c. gerben loves you

Song #19 // Langhorne Slim “Diamonds and Gold” [Langhorne Slim & Daytrotter Session]

And now, finally, the story can be told. With, of course, some caveats, including:

• This is not a new song, or even a song from 2011. In fact, the original was released three years ago, in 2008.
• Though the studio version is great, I always based my love for this song off of a semi-acoustic rendition performed for Daytrotter in 2008.
• This is not my song. I didn’t write it, and I never meant to pass it off as my own (more on that in a bit.)

This past year I listened to this song hundreds of times. If you count the number of times I hummed it to myself, sung it in the shower, or strummed it—chord by aching chord—on the guitar, that number probably blooms into the thousands. Seriously.

And yet, after September 4 (my wedding day) I didn’t listen to it a single time—not once—until I compiled this list and sat down to write this post. When I did, it was like watching someone I used to love walk down the street towards me, smiling, and forego a handshake for a real embrace. I started crying. Which is why I probably didn’t listen to it for four months anyway, because of the emotion of it. Because it meant too much.

This, in a way, is really a tale about crying, about emotion, about feeling things really really really intensely. So, please, bear with me through this; if I’m successful you’ll feel it too.

I’m pretty sure it began as I was driving from Atlanta to Ann Arbor last April. Down South it had been in the 80s, flowers were in full bloom, and I had found the secret shortcut to spring. Driving back, windows down, I watched as the green and sunlight receded with the miles put behind me. I was going back to something not quite winter. Still, I was feeling alive and happy as I sped up I-75.

Langhorne Slim came on my Shuffle, a Daytrotter set from a few years prior that I had loaded before my trip just to hear some new music. I had never heard of LS, but after the first few listens, I was really impressed with his earnest lyrics and strained vocals. This, I thought, was a man I could get behind.

And then “Diamonds and Gold” came on.

Now, keep in mind that I was happy. I felt warm and free and capable of approaching my life back in Michigan with optimism and strength even though my professional and personal lives were going to be turned up to 11 once I got back. But that song came on and hit me like a semi slamming his brakes at 80mph.

I began to cry, thinking about how beautiful everything was. How beautiful my wife-to-be was. How beautiful our wedding would be, how beautiful our life could be. In my own small little way, I knew that I could do better to make everything—if not beautiful—then at least happy.

It was then that I decided that I would learn a song and play it at my wedding. No more than 2 or 3 listens later, I knew the words to this song and began singing, no—shouting—as I drove the highway. I’d break down nearly every time near the end, right when he near shouts: “tough day at the office/ and a worse night at home/ don’t want to talk about it/ you just want to be left alone/ there’s no joy in living/ when you’re giving all and getting none/ it’s a new beginning/ you thought you lost, but darling, you won” Those words were so true for me. I knew they were my words. This was the song for me. This was the song I’d learn and play.

I had never played the guitar. I owned a guitar. I had taken guitar lessons. I had strummed my guitar. But I had never learned and played a song, no less learned a song and then sang the song and then performed the song in front of everyone I know. Still, I decided that that is what I’d do at my wedding. After all, I had nearly 5 months to prepare a 3 min song. How hard could it be?

As I flew out to San Francisco to spend the summer with my fiancee, I realized that I needed to loan a guitar from a friend. Not only did I deem it too difficult to bring mine with me, I also wanted to surprise my fiancee on the day of our wedding. I didn’t want her to know that I was going to play a song, obviously, but I also didn’t want her to know that I could even play a song. This proved to be one of the more romantic/stressful choices I made leading up to the wedding because I was never allowed to talk about it or even hint that it was a big part of my summer.

For the next three months I essentially followed the same routine. My SF BFF Mark brought over his Martin acoustic and I hid it behind the couch whenever my fiancee was home. When she left for work, I’d pull it out, play through “Diamonds and Gold” about a dozen times (always reading off an increasingly wrinkled piece of notebook paper where I had taken a stab at the right chords) and then push it back behind the couch before she got home from work.

I had always been told that anyone can play guitar as long as they’re disciplined enough to play it every day. I always thought that was dumb, but this summer proved otherwise. After several weeks I could play the song without looking at my chord sheet, and after an opportune and ad hoc guitar lesson via Skype from one of my great former students (a tennis star at UM no less), I had my strumming down to a point that I felt comfortable, if not confident.

But then I came back to Michigan. Even though I had practiced and kept a secret the entire summer, I panicked upon returning and realized that there was no way I could sing a song in front of all of our family and friends. I already knew I’d be crying through the entire ceremony (this proved not to be the case), so why add this on to make me truly miserable the entire day. I decided I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, do it.

Still, I brought my guitar with me up north. The week before the wedding I reconsidered. I lied—again—and told my fiancee that I was waking up early every morning to go for a run by the lake. It was a horrible lie given how averse I am to the hours between 4 and 9am, but it worked. So I woke up each morning at 6am and drove to Lake Michigan, where I serenaded the lapping waves and early seagulls with my song. I quickly refound my fingering, felt passable about my voice, and decided that I could, indeed, go through with it.

The morning of the wedding, of course, I was all thumbs. It had all come down to this. Nerves. But I wasn’t so much nervous as overloaded. As I watched through our front window, and all of our friends arrived in suits and dresses, I came as near to a panic attack as I’ve ever felt in my life. It wasn’t the song, but the whole thing. I was obviously happy, so happy, but everything just felt so real and felt so out of control, as if everything was in double-speed and I was running underwater. At this point, there was no turning back, though. I knew it by then.

So, kind reader, I’ll speed this up and get to the big moment (for me anyway) where I recite my vows and segue by saying that I love my fiancee enough to make a fool of myself from time to time. I stripped off my jacket, gave it to one best man, while I waited for the other to hand me my guitar. In gasps and chuckles from the crowd I threw it over my shoulder and tried to find my fingering. It came, if only approximately, and as I strummed a somewhat-G I knew there was no going back. I strummed that chord over and over before diving in, knowing things would never be the same.

I don’t regret much about that decision, or that act. I don’t regret the horrible chord progression that I swayed in and out of like a drunken pedestrian. I don’t regret my voice cracking as I reached high notes. I don’t even really regret not looking at my wife-to-be throughout (I always knew I’d have pictures like the one above, and I also knew that if I looked at her it would be all over.)

But what I do regret, and what I never saw coming, is that I didn’t properly introduce the song. I never announced that the song wasn’t mine, that it wasn’t written for my wife, that it wasn’t about us. But I knew, and she knew, that it was. It was only about us for those 3 or 4 minutes (what felt like an eternity but also a flash).

For weeks after, people brought up that song and how beautiful they thought it was (the lyrics, I presume, and not my singing/playing.) I never had the heart to correct them. It’s not that I wanted the glory so much as I didn’t want to ruin people’s perception of the event. Because that’s the funny thing about this: my entire summer was spent building up to that one gift for my wife, those 4 minutes were spent singing just for her, but while I was playing (unexpectedly not crying while apparently people in the audience did the job for me) it wasn’t for me at all. It wasn’t mine.

Events in our lives can do that, can remind us of feelings that we had years ago that we thought we had lost. Can surprise us and catch us off guard, perhaps when we’re vulnerable, perhaps when we’re at yet another wedding, and can make everything suddenly relevant.

This song was mine and mine alone on a Southern highway. It was mine when the door closed and I knew I had 8hrs alone a day to get it right in San Francisco. It was mine near the lakeshore in the early dawn. But when I played it, it was no longer mine even if people thought it was.

So who am I to correct them? Who am I to take away something so personal? It was, after all, my mistakes—my poor playing, my imperfect voice—that made the moment. It was a whole set of other feelings that made it a moment to remember, though. A moment where people allowed themselves, in someone else’s foolishness, to be happy. It was all those lost memories, those people not with us, those people we wish were with us, the things we do and don’t do and sometimes regret. It was what people wanted it to be, for them. It was never really about me. Even when I thought it was.

The Daytrotter version that I used as my model is no longer available for free. If you want to pay for it, you can go here. Otherwise, you can see a very similar performance in the video below:

Song #18 // Wilco “I Might” [The Whole Love]

For me, Wilco will always be wintry days, when the snow blows small and in pellet form, like stones thrown from the sky, dryly accumulating in piles that are whisked away by ungloved hands or anxiously unfrozen wiper blades.

It’s a time in grey, when ponds and roadside ravines realize their standing water is a shield that can protect them from the coming months, and in a rush they work to solidify in bubbles and white ice that breaks like glass with the first sign of pressure. It’s a learning curve in the waning months of the year.

Of course all of this is embodied, for me, in Wilco’s double-album Being There, which remains one of the most influential and time-tested albums I own. It marked a clear departure for my musical tastes: away from the grunge-heavy metalistic sounds of my high school years and into a more nuanced songwriter form, notably exercised on album opener “Misunderstood.”

I can’t remember for the life of me where I first heard of Wilco or what brought me to buy their LP. But I can remember driving slowly around my boyhood neighborhood, playing the same songs on my CD player in the middle of winter, circling over frost, ice, and bittersweet alive memories as I tried to find a reason to go home, or a reason to keep going.

I remember driving with my boyhood bestie, Matt, as we traveled to and from the nearby exotic land of Ann Arbor, less than an hour away but magic in its offerings of used music and book stores. At the time of Being There I never would have thought that I’d be there, in Ann Arbor, less than a year later as a student. Everything was still so uncertain and slowed in its icy environs.

This song is not that.

Its 1960s pop-influenced organ drives the song in a way that initially drove me away. Hearing the song on near repeat every day this past summer while listening to CBC Radio 2 I couldn’t stand it on the first dozen listens or so.

But then something happened: its, loop, its melody, became an ear-worm that bore into my skull almost overnight. I suddenly couldn’t live without the song, much in the way as a high schooler I couldn’t live without misery; how else can you possibly explain Morrissey?

Years ago when I lived full time in San Francisco an ex-friend of mine and I were debating who would be our generation’s Beatles. In other words, who would transcend time in a way that they were not only popular in the present tense, but would also be looked back on as one of the most influential and longstanding bands at the dawn of the 21st century.

I don’t remember my response. It was probably some Pitchfork-esque nod to Radiohead or something dumb. But she said Wilco, and I’ll never forget how stupid that sounded. At the time they were hovering just above mediocre popularity; appreciated for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but not really followed in the way that bands du jour such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were.

I’m still not sure that she was right; only time will tell. But that conversation, and this band’s place in my life, is frozen in my memory as a kind of mile marker of my appreciation of music. This song will live on less as a 2011 super hit than it will as the final weeks of my bachelorhood, when I drove around SE Michigan wondering if I could possibly ever share my selfish life with someone else; whether someone else would ever want to share hers with me.

Song #17 // Raphael Saadiq “Radio” [Stone Rollin’]

These are simple pleasures: a summer afternoon, childhood games, and speakers (however ill-equipped) pumping out grainy, feel good tunes.

This was the scene one summer day this past year when I traveled up to my parents’ house in Leelanau and convinced them to finally pull out the badminton set they had bought on clearance at Meijer (Michigan pronunciation: Meijer’s) a few years ago.

After some initial trepidation, my Dad helped me put the set up in their lush green grass aside the nearby treeline of the woods. Before long, my Mom joined us and we spent the afternoon like children, running barefoot and slapping at a small rubber object with glee.

The best part of the scene came later in the game, when I laid nearby under a tree, played the Raphael Saadiq album through my iPad’s small speaker, and watched my parents play a surprisingly competitive match.

My parents, having grown up in Detroit on the Motown sound, I figured would like the album, though honestly they probably couldn’t hear much of it above the wind and our laughter. For a few hours, though, the iPad became a transistor radio in the yard—one of the best apps it wasn’t designed for.

This album is classic in every way. There is no 21st century irony or lo-fi admiration that tries to put a spin on an old sound. This is simply old school rock and roll and R&B at its finest.

Saadiq, formerly of Tony Toni Tone (yes, that Tony Toni Tone), is as unpretentious on this album as a kid pulling a speaker onto a street corner and strumming for coins. There is a purity in this high treble track listing that, what it lacks in bombastic super hits, more than makes up for in its consistent resolve. It’s the perfect music for an outdoor gathering, a familiar romp through simple pleasures.

Year in Review keeps on moving [sorry for the delay]

For those playing along at home, my sincere apologies that the tunes are rolling out as slowly as they are. Lots of travel and life eventing is causing me to push the Pause button more than I’d hope.

Still, there are 27 total songs this year and we’re already at 16, so the end is relatively in sight.

Thanks for listening along.

Song #16 // Charles Bradley “The World (Is Going Up In Flames)” [No Time For Dreaming]

By now you’ve either heard Charles Bradley’s story or you need to. And if you fall into the former category, it bears repeating: the 60-something parttime cook who had dreamed of being James Brown since he saw him at the Apollo decades earlier. Never giving up and eventually “discovered” by Daptone and paired with the surprisingly tight Menahan Street Band. After a string of loosely distributed singles, this full-length LP may easily be some people’s “Best Of” for 2011. I wouldn’t blame them.

This is the definition of solid.

Echoing back to Stax-era crooners, at times Otis Redding at others Wilson Pickett, this is music as I remember it growing up: unlike Motown’s honey-dripped arrangements, the saltier 70s funk and soul bands sounding like a house party on black vinyl. Now at 62, Bradley has more passion and talent than nearly any contemporary pop musician or band you can mention.

It’s not that it’s a competition, but that it’s as it should be: a storyteller who has earned his right to tell his tales.

There’s something so gloriously unpolished about this album, even when it coos gently and stomps aggressively at just the right moments. There’s a gravelly-ness to it that bumps your tires on an otherwise smooth path. Weathered; the sign of real utility and popularity.

I began listening to this album just before I flew out to SF for the summer, just a few weeks before I caught Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings at Stern Grove. As we got there a few hours early and dug our feet into the eucalyptus-strewn dirt at 60 degree angles, I remember hoping that the show would be a return to a mythic Monterey Pop-era romp. A wake-up call to all the rock’n’roll hipsters that this was still the music of the soul: swinging and true, even through summer San Francisco fog.

It was and it wasn’t. The show was so well produced and so spot-on (and the weather so uncharacteristically sunny) that its luster was almost blinding. It was clear by the time we left that I wanted something as dusty as our picnic blankets. Wine-soaked and tired from the trek that seemed to the edge of California.

I can’t be sure, but had it been Charles Bradley and not Sharon Jones I may have gotten that.

Of course, it’s not a competition.

It’s simply solid.

Song #15 // The Head and The Heart “Lost in My Mind” [The Head and the Heart]

Like most of us, I first heard The Head and The Heart this year despite the Seattle-based band appearing on Sub-Pop a year prior. Whether or not this release was fated to meet my ears just as the May rains opened up green buds and unsheathed winter windows is up for debate. It’s impact is not; it’s the perfect spring song, filled with hushed optimism and crushed grass bombast.

Strange, though, how it encapsulates my/our evolving understanding of Pacific-Northwest music, especially as the early 90s hinted at a fog-laden Shangri-La fueled by angst and caffeine. Now, as I sit here in that very Mecca of grunge and punk on a mostly overcast day, the spitting skies provide counterintuitive evidence that even rolling stones gather moss here, and the soundtrack to such controlled dreariness is often some of the most homespun pop music this side of the Mississippi.

Funny, that: the way the distant mountains were so clear, vivid, and majestic this past weekend while this morning the not-quite-dank gloom partitions the visible world at the end of the street. An elastic worldview, played like an accordion in the winter early sunsets.

Go Irish!

Song #14 // The Decemberists “Down By the Water” [The King Is Dead]

The Decemberists surprised me (and a whole lot of other people) with The King Is Dead. While I was never necessarily against them, I was also never really a huge fan. I (like a whole lot of other people) loved “O Valencia!” but otherwise didn’t pay the band much attention.

There was also a sense that there was just a bit too much effort behind the albums, such as 2009’s concept The Hazards of Love. As an ex-friend once said years ago, “Just because you can write songs about 19th century news stories doesn’t mean you should.”

However, this LP felt effortless from the first listen. “Down By the Water” throws off my equilibrium every time it comes on my stereo. I momentarily have to realign my expectations to realize that the opening harmonica blast is not blown by Springsteen, but by a finely coiffed indie band from the Pacific Northwest. They’re here to kick ass, and they do so so efficiently and so convincingly that you have to wonder if this, too, is a concept album, or some sort of molting, leaving behind the band we always wanted underneath.

My only complaint (which isn’t a complaint so much as an observation) is that the band does veer a bit too close to jangly R.E.M. territory on several tracks, making me question their sincere originality. Having Peter Buck on board doesn’t hurt this hunch, especially as “Calamity Song” features an opening doppelganger to R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion” and the backbeat refrain to “Down By the Water” echos “The One I Love” nearly note for note.

Still, this is pure stuff, and they could be emulating (err, imitating) much worse. Regardless of the roots, this album reaches up and flowers in the heat of summer with windows down and bare feet running through dewy grass, tumbling toward the lazy afternoons ahead.

Song #13 // R.E.M. “Mine Smell Like Honey” [Collapse Into Now]

R.E.M. was so many things, so many memories, so many places.

This is the power of music.

Growing up it was the first indicator of music cred. In a pre-Internet world, R.E.M. was the pre-indie band. The continuation of a Talking Heads artscape, but with meatier hooks, and popularity that didn’t need to be fought over. If you liked them, you were in. If you didn’t, that was OK too.

My sister gave me her 45s from Green when I began listening to my turntable more often and she no longer needed the cool cache of the cardboard box. They now stand as a kind of prized time capsule, an 80s analog to sepia tone in pops and hisses that kids now in college holding 80s parties will never quite grasp. It wasn’t always fluorescents and leg warmers. We were cool after and before we weren’t.

R.E.M. was passing along Automatic for the People cassettes in the back of the classroom, memorizing the words and feeling completely understood when listening to “Everybody Hurts” at 15, appreciating “Find the River” at 30. It was sitting in the back of my parents’ car as we drove through Indiana and falling in love, secretly, with New Adventures in Hi-Fi closer “Electrolite.” Making excuses for Up. Making excuses for Reveal. Making excuses ad nauseum as we all came to terms with the band and ourselves. The way U2 fans never do.

This is the power of music.

When the band disbanded in late September I immediately thought of my old friend Steve. Since college he was the one true disciple. Honest about the band’s shortcomings, but unwavering in his admiration and acumen. Within seconds of hearing the news I had posted to his Wall. Within seconds of it traveling through the Internet my cell phone was ringing, bounced miles above the earth via satellite. I hadn’t talked to Steve in years. He was married, with a newborn. I was married, just a mile down the road from where we once took the same classes. Everything and nothing had changed.

One could argue that Steve and I have nothing in common anymore. That some subconscious trigger is pulled each time I think of the one or two things we still have in common (mostly love for bands, including being the only two straight relatively young men who still adore Morrissey.) One could argue that our friendship is as thin as the aging bands’ aging catalogs. That’s one way of looking at it.

Another is that without this music, without these things, these memories, these places, these songs we’d have nothing to talk about anymore. Like so many others we’d fade from each other’s memory, eventually getting just curious enough to do a late night Google search, but little else. Instead, when we hear about a band calling it quits we talk on the phone for half an hour, first trading shock and then talking about life. We connect like electrical wires divorced from a power source for years. Then one day a dusty switch is thrown and there you have it: light.

This is the power of music.

“Mine Smell Like Honey” is an R.E.M. song for the ages, a harmony-laden nonsensical romp that fans of all eras can rally behind. We’re so spoiled with nearly three decades of music that a song like this on their last studio album can be just another good song. Were this fresh off the shelf, swapped like aural contraband in the back of pre-calculus, we’d know better. We’d be so much wiser in our younger years, when we knew enough to trust our ears, but didn’t know enough to know much else.

Year in Review 2011: Song #12 // Ben Harper “Don’t Give Up On Me Now” http://t.co/HWuloxsk #yir2011

Song #12 // Ben Harper “Don’t Give Up On Me Now” [Give Till It’s Gone]

The term “ear worm” is used to describe a song that wiggles its way into one’s ear and lodges there for an extended period of time, housed in the thoughts and memory of the host, not just taking up occupancy, but in effect infecting all other sounds and ideas. It becomes the looped soundtrack to the movie of our lives, infiltrated with even the slightest invitation. It’s a great, fitting visual metaphor.

Ben Harper is successful and widely known. Yet there’s still a feeling that he’s nowhere near as appreciated as he could or should be. He’s a devil guitar player (including the most engrossing slide guitarist this side of AM radio) and has golden pipes on par with Marvin Gaye. A Ben Harper show is one part hard rock, two parts soul. He could be in the pit or the choir depending on the mood.

This song is deceptively plaintive. It’s resilient in a self-effacing way; taking off from Tom Petty’s sentiment in “I Won’t Back Down” but reaching out to an other, as if the unspoken “you” has the key to personal worth. Such a message is so ubiquitous and so clear: I’m strong, I can be strong, but without you, I’m doubt. Don’t take me away from me.

“Don’t Give Up On Me Now” is an ear worm. When I first heard this song in April and May of last year it was the one radio song that stuck with me long after the car was parked out back. Downloaded, its slow bass-driven build portends determination and triumph, but is cut by the pleading, the yearning.

This song may never be big. It might make its way onto a “Best Of” LP as a second-tier track somewhere down the road. But now that’s it been unleashed on the world, it won’t be penned in again. It’s either a blessing or a curse, revealing more about ourselves than we yet know.

Listen to the song HERE.

Year in Review 2011: Song #11 Adele “Rolling in the Deep” http://t.co/8NgE7WEG #yir2011

Song #11 // Adele “Rolling in the Deep” [21]

Years ago, before I left California for Michigan, I decided to book a West coast swing, starting up in Alaska and working my way down through Vancouver and Seattle. It was a last minute, ill-planned trip that I undertook by myself without any background knowledge at all. I paid for it, of course, through overpriced hotels, rental cars, and salmon sandwiches that I could have scored for half the price had I applied a modicum of research and planning. I didn’t, and I don’t regret it.

By the time I got to Vancouver I was a well-seasoned veteran at traveling alone and giving myself up to opportunities as they presented themselves. I booked a downtown hotel, hopped on the train, and set out to walk the entire city once I arrived. The result was chaotic and masterful: getting lost (somehow) in Stanley Park, drinking cream ale in Gastown pubs, and watching live music in an upstairs bar somewhere far off my hotel map.

In my explicit role as an outsider I engrained myself as an insider through happenstance and accident.

It was at the last venue of the night, an out of the way bar featuring a ska band, that I was posted up in the back, looking over the heads of dozens of Vancouverites skanking through a humid July night. Sometime midway through the set a woman came over and invited me to sit with her friends in a booth near the stage. I hesitated (I was perfectly content and feeling my third or fourth cream ale) but could come up with no good excuse to reject her by the time she grabbed my hand and dragged me across the dance floor.

Later on, the four of us were kicking our legs and bouncing in syncopation as the band heated up well past closing time. When they finally ceased, my new friends led me to their convertible and drove me across town to the most elicit gay bar I’ve ever seen. As a mustachioed transvestite in a miniskirt huskily asked me if I could help find her wallet, I knew I was in over my head: it was nearly 4am and I had no idea where I was. I did know, however, that I was leaving the next morning at 7am.

So I began to walk, smiling stupidly at the mess I’d gotten myself into.

Somehow I made it back OK and actually got a few hrs of sleep before I left the next day. The entire ride south to Seattle, all I could think of was how free I had felt as the wind whipped through my hair of a stranger’s convertible. How I had uncharacteristically given myself up to uncertainty and the kindness of people who I hoped were kind.

I didn’t get the feeling again until last April when I visited Atlanta for a conference and found myself stuffed in the backseat of a compact car, racing across the southern city with two guys I barely knew, and a driver I had never met. All I knew is that when she kicked the car into gear, sounds that made my ears bleed in pleasure pumped through her speakers. My heart raced with excitement and opportunity.

I had no idea it was Adele, a woman I had heard of, but never listened to. All of the sudden “Rolling in the Deep” kicked down my door and took me hostage. All that night I grinned as we sat in a highrise apartment (I sat in a cushioned wagon bed as she played Beatles LPs on her hifi) and I didn’t wonder once where I was or how I’d get home.

I knew it would be all right.

And it was.

I make no excuses for including this song on this list. This is a controlled explosion, sass in the face of constraint that is perfect for giving yourself over to a city and to people you’ve never met before and may never see again. For that one moment you’re whoever you want to be, and the people you’re with are willing to go along on the ride.

This is life as you want it to be.

Song #10 // Bon Iver “Calgary” [Bon Iver]

Looking back years from now, people of a certain persuasion will undoubtedly see Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago as a high water mark, especially in the artistically bereft early years of the new millennium. (Where art thou, Will Smith; and whither your promise of a new Willennium?)

For me, I won’t be the least bit surprised if it is looked back on as one of the best albums of my life. That’s high praise and at face value a bit over the top, but no album before or since has crystallized the holed-up feeling of despair, desperation, and hope contained in the Wisconsin cabin-penned LP.

Even the cover art evokes the feeling of looking out frozen windows as the world crawls on and I sit inside, only somewhat warmed, sipping from a pot of stove-top espresso.

Is that window icing or thawing? That album was music for both potential answers, sometimes in the same listen.

Given this, forgive me for being not only cautiously optimistic about the new album, but also cautiously concerned. In some ways, like many other fans, I just wanted more of For Emma. I selfishly wanted the artist to be the martyr of my own heartache, so that on his sonic canvas I could look and see my own reflection.

This album was and it wasn’t just that. It was more lush, featured more percussion, and was released (perhaps fortunately) at the dawn of a new, warmer season. In spring and the first blush of summer we were invited to view Bon Iver anew. Life, after all, had moved on since the last time we met, some 3 or 4 years earlier.

Time will tell how this album fares in the wake of our relentless aging. My guess is that it will fall into the cracks of our lives the way the majority of our days do. I still have unsolicited dreams of girls who broke my heart when I was younger. I still have regrets about things I said that I never should have said. I return to those memories and (over time) feel almost a strange attraction to them. To times when I really felt the contents of my ethereal heart.

Meanwhile days like this one—holed up in a coffeeshop in a wind-swept Minnesota town, waiting by the window for my wife to come pick me up, looking forward to the days ahead when we won’t have to drop one another off at the airport—are good, not great, and bittersweet, but not sad, and yet what memory will I have of them?

What reflection (if any) will I see when I look back on these words with older eyes?