How to give love better

Bon Iver comes through talking Personal Growth in the least torched terms, his beautiful new album, Japanese leather bags & more

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Photo by Graham Tolbert

In 2006, Justin Vernon, a.k.a. Bon Iver, huddled down in a remote Wisconsin cabin by his lonesome and made a debut album about heartache, longing and regret. It turned him into an unlikely star. In the years that followed, Justin got sonically freakier with it, building a wild electronic-acoustic cacophony around his keening, soulful, beautiful singing. Improbably, he helped to shape the sound and the feel of contemporary pop, too, collaborating on music with artists like Kanye West, Taylor Swift, James Blake, and Zach Bryan, and inspiring many, many more, among them Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean and Mk.gee.

On Bon Iver’s fantastic new album, SABLE, fABLE, he strips the sound back down and explores new thematic territory. He kicks things off with an opening triptych of tracks that is familiarly morose… mournful… stressed… But then? He flings open the curtains, throws open the window, and starts vibing hard in the warmth and brightness of the sunshine. The result is a (lived-in, non-corny) album about joy, resilience, and optimism.

No track captures that energy quite like “Everything is Peaceful Love” — whose video was shot, directed and edited by Spyfriend John Wilson.

Blackbird Spyplane is, of course, your no. 1 source across all media for vibing hard in the warmth and brightness of the sunshine. So I (Jonah) was psyched to get on the Spyphone with Justin the other day to talk about whether you need to live in cities to make original art, how growing as a human means learning how to give love better, why adults should climb more trees even when they’re not on drugs, and more.

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Blackbird Spyplane: I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of cities to creative work these days. On the one hand, a creative community can manifest physically in a city in a way that feels more vital than ever to making good art. On the other hand, I’ve found that removing yourself from the epicenter of people who work in the same field as you can help a ton as far as having original ideas and developing your own point of view. I think it’s good to know what’s going on in cities, but your horizons have got to be broader. A place like New York can be extremely provincial in its own way. You made part of the new Bon Iver album in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, your hometown, and part of it in L.A., so I’m curious to hear you talk about the tension between the big-city communitarian mindset and the hinterlands bunker mindset when it comes to making art.

Bon Iver: “Yeah, when you’re in New York or Los Angeles, you’re closer to more creative people, but the people are also motivated by the commercial interest of everything, right? Necessarily so. They have to cover their bases, and there’s an actual infrastructure to the industry. Whereas, growing up in Eau Claire, I dreamt of having a job in music, but really we were out here trying to entertain ourselves, inspire each other, create things for each other. Everything happens between two extremes, so when Bon Iver took off, I definitely had a lot of inertia coming from, like, Wow, I sprouted out of nowhere, this is exactly how art should be, and almost ignoring the fact that I was also participating in the apparatus of the industry. On SABLE, fABLE I said, Let’s embrace it all. I’ve identified so much with being a guy from Eau Claire, but it wasn’t a normal Wisconsin existence anymore — so I kind of connected all of it with this one.”

Blackbird Spyplane: So the tension came into a balance for you.

Bon Iver: “Yeah. And I actually feel like I’m at this point where, this record is great, and I’m proud of it, but I don’t know if I want to make anything ever again, because all I care about is the process — the hiccups, the difficult challenges and questions. Those are what’s driving me forward these days.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I want to talk about the communitarian impulse more generally, not just in terms of creative work, because there’s an interview you gave, I think with Krista Tippett, where you defined growth as learning “how to give love better.” I like a definition of growth that puts your obligation to other people at its center, as opposed to a more narrow, familiar understanding of self-help and self-improvement.

Bon Iver: “It’s tricky, it’s one of those Catch 22s or something where as soon as you say it out loud it starts to vaporize. It’s this kind of sacred elusive truth. Taoism talks about that a lot, how you can’t name the thing you’re trying to name. We could say we’re motivated to love others so that we’re loved ourselves, but I think there’s this inexplicable thing about being a human being — something beyond biological coding, something spiritual, that makes us want to love. And if we ourselves are loved, I think we can show up better for other people. Maybe that’s just it, it creates a balance. I think we empathize not for some selfish reason, but because we know it makes the world a better place.”

Blackbird Spyplane: That thing about “Hell is other people” — there’s a simplistic understanding of that phrase, but I think it implies that God is other people, too.

Bon Iver: “Yeah man. That’s so true.”

Blackbird Spyplane: There’s a song you put me on to, John Prine’s “Hello in There,” which is sort of about how God is old, lonely people. Prine’s been a total blind spot of mine, he’s one of these guys people love deeply, but for no good reason I’ve never dived in. I know hearing that song as a kid was a big part of why you wanted to become a musician, so I listened to it this morning and it floored me. Not just the lyrics, but the way he holds certain notes in the vocal for much longer than you think he’s going to — it adds this feeling of yearning and reaching outward that gets to what the core of what the song is about. What should I keep my ears open for when I listen again?

Bon Iver: “The first time I heard that song I was sitting in the back of my parents’ minivan, on a hot summer day, holding my Discman really carefully so it wouldn’t skip on the country roads. I was about 12, and I remember thinking, ‘I’m too young to understand what this guy’s talking about, and yet I understand this deep, throbbing river of pain that exists in people as they get older. Prine was kind of a clown with no makeup on. Everything was always a little funny, he found the humor in things, but he’s able to describe the lack of beauty in human beings in this beautiful way — sort of bringing us down to earth, as these coughing, swearing, sad people who are just getting through things. This song shaped so much of how I think and meet people: Stop, look ‘em in the eyes, and say ‘hello in there.’”

In March 2020 I ate some old MDMA powder with the fellas and climbed this Coast Live Oak in Napa. It was sick — so why have I not climbed another tree since??

Blackbird Spyplane: The new song of yours I’ve played the most is “Everything is Peaceful Love.” It’s about experiencing a state of pure elation, and to capture that, you sing about climbing up a tree. I don’t know if that’s a literal or metaphorical line, but there’s something so sick about being up in a tree. You look up at the sky through the branches, you look down at the ground through other branches — it’s like you’re hovering and rooted at the same time. The last time I climbed a tree was in March 2020 in Napa. I was with some buddies, we ate old MDMA powder and I climbed into a Coast Live Oak and chilled out for what felt like an hour. There’s really nothing like it, but it’s one of those things we tend to not do as adults unless we’re on drugs.

Bon Iver: “That line was me trying to capture that feeling of an early stage of love, where you’re crawling out of your skin, you can’t smile hard enough to express the joy you’re feeling. Now I’m gonna be thinking about your tree when I hear the song.”

Blackbird Spyplane: All right, finally, I asked you to share a unique cherished possession with Spy Nation, and you sent along two leather bags from the Japanese label Herz. These are cool, what’s the story?

Two bags by the Japanese line Herz. Photos by Justin Vernon

Bon Iver: “I wish I knew a bit more about Herz and the cult around them. I took Japanese in high school and college, but not enough, and I’m a little shy. But whenever I go to Tokyo, one of my first stops is their workshop, ‘cause they make the bags right there in the store. I’ll just sit and watch them, I’ll spend two hours in there. The little purse thing, that’s my daily driver, I bought that a number of years ago. But the briefcase was the first thing of theirs I got. I was on tour years ago walking around this market with thousands of things, food vendors, whatever, and I walked by this bag kind of fast. Five minutes later I couldn’t get it out of my head. I went back and couldn’t find it, I got lost, it took me 35 minutes to figure out where it was, but I was, like, ‘I need that in my life.’ The brass, the hooks, the snaps. It feels so archetypal. It’s like looking at an Eames chair. Like, ‘That’s a design that needs to be repeated.’ It was expensive, but it’s been with me around the world. You know, there’s these discolorations from me spilling Guinness on it…”

Blackbird Spyplane: We call stains like that evidence that you’re living the “Life Well Lived” Lifestyle.

Bon Iver: “It’s worn itself into my life. I adore it.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Do you relate to lots of things this way, or is the bag an anomaly?

Bon Iver: “I’ve gotten more into furniture, too. I appreciate a good chair, I like well-made things, I try not to buy cheap s--t. You know, I got some Eames chairs in the studio. But this bag is my favorite. And what’s also cool is, as far as I can tell, Herz have no interest in becoming a world brand. Like, their website is not easy to navigate if you’re not Japanese. It might not even be easy to navigate if you are Japanese. They’re happy staying in the cut. They’re not expansionist — they’re like the Fugazi of bags or something.”

Blackbird Spyplane: We just wrote about this exact mentality, where you’ll go into a 10-seat restaurant in Japan where the chef learned how to cook Sicilian food as good as anyone besides Sicilians, he opened his dream restaurant in Osaka and then took its name off Google Maps and turns away people on nights even when he’s got empty seats, because it’s not about maxing out profits for him, it’s about doing something he loves at a level he can sustain. You see that mindset so much all over Japan, you wish more of us could live that way.

Bon Iver: “They’re the kings of that. There’s another place I go every time I’m in Japan, this hifi bar called Jazz Blues Soul. I once spent three extra nights in Tokyo just to go there every night.”

Blackbird Spyplane: JBS! A temple. Respect.

Bon Iver: “Places like that, there’s intention, it’s like, ‘There’s a sacred property to the things we do, we take those things seriously, and if we don’t, what are we doing here?’”

Bon Iver’s new album, SABLE, fABLE, is here. He’s on IG here.