Over the last two decades, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon has become a stalwart of the indie music scene. Since the release of his revered 2007 debut For Emma, Forever Ago – a cult-classic isolation record composed by a heartbroken Vernon in a cabin in the Wisconsin woods – the musician has transformed himself time and time again. Yet, even after 2017’s distorted folktronica revelation 22, A Million saw Vernon diverting from the gentle-plucked delicateness listeners had come to expect from him, it still captured him in the throes of spiritual crisis. The lyrical content of Vernon’s records have long been marked with a tinge of turmoil, and his tendency towards heavy introspection has, at times, cornered him into a trope of a melancholy, lovesick songwriter.
Last fall, after a five-year-long break from any new Bon Iver projects, Vernon dropped a triptych of songs. Named for a word used to describe pitch blackness, Vernon’s EP SABLE found him in the middle of a reckoning and on bended knee. “Nothing’s really happened how I thought it would,” he sang in his signature lilting falsetto on “S P E Y S I D E,” and it rang more like a long-awaited exhale than an expression of pitiful defeat. On the modest doxology “Awards Season,” Vernon tilted his gaze to a higher path. “And you know what is great? Nothing stays the same,” he sings.
So if SABLE was Vernon in a posture of atonement, the nine tracks he’s added to the EP to arrive at his new album SABLE, fABLE see him finally relenting to lightness. “Short Story,” the introduction to fABLE, is perhaps the most reminiscent of the Bon Iver we’ve come to know in recent albums. The track, just under two minutes long, is layered with a cacophony of familiar synths, brass outfits, and vocoders all cascading on top of each other, as if Vernon is thanking the tools of obfuscation he’s hid behind, then releasing them for the final time. “Time heals and then it repeats,” he sings, acknowledging the regenerative nature of all things. “You have not yet gone too deep.”
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“Short Story” shimmers and blends seamlessly into “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” the single that stands as the thesis of fABLE. Vernon’s harmonies ascend up a scale over a metronome-like beat, as if he’s carefully keeping time, determined to hold a steady pace as he revels in the qualms of new love. He only gets ahead of himself a few times to acknowledge the inevitable possibility of heartache. “How am I to know that someday you might change the road?” “Will it hang around for a long, long time?”
There’s a sense of transcendence running through fABLE, with most songs resolving in a major key, carried by propulsive percussion and a whole lot of pedal steel. Vernon leans into more triumphant anthemic pop melodies on this record, produced by Jim-E Stack. His penchant for collaboration continues on fABLE: Dijon and Flock of Dimes make appearances on the buoyant “Day One,” Danielle Haim joins in for “I’ll Be There” and the ruminative duet “If Only I Could Wait,” Kacy Hill and Jacob Collier’s voices are interspersed throughout.
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At a live podcast taping for Krista Tippett’s On Being in Brooklyn in February – one of Vernon’s first conversations around the album – he described fABLE as a “controlled burn,” chronicling the “drama and odyssey of giving into love and loving.” This work, for Vernon, is bigger than just romance – it’s a man at his most hopeful and open, palms upturned, ready and willing to come up for air.
On “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” the first song on SABLE, Vernon states that “I would like that feeling gone.” On “Rhythmn,” the last song on fABLE that has his vocals, he asks a crucial question: “Can I feel another way?” Here, after this journey, his voice is lower and more grounded. “Can I really still complain to be back here once again?” With SABLE, fABLE, ominously touted by Jagjaguwar as Bon Iver’s “epilogue,” Vernon is ready to break the murky cycle of sadness and heartbreak, and to walk into the light.
