2. Bon Iver’21 Moon Water’ / ‘8 (circle)’
The first time I heard it, Bon Iver [aka Justin Vernon] invited me to a festival that he used to do in Eau Claire. There, he premiered the entire album from start to finish – no one had ever heard it before. I remember connecting so much to the first track and a couple of others. The more complex tracks were quite hard to take in on a first listen, and I find it takes me some time to really get to grips with a more complex record like that. Listening to some of the sounds I was like, ‘What’s that and where did that come from?’ It was once it had come out and I digested it more that I started to understand how each track informed the one around it – it was a sort of ecosystem.
This was a huge record for me. I’m into longform music and this record fits together so beautifully, like a tapestry. I could never think of these two songs, for example, as separate pieces of music. ‘8 (circle)’ is actually one of the most accessible things on the record – it’s a beautiful, straight up kind of americana Bon Iver song, but ‘Moonwater’ is an extraordinary, bizarre, quite unnerving, very beautiful patchwork thing and for me, the two of them sitting together is again about this concept of having to earn your right to getting the release after the tension, just as with Stravinsky.
You’ve got this increasingly mad saxophone solo too that actually starts to go out of tune so that when that first beautiful 1980s Juno synth pad comes in at the start of ‘8 (circle)’, you’re like, ‘Ah thank fuck for that! What was this chaos that I sat through?!’ But then it starts very movingly with his vocoded vocal and some simple lyrics about the path ahead and the path behind us. There’s also this feeling like he’s enigmatically transmitting something but you don’t know what it is. I’ve never spoken to him about the meaning behind the lyrics, but I feel like something very potent and complex is being transmitted, and then as the second song starts, something very simple and deep. Maybe it’s this shift from the cosmic to the heart. I feel that’s quite a big influence on what I’m doing.
There are still musicians who will make albums in sequence, and I will always be one of them. I think honouring the original album format just feels like such an important thing and these two songs are an example of the importance of that sequencing.
