“Hello.”
“Hey, Joe.”
“Where are you?”
“In Eau Claire, by the mall,
where I can get reception.”
“Cool.”
“The fish is amazing, what,
right over your head.”
“Yeah, right?”
[laughs]
“Where are you?
You have a nice
pink background.
I like this.”
“Yeah, we call it red.”
[singing] “All my life,
I was ...
... keepin’ what you tellin’ me,
I know mine.”
“I’ve known Justin since
we were 16 years old.”
“And what was he like
when he was 16 years old?”
“Exactly like he is now.”
“[singing] Back in all
those sunny days.
Back in all those
days by the water.”
“Did you always think
of Justin as the one?”
“We didn’t know
any better, but we
knew that that was
a crazy voice.”
“[singing] I’m gonna suckle on
the hope in light brassieres.
My, my, my--”
“He’s going to be tinkering
till the day he dies,
trying to figure out
what else is a possibility.”
“Here we go.
Are you recording, Trevor?”
“Yes.”
“My best friend,
Trevor, and I,
we were out up in the bar
in the middle of the winter,
making music in
whatever way we could.”
“It’s kind of like free
improv performance art
work that we do, but
mainly just for ourselves.
Right away, he kind
of went to a radio
and was messing around
with the different knobs.”
“I was turning the
radio on and off.
Still don’t know what
song is playing.”
“And then I started sliding
on this piece of cardboard.”
“Trevor was just dead
on with the slides."
“And do you hear that
as a beat, essentially?”
“Yeah, it’s like the—
you hear it in
hip-hop sometimes.
It’s, like, the chop.”
“It’s sort of rhythmic
and sort of melodic,
and you can kind of
start to mess with it.”
“But it was such a
fragment of an idea,
and even then,
he was dead serious.
He was like, this is
going to be the first song
on the next Bon Iver record.”
“The part that I wrote
came about from a jam
that we did maybe
four years ago.”
“Justin’s really good
at piecing it together
in weird ways.”
“Maybe a year later,
we were in London.
James Blake was in
the neighborhood,
and so I had him come by,
and he just improvised.”
“Justin invites a pretty
eclectic cast of characters.
He loves to be in the
middle of all this
but sort of let
the chaos unfold.”
“It’s kind of like a little
game that you play with
the song, like you try
and figure out what works
and what doesn’t.”
“I didn’t even
know who Bon Iv— uh,
I didn’t know who Justin was.
You know, when
he played it,
I was like, load me up,
come on with it.
And I just threw the
drums on, and then
that [expletive] just turned
into a whole ’nother genre.”
“God, I mean, I will never
remember all the things
we tried to do on this song.”
“I made three
trips to Wisconsin,
and each time, it was
in kind of a different place.”
“We just kept trying stuff.
Oh, let’s play new chords.
Let’s do piano.
Someone play acoustic.
Let’s do a bunch of
electric guitars.”
“Justin was kind of like,
try anything, anywhere.”
“Throughout most of this,
Justin had not sung
on it at all.
There wasn’t — there wasn’t
even really a scratch vocal
for a long time.
I think a yearslong time.”
“I could never
figure it out,
and I think
I was scared for many—
I think writing the first
verse of this album,
you get scared,
you get in your head,
you have little obstacles.”
“When we got to Texas,
it was, all right,
we’ve got to figure this out."
“The ranch is 40 miles
south of El Paso.”
“The property
butts up against
the United States-Mexico border.”
“There is literally a
wall on Tony’s property,
and then on Tony’s property,
there’s no wall.
It just, like, stops.
So you can just put your hand
over and here I am, Mexico.
This is all very [expletive] up.
Doesn’t make any sense.
A lot of perspective there.
While we were at
Sonic Ranch,
it was still very, very
unfinished, this song.
And I’m still just like,
it's got to be the first song,
got to be the first song.
And Brad’s just like, it’s not
a song at all, you know?”
“I show up and I
can’t find anyone.
And of course, the
first person I run into
is Justin, smirking
ear to ear.
Bon Iver was my
hero in college.
Because of that,
I was really motivated
to try some [expletive].”
“Justin played on
that song right away,
and he looked
him in the eye,
and he’s like,
I don’t get it.
I want to figure out what
the [expletive] is going on.”
“I didn’t see any significance
in doing that at all
until, while I was working
on it, I’d just see almost all
of them pacing around,
listening through the door,
and that if I wasn’t nervous,
that made me very nervous.”
“That was a really big
turning point for that song.”
“What did you do to it?”
“God, I feel like I was
Jackson Pollock-ing it,
and you’re asking me,
what colors didn’t I use?
I don’t even remember.”
“What you would understand
to be a chorus—
—he took that little
part, cut it out,
and made it sort of this hook,
and then put bass under it
and made it feel
like a drop.”
“He pulled a form
out of that song
that hadn’t been
there before.”
“And it was giving me
some new energy.”
“He was just like, man,
I’m going to sing on this.
I’m going to sing on this.
And I think that was it.
That was his reaction.”
“Brad's just like, dude,
you got to write this verse.
Go write this [expletive] verse.
Go [expletive] do this, you know?
Like here’s your bars,
do something.
Brad’s a really good friend.
He produced me as a person,
just as much as a musician,
really, in the last few years.
He’s just encouraging.”
“Justin’s had a
hard time asking
for help over the years.”
“You get tied up
in knots inside.
These knots get so —
so thick and so tight,
that you don’t even know where
to begin to unravel them.”
“If I’m going to
be honest with you,
I think there was some
real burnout going on.”
“When I was going through
some tougher [expletive],
like battling all
that [expletive], the fame
and attention, the inability
to have relationships,
the inability — just the
isolation of where I found
myself, Brad got me
to relax and just
say what I’m feeling.”
“As soon as he
sings, I feel like it
makes everything right.”
“It still makes me cry.”
“I like it when
people get inspired,
because when they
get inspired,
they usually have some sort of
empathetic, euphoric feeling.
That’s the idea with
Bon Iver in general.
It’s just like a little town
of people trying to be good.”
“This song has been
a beast for us.”
“I do love that song.
I don’t know, it makes
total sense to me.
I just hear it and I’m like,
oh, yeah, cool tune.”
“It was very interesting
to see that progression
from that first recording
into what the song is now.”
“One of the guys said
even Frank Ocean
might have been
around when James
was messing with the song.
“Yeah, I think Frank took
his track, though, man.
I don't know what he did.”
Classic.
“He’s like, yo, like,
some crazy Midwest dude.
I’m taking these
tracks out of here.”
[laughs] “Fair enough.”
