<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808"
crossorigin="anonymous"></script>Oh, the guy with the acoustic guitar. He’s about as trite as it can get, theoretically: the heartbroken playboy with the ego outspanning his purported substantive muse, settling into tepid tempos and rhythms for a journey into his cask-like soul, so to speak. He’s INTIMATE. He doesn’t strive to be humorous or conceptual which, of course, can be incredibly nauseating. He pervades the American South and the Mason-Dixon line plentifully. And he’s made valid by his direct approach to instrumentation and delivery… or so he offers.
This is legitimately a strain that has raced through my mind in my life: particularly in 2014 when I encountered just a litany of these cowboy Don Juans down in Asheville, North Carolina only to retreat back up to my hometown of South Bend, Indiana and relish what seemed like just an explosion of punk and blues rock, in the clubs that summer. I mean, I’m really not a singer/songwriter dude. I could never get into Dashboard Confessional, I like Dylan but I’m not like a fanatic of him, and Jeff Buckley never made any sense to me. Songs: Ohia, Sun Kil Moon, Bonnie Billy, sure: but none of these have ever been omnipresent staples of my listening rotation.
Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, which according to Wikipedia was recorded in his “father’s remote hunting cabin Northwest of his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin,” is the one horse in this race I’ll always put my money on. Wikipedia’s got this other bit regarding alterations in singer and guitarist Justin Vernon’s songwriting approach explicating “wordless melodies that he later set to words, which he felt evoked a more subconscious meaning.” Certainly, it seems laborious to try to explain it any more aptly than that: these songs indeed connect with you on a gut level, like rustic hymns destined to be permanent and structure-bearing.
The immediate and general favorite is “Skinny Love,” without any question, which is not only musically great but also discursively central to the album’s general fabric of bemoaning a lost romance. Along these lines, further, track two, “Lump Sum,” regards the exact same event, more or less. Intriguingly, though, in having a likewise metaphorical title to “Skinny Love,” the concept of a “lump sum” is applied stalwartly to symbolize the cessation of the love and intimacy of the relationship from which he’s been expelled, similar to the way a finite sum of money is given and succeeded by a stoppage. It’s never been my favorite song on the album but it popped into my head last night when I had something going on and in a way, it deserves special credence for this ability to take the pain and anguish involved with the breakup and extrapolate this reality out into something official and impersonal. Actually, it almost seems like a real-life, Henrian application of the advice in “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes: “Don’t surround yourself with yourself / Move on back to the square”. In “Lump Sum,” Vernon is taking his heartbreak and making it something that’s meaningless, like a pile of money, which of course might be erroneous from a logical standpoint, but soothing, anyway, and buoyed by some great, weaving and lilting melodies and those salient falsetto vocals like the blinding Northern Lights.