Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Keeping with the theme of lone geniuses: Bon I-fucking-ver! I find this record quite difficult to listen to because its painfully beautiful. It's one of those once in a generation records that totally adjusts other musicians' ambitions. Justin Vernon built a world in a shed. So smart, and so sensitive, and while the follow-up is also gorgeous, in entirely different ways, this record is something else. Being able to understand and appreciate this record was a sort of gateway to so much other music for me. There's something I really envy about a lot of the artists I've picked. I'm working in a band format at the moment, but I'd love to do something like this, where, from start to completion, it's nothing but mine. I can play piano a bit, guitar, and the thing I'm best at is vocal arrangements. As soon as I can master Logic myself, and learn the drums and another instrument... I need to get my arse in gear. There's often a lot of creativity to be found in limitation. That happened with this record, and you can hear it. The way he produced his vocals is really clever: sometimes in octaves, sometimes massed but not perfectly massed, sometimes in layers and a shedload of reverb. The success of this album also said something kind of awesome about listeners too, the fact that so many people connect so deeply with something as cryptic, personal and 'non-commercial' in a traditional sense, really contradicts with any cynical ideas of what makes a hit.