Wisconsins’s Bon Iver Releases New Triptych EP ‘Sable,’ Out Now
Originally published in Milwaukee Magazine 10/18/24Today is a good day for Justin Vernon fans. Bon Iver, Vernon’s seminal experimental folk solo-turned-group project just released its first new record in more than five years, and first EP since 2009.
The EP Sable, features a trio of songs, accompanied by a trio of videos. The opener, “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” and the closer “Awards Season” are now available to the public. The second song on the EP, “Speyside,” was released in September.
Written between 2020 and 2023, this new release is autobiographical and direct, according to the press release. “Each song was written by Justin Vernon at different points of healing and processing,” it states. This is no surprise to fans familiar with Vernon’s songwriting style. His vulnerability, alongside his distinct musicality, make his projects stand out among the sea of indie releases of the 2000s and 2010s.
“He developed literal physical symptoms from deep anxiety and constant pressure,” the album notes state. “At the end of his rope, maybe done with music, and thinking increasingly about the process of healing, he finally found the time to unpack years of built-up darkness just as the lockdown began.”
The opening full-length track “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” is a commentary on how he processed these feelings as he faced his future as an artist. Written in 2020, in the muck of it all, the song is a “meditation on the process of unpacking the contexts that inform his contexts– it stares down the long road of putting oneself back together.”
I get caught looking/
In the mirror…on the regular/
What I see there resembles some competitor/
I see things behind things behind things/
And there are rings within rings within rings
The next year, “Speyside” was written. It’s a song that “spilled out of him as an apology to a couple of people he loved and hurt,” according to the liner notes. Melancholy guitars introduce the candid laying bare of an apology.
I know now that I can’t make good/
How I wish I could/
Go back and put /
Me where you stood/
Nothings really something now the whole thing’s soot
The closing track “Awards Season” was written last year, completing his trio of “transformation” tracks. According to the album notes, “Awards Sesason” was written while walking around the Lake of Isles in Minneapolis. The lyrics are forward looking, and the song is the most resolute, and in parts most barren, song of EP–serving as an apt resolution to his journey through his fears, anxieties and tribulations.
Oh how everything can change/
In such a small time frame/
You can be remade/
You can live again/
What was pain now’s gained/
A new path gets laid/
And you know what is great/
Nothing stays the same
Sable, is now available for purchase on the Bon Iver store and Apple Music and can be streamed on Spotify.
