I feel it there. Feel it surging through my veins. This tumbling, rolling to match the cascade of my own memories swirling within me, haunting me, roiling all round as we head to the lowlands where we gather more strength and power and speed as we race Howl-like in almost a single breath through the next few lines.

In B, unrationed kissing on a night second to last / Finding both your hands as second sun came past the glass / And oh, I know it felt right and I had you in my grasp.

He’s controlling our breath with these lines when we read them. Every line longer than the stanzas previous and each so tied together and rushing forward through sounds. All the Is and As and S and percussive consonants like pebbles pushed along by the creek’s growing current.

It’s also where the structure of his melody that I’ve described as rolling downhill and then spreading along the lowlands absolutely breaks apart, because these racing lines full of music and power are met by a voice no longer constrained by the flattening of the synthetic organ. Rather, we see a voice struggling to break through the robotic modulated melody. The human voice rising and trying to shatter through, pushing the melody up and out, stretching the limits defined by two stanzas.

The creek bursting over its banks, carried by assonance and consonance, by elongated breaths, by a vocal performance busting out of what it gave us, the rhythm and tempo it defined for us.

And these lines are what struck me as I sat here watching the live performance. The organ, the modulation, the hypnotic melody, the confidence and bravura of this vocal performance, all come crashing together here at a moment of rupture, when Vernon’s voice, no longer the gentle falsetto of the conclusion of the previous two stanzas, instead becomes increasingly robust, uncontained, unconstrained, uncontrollable.

Trying to escape this stream of memories, this creek of our lives, and Vernon brings us there with breath, with sound, but also with a voice straining against the choir, the organ, the machine, and he lunges towards a handful of notes as if flailing for the bank, scrabbling in the dirt and mud and sand to climb out of the creek.

I stopped what I was doing, my heart racing and my lungs empty.

This song drowning in melancholia, in beauty, becomes tinged by rage, by anger, by desperate hope rather than sorrow and lamentation for what could have been but wasn’t.

Unrationed kissing on a night second to last

Have we not all had such nights? Those evenings that seemed made for eternity, where our hearts were bursting with hope and love, with desire, and we kissed as if it was all that kept us alive, all that would give us tomorrow.

I remember something

And it was kissing on those final nights we had together.

I remember something

And it was Finding both your hands as second sun came past the glass.

I remember something

And I had you in my grasp.

You were there. We were there together. Another sun to shine through my moonlit night, to give light and shine to my life, to my world, and we were bound together, and I promised to never let you go. To hold you always.

I remember something

I had you in my grasp

Had you in my grasp. Your hand in mine.

And I tumble through the years, through the people who I loved and who loved me, and all those hands once held that slipped between my fingers leaving me alone, with nothing but the shine of their memory, the haunting of their face, their goneaway love.

Oh, then how we gonna cry
Cause it once might not mean something
Love, a second glance it is not something that we'll need
Honey, understand that I have been left here in the reeds
But all I'm trying to do is get my feet out from the crease

In the studio version, there’s another immense pause between having you in our grasp and the next line but the live version barrels forward, still clinging to those clasped fingers but also returning to an imperfect memory of that melody that defined the previous stanzas.

The melody rolling downhill.

But here we no longer remember something and instead he asks us how we gonna cry / cause it once might not mean something.

Cause it once might not mean something.

It once might not mean something.

Another vague line that fails, in a certain way, but I find it strangely powerful.

It once might not mean something.

Even the peculiar use of tenses here where the past is telling us something of the future. It once meant so much. Too much. But, someday, maybe it won’t mean so much. Perhaps it will mean almost nothing at all.

What is the weight of a heart? The price of pain? What is the weight of my memory?

And perhaps the vagueness hits me particularly because of my propensity to throw myself into emotions, into love, into open hearts and open arms. Perhaps I remember something hits me like a brick because of my inability to remember so much of my life, but for those moments, those memories, that shine like beacons, like spotlights, overcrowding all else, overawing the rest of my life, leaving this threadbare tapestry worn by time and singed by fiery bright moments, and all these moments that should belong here and there are instead nowhere to be found, to be recalled.

But I remember something.

I remember your hand in mine. Your hand on mine. I remember holding on, metaphorically and physically.

I remember saying goodbye, wondering if I’d ever see you again at that train station in Prague, wondering if the rest of my life might one day mean nothing compared to the hours and days, those painfully bright minutes with you in the apartment in Prague full of cats, in hostels in Scotland and Ireland, in Paris and Nantes, and that weekend in Nice when the rest of my life became writ by your hand.

But I remember letting go, watching you go, wondering if I’d just let everything go, if I’d left my last chance at love, my only real shot at it, and I knew you’d always have whole fists of my heart that would never heal unless I saw you again.

But for a few weeks winding through Poland and Slovakia and Hungary, I felt as if my life had ended on that train station when I said goodbye.

And I wondered, then, if ever I’d cry again, if ever I’d feel again, if ever anything would ever matter the way those months with you mattered.

And then as if from nowhere, the melody flattens again like we’re back in that first stanza.

Love, a second glance it is not something that we'll need / Honey, understand that I have been left here in the reeds / But all I'm trying to do is get my feet out from the crease.

After bursting violently against the banks, we settle back into Vernon’s falsetto: Love, a second glance it is not something that we’ll need.

And I never needed a second glance though I took it. Again and again, I glanced at you reading there in that hostel bed above me for I had never seen such beauty.

But here the melody that Vernon created over all these tranquil lines in previous stanzas feels like a creek hitting a dam until the next lines, where his voice riotously rises, once more struggling and straining to break free, to shatter this dam in life, this containment.

And it all strikes home making me dizzy, my legs weak, as the flexibility of his voice once more rages against and breaks away from the synthetic to become his own whole, the choir falling beneath, and in the live performance he finishes the stanza with that harsh breath released into the microphone and my entire body quivers.

But all I’m trying to do is get my feet out from the crease.

That harsh breath at crease feels absolutely violent, the way it hits my eardrums and radiates through my spine to my toes and fingertips.

And I remember when ASMR was all the rage and I listened to someone running their dry fingers over the dry paper of a map and my vision became fuzzy and my chest seemed to empty, like I was the floor in some warehouse giving out.

I feel that same thing at this harsh breath.

Where the previous attempt to escape caught the memory of holding you, of grasping your hand, this final attempt to escape is a plea, a lamentation for the fact that we are stuck, caught.

Honey, understand that I have been left here in the reeds

We reached for you but away you hurried, a heron. Now we’re here caught in the reeds of this creek that is our life, that sends us ever onward along these lowlands, inexorably away from these memories that meant so much, that defined who and what and why we are.

We’re here in the reeds, alone.

And all I'm trying to do is get my feet out from the crease.

I could live in that harsh breath.

The absolute dominion of Vernon’s vocals carry us onward, much like the creek pulling him ever onward.

And I'll see you

Turn around, you're my A-Team
Turn around now, you're my A-Team
God damn, turn around now, you're my A-Team

Look at me.

Turn around.

Goddamnit, turn around.

You’re my everything.

All this life could turn and twist and transform if only you turned around, for this has all been for you, because of you.

I never meant to, but I could not hold on. Could not keep you here and you hurried away and I wander moonlit paths remembering, caught and haunted by the echo of your touch, your tongue, your lips, and desperately I seek a way out, a path back out of these reeds, this creek trapping and containing me, but I cannot find it without you.

So please, my love, my heart: turn around.

Wolf.

Howl.

---

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