can i get another year?

must i be so damn severe?

from the valley to the pier, i’m beset by what we could become.

I’ve danced to songs from the new Bon Iver album every single day since it came out. Early on in my first listen I knew it was the first music in a while I’d be compelled enough by to write something for, but it’s awfully hard to write and dance at the same time so this has taken a little longer than I expected because dancing has been winning out over typing almost every time.

I’ve been a fan of Justin Vernon’s work in its various incarnations for many, many years at this point but rarely have they made me move. That’s not to say they haven’t moved me.

The Fionn Regan sample in the last track of 22, A Million gutted me so thoroughly I had to walk out of the coffee shop I was in when I first heard it to stare at the sky. I get excited when I meet someone I think I can successfully push Volcano Choir’s Repave on and get more than a half-hearted nod back in return. The Shouting Matches’ Grownass Man is a staple for a certain kind of morning drive when the sun is coming up and the light hits just right on the windshield and you have to shield your eyes with one hand and tap the rhythm on the steering wheel with the other. And as long as the people a few streets from me keep setting up a strange and janky prom scene in their driveway for Christmas (this one is hard to explain…) I will reliably listen to Gayngs’ Relayted every single December.

When the DeYarmond Edison EPOCH box set was released back in 2023 I ordered it within about four minutes of its announcement despite not being much of a box set person and I sat in awe on the floor in my living room when I held it in my hands months later.

At that point in time, I’d been spending a lot of my time thinking about what it is to reach the point with certain songs that you’ve known them for longer than you haven’t; what it means to have lived long enough to have songs that have been with you for more days of living than they have not. To be able to go back to them, again and again and again. To have them so entwined with your memories that your life and the music it has been filled with cannot be untangled.

When I ran my fingers over the spines of the albums that make up that collection I wept thinking about the fact that it is a not insignificant miracle to have made it far enough, with love enough, to be able to open the blinds and the windows and flood my home with light and with the same songs that I, in what feels like lifetimes ago, used to mostly listen to on headphones in the dark.

All of which is to say - I was very much looking forward to the new Bon Iver album but I was surprised in all of the best ways to find that the new set of songs didn’t invoke those old familiar feelings. No, rather than inspiring wistful drives into the horizon or provoking stare-at-the-sky sessions or invoking the deep chill of long winter walks - SABLE, fABLE made me need to dance. And not once, not twice, but daily.

And I think maybe those new feelings are the whole point.

Because while there is certainly something beautiful about being able to return over and over again to the songs that have carried you through every day that got you to this one, sometimes the roads you’ve traveled with those songs become washed out with old memories and patterns and ways of being and rather than trying to trudge down those muddy roads that are familiar but no longer as safe as they once were… sometimes it’s best to open up a new map, find a road that’s easier to travel. And it’s something more than beautiful when the cartographer drawing those paths is the same, but they’ve learned, just as you have, that the journey doesn’t always have to be so hard.

This is an album in two parts. In SABLE, the first four tracks we are staring into the darkness - or we are staring it down. When Vernon sings “I get caught looking in the mirror on the regular and what I see there resembles some competitor” it becomes clear that there are still things plenty of things to wrestle with but as the tracks go by and we move into fABLE, it becomes clearer still that the choice was consciously made to move out of the dark winter of the soul that brought Vernon’s most sizeable fame and step into the sun.

Even much mythologized winters can come to an end - and with this album Vernon shows us a path out, shows us what it is to choose to emerge from beneath the snow and seek out a new perspective. In a line I hope stays nestled in my brain for a long time to come, he sings with marvel in his voice - “and damn if i’m not climbin’ up a tree right now” and I hope I never forget what it is to wonder at getting the chance to do things differently.

In an interview with Krista Tippett, Vernon is asked about the line in “From” (the song I cannot stop dancing to) in which he sings “I’m beset by what we could become” and they talk a little bit about the poetry in the word beset and Vernon talks about how what he’s talking about is how sometimes you are opened up to a new possibility and you really want something to happen and how “it’s all you want because you just want that truth ringing true” and Tippett comments that the word also implies being filled, obsessed and occupied with something and this isn’t untrue but it isn’t everything I think of when I hear the word. Just as this album is two sides of a coin - the darkness we can get bogged in and the lightness we can choose, there are two sides to the way you can look at the word.

Merriam-Webster’s captures this duality well. To their telling, to be beset is to be set upon as in “the explorers were beset by wolves” but it is also to set “as if with ornaments” as in “a crown beset with rubies” and if that does not encapsulate the choice laid out in this album, I’m not sure what would.

You can look at the future as something preying upon you, or you can look at the future as something you get the chance to decorate, to embellish, to make shine.

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Listen to SABLE, fABLE.

Listen to the On Being interview with Krista Tippett, one of my long time, very favorite interviewers.

And as always, Listen to Ted Hawkins.

and damn, i did not climb up this tree right now, but metaphorically speaking we are tree climbing all the time now and everything is peaceful love and right in me.