Music-Songs

"Ah, feel the signs
I worried about rain
And I worried about lightning
But I watched them off
To the light of the morning."  715 Creeks, Bon Iver

After Justin Vernon, Bon Iver, had produced two highly successful albums, he, like many musicians, experienced an existential crisis.  Only instead of turning to alcohol, drugs and sex, as so many do, he turned to himself. To try to deal with the two-headed dragon of anxiety and panic,  he sought solace in a remote Greek island.  But he said that instead of "finding himself", things just got worse. You might can outrun a dragon, but it's hard to escape his fire.  He did take with him a traveling companion, his robot OP-1. This small all-in-one synthezizer, sampler and sequencer is the digital force behind the most unusual music I've ever heard.

I was introduced to Bon Iver a few weeks ago in a strange and wonderful way.  While enjoying coffee  with my wife and friends at a local coffee shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I found my heart and spirit strangely warmed. And  as is  so often the case, my ears began to hear the music my spirit had already been listening to.  I was immediately translated into that surreal experience of simultaneously being in the room  and somewhere else.  I can only imagine that these experiences approximate what you feel smoking dope or dropping acid. Since I have done neither, I really have no way of knowing that for sure. When the song was over, I remained in my trance-like state  for a few more minutes and then it faded into wherever those sorts of things fade into. Recently I stood in the very spot  of my most significant transcendental experience years ago, and it was just an ordinary gazebo on an ordinary street.  Nothing transcendental here.  In the coffee shop  I had never totally left the conversation and I was now fully back in it. "Always another one" my five year old son had said after another gutter ball. Transcendent experiences  are nice from time to time,  but pleasant conversation with friends is even better. On the Mount of Transfiguration,  after witnessing the fusion of Heaven and Earth, when Peter said to Jesus, "Let's just stay here", He said, "Our work is in the valley, not up here. Let's go."  "Dang."

Instead of letting it all go, I walked up to the counter and asked the barista about the song. I asked her if there was any way of knowing what song she had played. She said, 'Sure  it's an iTunes playlist on my phone". Within seconds she said "The song is Holocene by Bon Iver".

From that "other-worldly" experience came my very down-to-earth experience of exploring both the world of Bon Iver and that of the creator Justin Vernon. From his existential crisis on that Greek island flowed his album 22, a Million.  He says of that  album that since his anxiety had continued unabated,  he quit before he had finished. A good friend took his musical and emotional hand and said something like, 'No, you're going to do this. No, we're going to do this.  We're going to do this  together and it's going to be good"  I had listened to most of the album before I read anything about Vernon or the  album. Somehow I knew that this music had flowed out of personal crisis. I am not unfamiliar with that process. But after reading the article what he wrote and sang made so much more sense, "

Vernon calls each of his creations "music-songs".  He says that this designation helps him to  take neither  himself nor his music too seriously.  I can only say that his "music-songs" which sometimes lyrically make little or no sense, make perfectly good sense to my soul and psyche. That's  the way it is with the visual arts and poetry, they point to something transcendent without being definable in and of themselves. I had this experience at the National Gallery in Washington D.C when I  was looking at original Monet, Renoir,  Picasso and other famous artists. Who knew that seeing the actual paintings could be so vastly different than the photographs I had seen all my life. Just like my experience in that coffee shop a few days ago, I fell through the canvas to somewhere else. You explain to me what "and at once I knew that I was not magnificent huddled far from the highway aisle, jagged vacance thick with ice..." (Holocene), you explain that meaning and I'll explain the meaning of  Picasso's Accordioniist. You can buy the Bon Iver CD for about $20. You can buy the Picasso for about $10 million.

Vernon said of his muse, "Help me OP-1; you're my only hope." And from that collaboration flowed 22, a Million.

I doubt making his new album cured his anxiety and panic. Even prayer, meditation and creating music seldom exorcise these demons. But just like the millions of gallons a minute pouring through the hydro-electric dam less than fifteen miles from here, this energy can be synthesized.  It can power a city. It can change a life.

And it can turn a coffee shop into a mystical  world of delight. I could have  let it go and not asked about that music, but that's not the way I roll. I don't want to live in the land of "All play and no work" but it's nice to visit there from time to time.

Of the production of his new album Justin Vernon said, "I was healing myself through that stuff." I was too.