The Sound of Spring

On Bon Iver's light-filled new album

I keep an evolving Spotify playlist called “Mood,” which is basically what it sounds like: whenever I hear a song that feels like it could match my melancholy when I’m in a mood (or help press the bruise when I want to), I add it. That could be a self-indulgent practice, but I find that syncing the way the world feels on either side of my skull is the easiest way to move that feeling towards the light.

All of this is just to say: what makes the new (final?) Bon Iver release so remarkable is that an artist whose entire catalog could slide perfectly onto “Mood” has now made an album full of songs that would sound more at home on “Sun-Drenched.”

The last time I wrote about a new album was around a year ago, about another long-gestating spring release from another long-time favorite of mine. Maybe there’s something to that: when the winter is breaking and the tree flowers are blossoming, all it takes to inspire me is a sunny batch of songs to help shake the last of the frost off.

That imagery is especially fitting for SABLE, fABLE, which is something like a concept album where the concept is Justin Vernon (the man behind the myth of Bon Iver) shedding the winter of his characteristic depression—the whole “aesthetic of despair” thing that made him the patron saint of “Mood” in the first place—and walking into a new season of hope.

That sounds a little trite as I write it, and it might well have been trite in the hands of someone less thoughtful, or less acquainted with sadness. But Vernon is a lifelong cave-dweller; having cartographed every last inch of the darkness over his previous four albums, there’s no one more prepared to finally trace the light.

The only way out is through, though, so he starts in a familiar place. The “SABLE” of the album’s bifurcated title comes from last year’s EP of the same name, transplanted fully intact to serve as the cave Vernon will spend fABLE crawling out of. And the cave is no joke; the first line of opener “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” sees Vernon trapped in the same old minor-key loop, asking for release:

I would like the feeling
I would like the feeling
I would like the feeling gone

Perhaps attempting to shake that feeling, he sheds its ornamentation like the last leaves of fall. “S P E Y S I D E” features just Vernon and his guitar, and “AWARDS SEASON” pares back the sound of Bon Iver to its barest essentials: a few voices, some distant piano, and a brief blossom of mournful saxophone. But while the triptych that kicks off the album is as moody as anything he’s ever done, the sadness is not entropic. As if anticipating the coming spring, the confusion of “THINGS” makes way for the apologies of “S P E Y S I D E”, which clears space for the cautious hope of “AWARDS SEASON”:

Oh, how everything can change
In such a small time frame
You can be remade
You can live again
What was pain now’s gain
A new path gets laid
And you know what is great
Nothing stays the same

Vernon climbs those lines like a ladder leading out of the cave, and right on cue, “Short Story” arrives: a sunburst to blast the doors open and let the light flood in. “January ain’t the whole world,” he sings, a loving rejoinder to his oeuvre so far. “You have not yet gone too deep.” After the sparseness of SABLE, the maximalist synths of 22, A Million and i, i sprout like the first reminders of spring, and yet nothing is crowded in. Even back within a noisier mix, Vernon is crystal clear, soaring over the soundscape as a flower child reborn.

Or maybe more than a flower: “Everything Is Peaceful Love” sees him all the way up a tree, so elated to be free from the depths that he can’t help climbing higher and higher on an ascending melody. It’s not just an album of vertical growth, either. Despite Vernon’s many A-list collaborations over the years, the Bon Iver project has often presented as a solo one. That makes a posse cut like “Day One” extra exuberant, as the thrill of hearing Vernon sing with Flock of Dimes and Dijon is buoyed by the thrill of hearing him sing with any friends at all.

Dijon in particular comes flying into the verse like he was shot out of the same cannon that must’ve launched him into his Absolutely sessions. Just like the infectious joy of that video, you can hear the artists on “Day One” pushing each other to sing bigger, louder, happier. It’s impossible not to smile, listening to something like this—impossible not to run the track back again and again, trying to catch as much glee as you can.

how it feels listening to “Day One”

It’d be easy for an artist known for conveying complex, sometimes tortured emotions to overcorrect when swinging for joy, sacrificing some nuance in a hurry to make his happiness clear. But while Vernon has gone on the record about wanting to cut through some of the abstraction of his past work, it’s all relative. This is still the guy who wrote lines like this:

Oh, the old modus: out to be leading live
Said, comes the old ponens, demit to strive
A word about Gnosis: it ain't gonna buy the groceries
Or middle-out locusts, or weigh to find

So it should be no surprise that his version of a more straightforward lyricism still yields lines like this:

I'll go find the tap wire
I'll go put the pathfinder on waltz

That’s from “Day One” again, which enriches its jubilant sound with some of the more inscrutable lyrics on the album. Though to be fair, there are also songs here that put Vernon’s new mindstate as plainly as he’s probably capable of, like the tranquil “Walk Home”:

No we don't need no window curtains
And we can let the light come in
And we can shed your earthly burdens
Of this I am certain of
You was made for me
(You was made for me, baby)

A light-filled room shared with a lover is a far cry from the isolated cabin where Vernon wrote For Emma, Forever Ago, though even this outright romanticism is cut with the self-awareness that he’s new to this stuff: “And if I get too high sometimes… I’ve just learned to walk.” He knows he’s still getting his sea legs in the world of major key love songs, but that doesn’t stop him from throwing himself into them with childlike excitement. You can hear that same endearing overeagerness in the saxophone croons of “I’ll Be There”, and even the more unresolved love story of “If Only I Could Wait” (another meaningful collaboration, this time with Danielle Haim) aches with some of the poppier emotionality Vernon brought to past collabs with Taylor Swift and The Japanese House.

Whether he’s expressing his newfound happiness literally or through a brightening of the Bon Iver sound, it’s clear that the comma between SABLE and fABLE is not just a demarcation line for the album but for distinct phases in Vernon’s life. Nowhere is that change more apparent than in the moving closer, “There’s A Rhythmn,” which charts his personal growth by offering a rhyming counterpoint to the album’s opener.

Where “THINGS BEHIND THINGS” introduced us to the dark ruts of his mind by begging for the feeling to be gone, “Rhythmn” optimistically rephrases the question: “Can I feel another way?” The sound of the song itself answers this question by mirroring the anxious, looping guitars of “THINGS” with hopeful keys and a shuffling, almost tranquil beat. When Vernon sings “I could leave behind the snow / for a land of palm and gold,” we could read it as a simple nod to his move from Wisconsin to California. But all the talk of rebirth and growth makes it just as easy to hear those lines as a turning of the seasons of the mind.

Finally, crucially, Vernon recasts the overwhelming interconnectedness of life, with all its stressful cycles—the things behind things behind things and rings within rings within rings—as a “rhythm to reclaim.” The song’s chorus is really as simple as that, just an almost prayerful Vernon finding peace in recitation:

There's a rhythm, there's a rhythm
There's a rhythm, there's a rhythm
There's a rhythm, there's a rhythm
There's a rhythm, there's a rhythm
There's a rhythm, there's a rhythm

If anyone doubted the legitimacy of one of our premier sad boys finding a little light, there could be no greater proof of his transformation than this song: not an unrealistic refutation of life’s endless loops, but an acceptance of their ultimate beauty—of the possibility for hope and even happiness within the larger rhythm of things. That possibility might’ve been teased as early as “Short Story” (“Time heals, and then it repeats / you will never be complete / and the strain and thirst are sweet”), and the lesson means more coming from Vernon because we know he knows what strain feels like. He got here the hard way, but he got here. And if he can, who can’t? The seasons keep changing, snow becomes spring becomes snow, and we keep walking.

It’s April in New York, as cold and rainy a weekend as we’ve had in weeks. But I see sprouts on the ground, and flowers in the trees. I hear a sunshower in my AirPods, and I feel the rhythm in my feet. Spring is coming, and it always will.