For over 15 years, Justin Vernon’s music has proven boundless. His 2007 debut as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, arrived as falsetto-filled folk shrouded in irresistible mythology—he recorded the album alone in the Wisconsin wilderness, heartbroken and recovering from illness. But just as a generation of songwriters started mimicking his signature woodsy sound, Vernon had moved on to the next thing, then the next: a post-rock side project; a Grammy-winning chamber pop record; then, in 2016, the experimental 22, A Million, whose vocoded vocals, glitchy synths, and spectral arrangements reimagined Bon Iver as a project unburdened by genre or era. By 2019, when the band released i,i, Vernon was widely considered a generational genius, an artist’s artist, an innovator of the highest order. It seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do.
After nearly two decades of reinvention and obfuscation, Vernon now seems set on becoming more direct. After initially spurning the spotlight, he’s embraced his role as an advocate for social change, releasing singles with corresponding mission statements and promoting partnerships with gender equity and domestic violence prevention organizations during his live shows; recently, he performed in support of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at a Wisconsin rally. His collaborations have also become less outré and more straightforward. Rather than freestyle alongside Chief Keef and Assassin on wily Kanye West album cuts, he’s dueting pop standards with Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan. Each Bon Iver release used to mark a rip in time, opening a portal into uncharted musical possibility. But on SABLE, his latest EP, Vernon forgoes the transformative for the nakedly plain, showing how revelatory his songs remain even when they’re stripped down to their elements.
SABLE, is not a “return to form,” though, a term some critics have been eager to deploy. Less indebted to For Emma and its follow-up EP, Blood Bank, the songs on SABLE, are more extensions of i,i and Big Red Machine’s 2021 album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, with Vernon’s belly-rich baritone and sinuous falsetto towering over fingerpicked guitar and gentle string arrangements. But while i,i was rooted in musical collaboration and lyrical explorations of forgiveness and togetherness, SABLE, finds a siloed Vernon sorting through self-hatred and disappointment. On “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS,” he seeks reprieve from his brooding mind. “I would like the feeling/I would like the feeling/I would like the feeling gone,” he sings in a descending cadence. The refrain that there are “things behind things” can be understood as either expansive or despairing: beauty behind pain, trust behind betrayal—or suffering behind suffering, a cyclical torture with no bottom. Vernon’s writing has always thrived in these liminal spaces, where meaning can shift from listener to listener. And though the song never soars into transcendence or dares to get weird—hallmarks of Bon Iver’s best work—its repetition and stagnancy are themselves meaningful. “I am afraid of changing,” Vernon admits, as a pedal steel sneaks in behind his voice.
Vernon still knows how to write a transcendent song, though, as he does with “S P E Y S I D E.” Apart from his duets with Swift, it’s the crispest and cleanest his singing has ever sounded. Unadorned and unprocessed, his voice lilts and howls, bends and breaks. His writing, impressionistic as ever, captures a bleak, hopeless state: “I know now that I can’t make good/How I wish I could.” The acoustic guitar, bright enough to banish the sadness, creates a striking interplay with Vernon’s aching falsetto. But it’s not until “AWARDS SEASON” that the sorrow breaks open into something new—resiliency, rebirth. A sound like howling wind is pitched behind Vernon, the song patiently building out with piano and cavernous synths, a pedal steel stalking behind a collage of saxophones. “I can handle way more than I can handle,” goes the opening line, which has managed to cut me in half each time I hear it.
In a 2004 interview with 60 Minutes, Bob Dylan was asked if he was still able to write songs as well as he once did. With a pained expression, he replied, “You can’t do something forever. I did it once and I can do other things now, but I can’t do that.” As I listened to SABLE, I couldn’t stop thinking about this clip. Dylan, of course, still had great work in him, including a late-career masterpiece. Maybe he could no longer conjure the magic of his past, but he could conjure something else, a different type of magic altogether. Similarly, SABLE, distills the familiar pleasures of Vernon’s extraordinary oeuvre while providing a singular magic all its own—one of refinement and maturation, of clarity and confidence. It’s hard to imagine him not doing this forever.
