DeYarmond Edison’s ‘Epoch’ muddies the Bon Iver narrative : NPR

Earlier than (left to proper) Justin Vernon, Joe Westerlund, Phil Cook dinner and Brad Cook dinner began Bon Iver and Megafaun, they made music collectively as DeYarmond Edison.

D.L. Anderson/Courtesy of the artist

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D.L. Anderson/Courtesy of the artist

Earlier than (left to proper) Justin Vernon, Joe Westerlund, Phil Cook dinner and Brad Cook dinner began Bon Iver and Megafaun, they made music collectively as DeYarmond Edison.

D.L. Anderson/Courtesy of the artist

This essay initially appeared in NPR Music’s weekly e-newsletter. Subscribe to the e-newsletter right here.

There is a scene in an outdated episode of The Simpsons whereby Lisa laments that nobody listens to youngsters. Grandpa Simpson, embroiled in a B plot of his personal, chimes in that nobody listens to outdated folks, both — at which level Homer pops by and cheerfully proclaims, “I am a white male, age 18 to 49. Everybody listens to me, irrespective of how dumb my solutions are!” (He then pulls out a can of a product referred to as “Nuts and Gum,” which bears the tagline, “Collectively finally!”)

Although I’ve not too long ago aged out of that vaunted 18-49 bracket, it is exhausting to not really feel culturally super-served — like everybody listens to me! — once I’m unboxing a lavish, five-LP, four-CD field set referred to as Epoch. The set is credited to DeYarmond Edison, the Wisconsin-by-way-of-North Carolina band that contained Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and three musicians (Brad Cook dinner, Phil Cook dinner and Joe Westerlund) who would later kind Megafaun. But it surely additionally collects works from the artists’ different collaborations and early tasks: a solo Justin Vernon album, songs by a excessive school-era challenge referred to as Mount Vernon, reside recordings and so forth.

Epoch is assembled in lavish element, together with an almost book-length set of liner notes by the terrific author (and occasional NPR Music contributor) Grayson Haver Currin. And, look, I am used to pondering of field units as Boomer Fodder, given that they are made for an viewers with disposable earnings, an obsession with the previous and a need for bodily media. However right here I’m, rubbing my grubby mitts throughout a field with a $130 price ticket, cooing over each uncommon gem and simply starting to dig into Currin’s expansive historical past of the band. Am I … a Boomer now? Is slightly voice inside my head saying, “Do not look again, you’ll be able to by no means look again”?

Epoch comprises 5 LPs or 4 CDs of DeYarmond Edison’s early and prolonged output, together with reside recordings and aspect tasks.

Jagjaguwar

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Jagjaguwar

Intergenerational warfare apart, Epoch is made for superfans — people who’ve beloved these musicians’ many profession highlights, and who now want to slink underneath the soil and comply with their many-tendriled roots the place they lead. Typically, that takes us to a tune like 2006’s “Hazelton,” through which Vernon units an impassioned vocal over the instrumental mattress that may be repurposed in Bon Iver’s 2011 monitor “Holocene.” “Hazelton” may simply be a treasured outtake from Bon Iver’s basic breakthrough, For Emma, Without end In the past. However Epoch additionally heads down many early and experimental aspect roads: You are not two tracks in earlier than you hit Mount Vernon’s “Morning,” which contains a little bit of rap-adjacent patter that’ll ship you hurtling again in time to the heyday of Barenaked Girls.

I am nonetheless selecting favorites, after all. However I am additionally reveling within the numerous nods to an array of influences — many early tracks replicate a love of Van Morrison, Counting Crows or each — and indulgences. Epoch is completely enriching my appreciation for the numerous methods musicians can evolve, and it is also reminding me that no second of artistic inspiration takes place spontaneously, in a vacuum. We’re not born impressed. Inspiration comes intertwined with imitation, with detours, with concepts that do and do not work, with failure. A few of these lyrics aren’t even recognizable as Vernon’s work, as a result of the writing is so literal; he hadn’t but realized to faucet into his extra impressionistic, poetic aspect.

The story of Bon Iver is so ingrained as to grow to be a cliche: Smarting from two breakups — a romantic relationship and DeYarmond Edison itself — Justin Vernon retreated to a cabin within the woods to write down his masterpiece, the aforementioned For Emma. What’s lovely about Epoch is how completely it muddies that narrative. Vernon did not have a lightbulb flicker over his head, shout “Eureka!” and abruptly discover his voice in Wisconsin’s north woods; he’d tinkered with creative musicians for years and toyed with vocal types starting from a bluesy growl to the falsetto for which he grew to become recognized. He simply saved doing the work of discovering himself, his songwriting voice and his sound. Identical goes for Megafaun, which used many of those early recordings as a jumping-off level for information that saved sprawling and looking out.

The difficulty with tidy legends just like the story of For Emma is that they make us wish to recreate them — to move off to that distant cabin after which beat ourselves up once we do not write “Skinny Love” straight away. Epoch is completely a treasure trove for these of us who love these musicians and want to revel of their early alchemic triumphs. But it surely’s additionally a terrific, huge, rumpled but superbly designed reminder that no creative id is born absolutely shaped. In music, as in life, none of us are really working alone.