Justin Vernon is a touring veteran with Bon Iver, but it’s not a universally positive experience. He spoke about this in a new interview with The New Yorker, telling the story of a time he cried “hard” on stage.
Vernon explained how his relationship with touring changed during the pandemic, saying, “I remember there was this moment during the pandemic where I was, like, I could stop doing all of this. I was driving my little ATV around. I needed that — knowing I could stop. But getting back on the road there’s all this excitement, and then, so quickly, the anguish and weariness and impossibility of it set back in.”
Then, when asked if he thinks he’ll “pull back from touring,” he responded:
I’ll share a pretty vulnerable moment. I knew that we were gonna be taking some time off. It was the beginning of our last run. I was in Duluth. My family was there. I was so happy to be with everyone, but I was really suffering under the weight of everything. I was playing ‘[715] CRΣΣKS’ — there’s no accompaniment. It’s really a crusher to do. It burns a lot of gas. I was scanning the crowd. I was just having a tough month. I was getting ready to start saying goodbye to the last sixteen years, in a way. There were six or seven thousand people out there, and I became overwhelmed with anxiety and sadness. I got choked up and started to weep.
My bandmates were all up on the stage, leaning down, because it’s too short of a song for them to leave and come back. I lock eyes with Was [Jenn Wasner], I can see Michael Lewis looking at me. And I’m crying — like, hard. Shoulders-heaving crying. And I feel unsafe, like this is not an OK place for someone to be. And the crowd is going wild, you know? I’m not mad at them. I would also be cheering for encouragement. But I was thinking, ‘They want this.’ Or this is making sense to them. It wasn’t all negative. […] The rest of the show, I could barely function.
He went on to explain a preferred touring scenario, saying, “If I could do that same touring setup and have somebody else sing the songs, that would be a little easier. But that whole night in, night out, let’s excavate Justin — I’m not built for it. When I say it like that, I think, ‘How is anybody?’ But, that’s just me, I can’t.”
Check out the full interview here.
