The song titles are a tip-off. With a Bon Iver album, they can be a difficult proposition. Ever since 2016’s 22, A Million, the tracklist for a Justin Vernon LP reads more like a menacing letter from a Zodiac-inspired serial killer than a rundown of songs. Random numbers and strange symbols are plentiful. Easily pronounceable words are not. But there is a method to the madness. When it’s a challenge to put a name to a song, that song becomes hard to pin down and decipher. Even when contained on a record by one of the biggest indie-rock stars of the last 20 years, the song remains elusive and enigmatic. And, by association, so does the artist.
But on SABLE, fABLE (the first Bon Iver album in six years, and the fifth overall), the song titles are shockingly comprehensible. Yes, there’s a song called “Speyside” — one of three tracks carried over from last year’s SABLE, EP — which is stylized in all caps with a space between each letter, a move designed to taunt typesetters everywhere while also possibly confusing Scotch liquor enthusiasts. And don’t overlook “There’s A Rhythmn,” with the intentional misspelling that may or may not reference the state of Minnesota, just because that seems like an extremely Bon Iver thing to do.
But what about one of the new album’s standouts, a duet with Danielle Haim called “I’ll Be There”? Vernon titling a song “I’ll Be There” is like Frank Zappa naming one of his sons John Frederick Zappa. It’s a weird act of uncharacteristic normalcy. And yet it suits the track, an art-rock love song with churchy chords and bedroom-sultry vocals that sounds like Luther Vandross as produced by Godley & Creme or Peter Gabriel after an intense six-month Sade phase. Vernon and Haim’s voices are distorted, but not as much as you might expect, and the disheveled rhythm track rubs up against the yacht-rock electric piano licks in a manner that’s warm and sensual rather than disorienting. It’s a vibe that evokes another relatively straitlaced song title from SABLE, fABLE: “Everything Is Peaceful Love.” Another high point of the LP, this song finds Vernon playing full-on with the sort of feel-good ’90s R&B he’s only hinted at on previous releases, and only via a mile-deep layer of effects, noises, and other assorted digitized alienation devices. This time, however, everything does instead seem peaceful love.
During his more-rigorous-than-usual press tour for SABLE, fABLE, Vernon has hinted that the album might mark the end for the project he launched nearly 20 years ago as a last-ditch vehicle for his emotionally charged and sonically adventurous indie-folk songs. His label, Jagjaguwar, has even called the record an “epilogue,” though the exact meaning of that, by design, is unclear. The fact is that every Bon Iver album since the second one, 2011’s Bon Iver, has been predicated to some degree on Vernon’s ambivalence about the popularity of Bon Iver. After the self-titled record made him even more successful, 22, A Million arrived as an actively hostile “anti-fame” response that, importantly, did not actually diminish Vernon’s celebrity all that much.
It helps that Vernon’s literal words have never mattered all that much to his art. Undoubtedly one of the most influential singer-songwriters of his era, Vernon’s innovation was to de-emphasize the centrality of lyrics in his songs and persona, at least as far as them being interpreted as direct statements about his life and well-being. Instead, he has expressed himself largely through sound — namely, the sonic texture of his music, of course, but also the way his voice can articulate feelings without being attached to discernible words with specific definitions. Which is another way of saying that his lyrics frequently make no bloody sense on the page, and yet nevertheless they communicate intuitive feelings and truths when sung. It’s how a Bon Iver song can instantly telegraph heartache and psychic turmoil to the listener while also being called “666 ʇ.” This approach also explains why Bon Iver has endured as many mid-aughts indie-folk acts have faded, and why he’s such a malleable influence for contemporary writers across so many genres, from Zach Bryan to Lil Yachty to Phoebe Bridgers to Mk.gee.
So, Justin Vernon can imply, once again, that Bon Iver might be finished. But the way he says such things always matters more. And with SABLE, fABLE, the feeling that he is more comfortable in his own skin than he’s been, maybe ever, in the Bon Iver guise is palpable. The songs from the SABLE, EP — yes, the comma is supposed to be there — announced this new “straightforward” Justin Vernon, and they are the most arresting songs here. Particularly the album-opening “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” his most enchanting slice of Bruce Hornsby-esque soft rock since “Beth/Rest.” (On that count, he nearly matches that track with “Home,” a beguiling gospel-Americana number.)
On “Things Behind Things” and elsewhere throughout SABLE, fABLE, Vernon returns to singing in his natural lower register, which automatically gives the songs a more grounded feel. While Vernon took his career to another level when he embraced his spine-tingling falsetto, using his “real” voice, as it were, seems like the most critical evolution of his “mid” career. Way back in 2008, when I interviewed him for the first time, he spoke disdainfully of that voice, saying it made him “sound like Hootie And The Blowfish.” But now, as a man in his 40s, he’s finally leaning into the brawnier aspects of his music.
“I think the last couple of years, I’ve been getting out of the hazy and trying to come more into the concrete,” Vernon recently told The New York Times, using Bob Seger as an example of the newfound directness he’s going for. “I’m not saying nothing bad about the old stuff, but now I’m just much more like, ‘Hey, we don’t got much time left to live — let’s be sexy.'”
My one quibble with that classification of SABLE, fABLE is that the previous Bon Iver record, 2019’s i,i, contains some of his most approachable music. The difference is that i,i felt like a “band” record intended to be performed live in arenas, in a way that the decidedly more intimate and homemade-sounding SABLE, fABLE does not. Working with producer Jim E-Stack, he’s given songs at the core of the record like “From” and “Day One” a lo-fi fuzziness that makes them sound almost like voice demos shared on the sly by a close friend.
Are these farewell messages? SABLE, fABLE closes with an atmospheric mood piece called “Au Revoir,” which sounds like something that you might hear over the closing credits of an art film you didn’t understand but nevertheless feel moved by. Naturally, there are no lyrics. But the message nevertheless comes through loud and clear.
SABLE, fABLE is out 4/11 via Jagjaguwar. Find more information here.
