REVIEW Bon Iver revisits album ‘For Emma’ in stunning concert
It began in solitude, the music written and recorded during a Wisconsin winter in a Dunn County cabin. The songs became part of “For Emma, Forever Ago,” the groundbreaking debut album for Justin Vernon’s folk project Bon Iver.
On Saturday, about 11 years later, the Eau Claire native sang those songs again in Milwaukee.
This time, he had company. Fifteen thousand people, visiting from Canada and more than 40 states, occupied nearly every seat of the BMO Harris Bradley Center for a special concert celebrating the album’s 10th-anniversary rerelease Friday.
But frequently, it felt like we were eavesdropping on Vernon back in that quiet cabin.
The pristine beauty of the music was just as radiant as when he first recorded those songs, and his vulnerability was just as raw and relatable.
And the audience, in turn, was as still as the Wisconsin woods after a winter’s snow, repeatedly absorbing the 90-minute performance with a kind of stunned silence I’ve never experienced at a packed arena concert.
The rotating cast of musicians — which included fellow Wisconsinites Sean Carey on drums, and Andrew Fitzpatrick and Michael Noyce on guitar — was worthy of the reverence, transporting the home of the Bucks into a cathedral with the swelling, ethereal harmonies of show opener “Lump Sum.”
Vernon elicited that same hush alone on stage with his striking falsetto, for “Re: Stacks,” and with the sweet strums and nimble plucks of acoustic guitar at the start of “Skinny Love,” a performance that strictly featured the first Bon Iver touring trio, with former member Noyce and ongoing member Carey.
Yet despite the show’s circumstances — and many warmhearted expressions of gratitude for his friends, fans and label Jagjaguwar for years of support — Vernon suggested Saturday that he was a bit leery of nostalgia.
So Bon Iver shook things up a bit, playing “Emma” in its entirety but avoiding a slavish front-toback album presentation.
The band reimagined a combined performance of “Creature Fear” and “Team” with a psychedelic rock freak-out finish, and performed a sentimental, never-before-released folk song written around the time of “Emma” (and dedicated Saturday to Vernon’s longtime manager and Wisconsin congressional candidate, Kyle Frenette).
There were other older songs sprinkled through the set outside of “Emma” — including “Brackett, WI,” “Blood Bank,” and a deafening “Woods” (sampled on Kanye West’s “Lost in the World”), with Vernon building a wall of sound for the latter through surgical voice manipulation and layering.
The band also dusted off two covers from its first album cycle — including “Lovin’s For Fools,” performed with the song’s writer, and special guest, Sarah Siskind. And it played one somewhat recent track — “Holocene,” from 2011’s Grammy-winning “Bon Iver, Bon Iver” — which sparked a huge ovation when Vernon sang, “You’re in Milwaukee, off your feet.”
“Holocene” appeared during the encore, and by that point the awed idolization had transformed into a communal, cathartic experience.
The song prior was the breaking point. To honor the night’s occasion, Vernon asked the audience to participate in a sing-along for “The Wolves (Act I and II).”
As they sang “what might have been lost” again and again, thousands of voices grew louder and louder.
The band steadily raised the volume, Vernon’s falsetto started to crack, and the dueling drums erupted into a cacophony of walloping kick drums and crashing cymbals.
From that Dunn County cabin to an arena full of screaming fans, the songs from “For Emma” have sure traveled a long way.
But Saturday’s show proved that that first magical Bon Iver album is as meaningful as it’s always been.