Last week, Paul Mescal posted what some might consider a cry for help on his Instagram Stories: a live recording of Bon Iver’s cover of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt. While we all know by now that the actor enjoys a sad bop, Mescal’s attraction to the musical stylings of Bon Iver feels especially apropos this time of year. The weather is changing, summer flings are dying out, and the country feels on the brink of political turmoil. Enter Justin Vernon.
After Brat Summer painted the world chartreuse, it seemed unclear, for a time, what would happen come autumn, when the hangover set in. As it turns out, Charli XCX had the answer all along: This month, the singer released her latest brat variant, brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a remixed album overflowing with high-profile features—including one from Bon Iver on “I think about it all the time.” (Vernon told The New Yorker that agreeing to do the track was “a no-brainer.”) In its original state, the song is a rumination on Charli’s biological clock, and not wanting to sacrifice her career to have kids. But with a downtempo beat and some vocal modulation, its remix becomes a broader treatise on love and loneliness, as Vernon croons: “You’re lonely and you’re / And you’re asking, ‘When did it get so hard?’” Charli and Vernon also sample Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and interpolate Bon Iver’s “Nick of Time,” engineering a track that neatly bridges the two artists’ sonic universes.
The brat feature turned out to be the perfect segue into Bon Iver’s latest EP, SABLE, released a week later. (One song on the three-track project, “S P E Y S I D E,” came out as a single in September, while “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” first debuted in 2020, at a virtual rally for Bernie Sanders.) If it’s not exactly a return to his For Emma, Forever Ago roots, SABLE does tap into the stripped-down melancholia that first earned Bon Iver a legion of heartbroken fans nearly two decades ago, along with the slightly more experimental sound on 22, A Million (2016) and i, i (2019).
An artist who tends to stay out of the public eye between projects, Vernon signaled his impending return this past summer, when he performed at a Harris-Walz rally in his native Wisconsin. While he regularly stumps for progressive candidates and raises funds for causes close to his heart, such as Everytown, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU, Vernon doesn’t really produce the hopeful, aspirational songs that candidates like to use in their campaigns; doom and anxiety are more his speed.
With SABLE, however, Vernon doesn’t nod to the mood of the body politic so much as to his own inner turmoil. Over the hum of ambient noise on “AWARDS SEASON,” Vernon sings, a cappella: “I can handle / Way more than I can handle.” The statement may seem trite—that we as humans are all capable of bearing far more weight than we think possible—but he quickly goes deeper, tangling with self-medication (“So I keep reaching for the handle to flood my heart”), and the salt-in-the-wound pain of seeing an ex again (“But now it’s the season / And I know I will be seein’ ya / On the TV for some reason / God, my heart”).
In a season of unrest, it’s equal parts comforting and disconcerting to have new Bon Iver music out. Vernon’s personal heartbreak, translated into something as moving and universal as SABLE, seems to be arriving just in the nick of time.
