Hard luck in love has driven Bon Iver to musical success.
It's an old story: guy's life falls apart, he holes up in a remote cabin to mend his broken soul, and returns to civilization three months later with a fine new album for his troubles. Maybe not everyone ends up making an album. But Justin Vernon - who also emerged from the woods with a new name, Bon Iver - stumbled into just the right combination of bad times, good karma, and genuine talent to come up with "For Emma, Forever Ago," recorded last winter at his parents' hunting cottage in northwestern Wisconsin.
Music fans have done the rest - finding and falling in love with and spreading the word about Vernon's songs, which are streaming online at Virb.com/boniver. The several hundred copies of the CD Vernon pressed to sell at shows and his website are long gone. But last month the tastemaking bloggers at brooklynvegan.com invited Bon Iver to perform at the CMJ showcase they curated at New York's Bowery Ballroom, and several weeks ago Vernon signed a record deal with Jagjaguwar, sister label to the esteemed indie Secretly Canadian. "For Emma, Forever Ago" will be re-released Feb. 19. Bon Iver opens for Elvis Perkins Sunday at the Paradise.
"I'm a humble, small-town kind of person and I don't know if I really understand what is going on," says the Eau Claire native, "except that someone will come up to me and talk about a song of mine. It lets me know that I'm working on something that makes sense to other people. That's exciting."
It certainly wasn't intentional. "For Emma" was created in near-total isolation, both geographic and emotional. When artists talk about music as catharsis, this is it - not the loud, primal-scream variety, but in the sense that allowing his aches and pains to surface in these songs allowed Vernon to resurface, as well.
The back story is fairly bleak: Vernon had moved to Raleigh, N.C., in 2005 with his band DeYarmond Edison. A year later he came down with a form of mononucleosis that attacks the liver, spent three months in bed, and lost 30 pounds. He and his longtime girlfriend broke up. Then the band did, too, and spending the winter splitting wood sounded like a good plan.
"I didn't leave in a huff. I left defeated," Vernon says. "I splayed out and sat there, and that's when the music started to breathe and happen."
The musical sounds that arrived during Vernon's hibernation were different from the straightforward singer-songwriter fare he'd previously produced. The songs were lonely and haunted, by virtue of the setting and Vernon's state of mind, but also strangely lush. Instead of singing in his usual gruff baritone, Vernon began to use a falsetto, which he layered into eerie chorales.
"I don't know how that happened. I would say that there have been a lot of soul singers who have the most painful, confident, bold voices I've ever heard, and I believe them," Vernon explains. "This was enough of a departure that I could forget about old patterns and find a new way to sing."
WHERE TO FIND BON IVER'S MUSIC We've got links at boston.com/clips
He played an old Sears Silvertone hollow body guitar and his brother's snare drum, but digitally manipulated some of the rustic tones on a laptop computer, infusing the organic palette with heady ambience. Later he invited a couple of friends in to contribute parts here and there, among them Randy Pingrey, who performed with Vernon as a duo in Eau Claire and recently moved to Boston to begin a master's program in jazz trombone at New England Conservatory.
"He's open-minded but at the same time he's got a spine," Pingrey says. "That's his gift: to know exactly what he wants and still be open to possibilities."
Vernon's tastes are wide open: he loved Primus as a kid, counts Indigo Girls among his heroes, and spent many hours immersed in his parents' collection of John Prine, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan records. He studied saxophone and played in his high school's jazz band. Vernon says he was a really happy person before nosediving in North Carolina last year, when, like a lot of unhappy people, he started watching too much television.
Specifically, reruns of "Northern Exposure." He was particularly moved by an episode featuring the residents of Cicely, Alaska, enacting their first-snow-of-the-year ritual, which involves stepping out of the house to hug your neighbors and wish them "good winter" in French: "bon hiver." But Vernon doesn't speak French, and he didn't hear the silent "h."
"I realize in hindsight it's just a TV show but it was a landmark experience for me in this pivotal time of life," Vernon says. "I sort of entered this weird hallucinatory place, like I was living there. I typed my friend Kelly a letter and signed off 'Bon Iver, Justin' and she said that should be the name of my band. When I learned how it was really spelled it was disappointing because it's not how I saw it in my head, so I thought I might as well bend the rules and take the 'h' out."
Vernon recently bought a small house in Eau Claire, and he spends a lot of time with his new girlfriend, who lives in Montreal, but his goal, he says, is to just keep working. He'll do some more recording in January, and then tour with a full band in February when the album is released, but the folks at Jagjaguwar - which Vernon chose over several high-profile labels that were courting him - want to keep it low-key.
"We don't want to overthink it or rock the boat of the awesome momentum that's building now," says label co-owner Chris Swanson. "Yes, it's counterintuitive to leave an entire album streaming online three months before it comes out. But something's working."
Vernon feels it, too.
"I was ready for this, to get my hands on everything, be the auteur," Vernon says. "I'm not going to worry about anything. All I'm interested in is excavating the music."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
