Eaux Claires, Saturday, after sunset. The ticket stand was close to abandoned; the workers were joking around as I paid cash for a second ticket. The murmur of the crowd echoed in the valley. Walking down into the field, parts of the path were so dark I couldn’t see my hands.
“Here?” I asked my friend. Close enough to see, far enough away to watch.
“Sure.”
She took off her sweater and spread it across the grass. People around us sat, then stood, then sat again. Some were laughing. A few were smoking. The heat had finally broken. Muggy, expectant starlight now.
The crowd shrieked itself into ecstasy as a figure took the stage. It was festival narrator and beautifully talented local author Michael Perry, lit up from behind like a rock star. “Good to see you here. Everybody’s gathered round for…” and his voice sharpened: “vespers.”
Perry offered a brief meditation on the nature of neighbors, of the valley, of music. “And so here we are, cradled by a river in a sanctuary of sound, craving consecration, exultation, on bended knee, seeking benediction.” About halfway through, electronic noises began spattering away behind his baseball cap. New Bon Iver backup singers The Staves listened, their arms around each other. Everything felt tuned to a higher pitch. In more ways than one, the stage was set.
We don’t talk about Bon Iver’s name enough. A homonym of “bon hiver,” or “good winter” in French, the words recall a wooden Wisconsin cabin, probably with the chimney puffing and snowbanks heaped outside. But this Friday and Saturday in that very state, the average high temperature was much hotter: the heat reached around 90 degrees, plus humidity. Far from the icy grip of winter, a July audience enjoyed a rare Bon Iver set from musician Justin Vernon. The occasion? None other than the inaugural Eaux Claires festival, which Vernon founded and co-curated with the National’s Aaron Dessner. It kicked off on Friday; read a recap here. Eaux Claires’s second and final day of music featured extra genre-blurring excitement, a fun Indigo Girls set, and Vernon’s first Bon Iver performance since 2012….
[Sufjan] Stevens also shared some of his personal feelings about the show: “Great to be here and have this view…beautiful and happy faces. It’s a picture of abundance.” He looked out from stage. “I never play festivals — I have such a fear of crowds — agoraphobia, social anxiety. The last two days have been proving all my fears wrong. It’s been like a 48-hour episode of My Little Pony.”…
Imagine. You’re an ambitious kid from a small town. This small town’s most famous export is the inventor of fraud-proof ballot paper. The arts scene is pathetic compared to the ones in Minneapolis, Chicago, or New York. Every artist you admire – every artist you love and respect and desperately want to emulate – is from a big city, went to school in a big city, found themselves in a big city. Nobody comes here because they want to. Nobody stays here and is successful. As long as I’m here, you think to yourself, I will have no chance of making what I want to have happen, happen.
Why, then, is it so difficult to say good-bye?
As you grow older, never making the break, never quite finding the courage or the cash to move away, you struggle to choose between forging a career in the arts and embracing the family and the small-town culture that raised you. You try your best to come to terms with things, and to not be ungrateful. Because there are worse places to be.
Then, suddenly, a neighbor becomes an international superstar. He’s an alumnus of the high school your mom went to. You hear breathless rumors in the press that he shops at your grocery store. Your youth symphony rehearsals were held on the same university campus he attended. The superstar’s drummer used to play at a restaurant two blocks from your house. Thirty years ago your grandparents almost bought a house on the corner of Third and Lake…an unassuming intersection that the superstar makes famous in a Grammy-nominated song. You hear these things, and you’re heartened.
Slowly but surely, you start experimenting with shedding the insecurity. You start trusting yourself a little bit more. You think, well, if he can make it…why can’t I? You feel a tentative pride. I’m from western Wisconsin, and I’m not ashamed of it. Which isn’t to say you won’t ever leave your small town…you know you will; you know you have to, someday. But you see now, with clarity, what should have been obvious all along: your provincial background shouldn’t keep you from dreaming anything. There’s a chance that you might live happily – or at least, contentedly – ever after.
This isn’t some weird fairy tale. Bizarre as it seems, it’s a true story, and it’s mine.
The superstar in question is Justin Vernon and his band Bon Iver, the genre-busting nine-member group that has fused virtuosic musicianship with elements of rock, folk, jazz, and even contemporary classical to create their own unique, wildly popular indie-rock sound. Vernon is from my hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, population 65,000, but he hasn’t given a hometown show since 2008. It turns out that earning multiple Grammy nominations, collaborating with celebrities, and embarking on sold-out international tours tend to take up a person’s time.
But this fall, Bon Iver announced they were coming home. Two hometown shows, December 12 and 13 at Zorn Arena at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. $15 for gallery seats.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said to my laptop when I read the news. “You are kidding me.”
***
Nothing went the way it was supposed to in 2011, for better and for worse. Three of my family’s four cats died. I met some outrageously talented people whose kindnesses moved me to tears. I participated in some disillusioning family feuds. I went to several world-class concerts. I tentatively started coming out of the closet as an asexual (a process much more difficult – and much more liberating – than it sounds). I had the chance to take a violin lesson, my first in five years. I played a couple of solos with string orchestra. I spent a day in Minneapolis admiring the cultural diversity and then came back to Eau Claire and found out that someone I’ve known my whole life takes a perverse pleasure in employing unspeakable racial slurs. Back and forth – forth and back – lows and highs – highs and lows. The combination of the dreadful and the divine was disorienting.
In short, everything got turned upside-down. So maybe in a weird way it was fitting that I, the self-avowed classical freak, found myself closing out the year by waiting in line for an hour in the Wisconsin winter to get good seats for an indie rock group.
I went to the show with the two people I love best in the world. (…If I admitted that one of them was my mom, would I lose some cool points? … I would? Okay.) We got a bit chilly and loopy in line, and so we started a drinking game, substituting hugs for alcohol. Hug whenever you see beards, flannel, plaid, blaze orange, or a Recall Walker petition. This was a Bon Iver concert held in Wisconsin directly after deer hunting season, so as you can imagine, we spent more time embracing than not. Our game was interrupted when the line began moving forward, and moving forward very quickly. I’m used to the leisurely pace of ticket collection at classical concerts, where elderly volunteers slowly rip off stubs and then hand you programs. Nothing like that here. People were jogging along the corridors to secure the best seats. We spun up the concrete stairs and into the gallery, and got front row bleacher seats overlooking the stage.
Victory.
By nine o’ clock, after the opening act (the lovely Lianne La Havas) wrapped up, the anticipation had reached a fever pitch. The electricity was just burning through the arena; it was all I could do to keep from shrieking myself hoarse with excitement…and the band hadn’t even taken the stage yet. I briefly entertained the idea of what it would be like if orchestral audiences behaved this way – screaming, stamping, hollering FUCK YEAH, MAHLER!!! WOOOO! before the conductor ascends the podium. (Sacrilegious as it sounds, I now kinda want to experience this, for, as the cool kids say on Tumblr, reasons.)
Finally the band came onstage. Justin Vernon was there, and I was there, and my mom and my best friend were there, and 3497 other people were there, and we were all there, and were all there together, and in some inexplicably moving way, the fact was sacred. It felt a bit like we were at an indie rock revival: we had a wild hipster crowd of laypeople, eight virtuosic back-up apostles, and Justin Vernon as our bearded, angelic-voiced preacher. As soon as the band launched into Perth, the crowd went berserk. Right away I was so overcome by the percussion, brass, and audience thumping my sternum that I started grinning uncontrollably and tearing up like a crazy person. What a relief to be in a venue where I could react to good music however I like and not be afraid of showing it, instead of tightening up and holding it all in, as I’m forced to do during particularly thrilling bits of Shostakovich or Sibelius.
After Perth and Minnesota, WI came the gentle guitar in the entrance to Holocene. I completely and immediately lost it. This was a song that I’ve inadvertently tied up to the memory of one of my cats. She was the closest thing I’ll have to a child for a very long time – maybe ever – and her sudden death in May was the most devastating thing I’ve ever endured. Late this summer there came an afternoon when I realized, suddenly, that it was time to fold up the blanket she slept on. To steel myself, I turned on Holocene, and I did it.
And just like that, the lyrics burned into the memory, and the memory of the loss itself –
At once I knew I was not magnificent / High above the highway aisle / Jagged vacance thick with ice / And I could see for miles miles miles.
I cried that afternoon, but less than I thought I would. Less than I would have if I hadn’t had the companionship of the song and the lyrics and the voice. Of music.
I set the folded blanket down and looked out the open window. The breeze picked up. I looked beyond the trees and far away into the empty blue sky. Somehow I’d survived the loss. I might have cracked open, but, miraculously, I hadn’t broken.
“And I could see for miles miles miles,” I sang to myself – sang to the sky – and five months later, to Bon Iver.
***
One of the many life lessons I’ve learned this year is that genre doesn’t matter. If music is engaging, and if it touches you, it doesn’t matter what form it comes in – whether that be an hour-long violin concerto or an indie rock song with gorgeously impenetrable lyrics. And if Bon Iver is anything, especially live, it’s engaging. From the pulsating lights, to the astonishingly virtuosic bass saxophone solos, to Vernon’s oddly endearing bobbing onstage as he plays guitar…it’s all engaging, all of it.
Eventually Vernon paused for a moment to catch his breath and talk to us. I won’t use more than a couple of quotations since I can’t remember word-for-word what he said, but I do remember the gist of his impromptu remarks, and I always will.
Since his commercial success, he said, things have been strange. Everywhere he goes, everyone tells him how special he is. “Well, I already knew that,” he said. “My parents taught me that!” The crowd giggled. And that’s, he said, the reason he knows it’s important to stay connected with one’s geographically isolated small-town roots – to keep a sense of perspective, to remember not to rely on what “important” “big-name” people say. “Even though we do like to complain about all the shit that goes on in this town…” (Audience applause.) Being from a small town reminds you that we are, in fact, all small and – in the long run, no matter how successful we are – insignificant. “We’re small,” he said, “we’re small,” and he shrugged.
The last number of the night was The Wolves (Act I and II). The second portion of the song – the second act – is a line that drips again and again with desolation: “What might have been lost – what might have been lost – what might have been lost…” It’s a tradition at Bon Iver shows for the audience to sing along with the band, beginning very quietly, then getting louder and louder and louder, culminating at the end with a primordial, gut-choking, venue-wide shriek. Vernon was about to describe the tradition to us, but then suddenly he stopped short and stepped back from the mike and said, “You all know what to do.”
Yeah. We did.
The band began the song, Vernon’s voice straining and aching through the room through the first act. Then came the quiet, agonizingly insistent refrain. Sitting up high in the gallery, those five short words meant more to me than they ever had before, and probably ever will again.
What might have been lost…
The deaths of my cats – my sweet darlings – my kids…
What might have been lost…
The resulting vulnerability that cracked me open in ways I was never, ever expecting…
What might have been lost…
Having to let go of relationships that have become untenable, for heartbreakingly stupid reasons I’ll never really understand.
What might have been lost…
People I love, people I trust, telling me that I really shouldn’t do what I want – that what I want is too much to expect, too much to hope for. That I should sit down, shut up, stay in town, settle for the status quo, and stop rocking the boat…
What might have been lost…
New faces, kind faces, dear faces, telling me the exact opposite…
What might have been lost…
Having to choose between the two paths…
What might have been lost…
The relief and agony of knowing the latter path is the inevitable one; that even more difficult good-byes lay ahead…
What might have been lost…
My own paralyzing insecurity…which maybe, in the final analysis, is the only thing holding me back.
Don’t bother me…!
Eventually I couldn’t hear my thoughts anymore. My voice became the crowd’s, and the crowd’s became mine. At the end we let out a crazy long communal cry, together.
I broke down, gutted out.
Catharsis.
There was no encore after that. How could there be? The band took their bows. Vernon looked up at the gallery where I was sitting and waved. He couldn’t see me, but I waved back wildly with gratitude, tears staining my face.
After the show I emerged from the buzz of Zorn Arena out into the silent December night. I walked over the university footbridge to get back to the car. I glanced over the railing at the blurry lights of the city wavering in the river. I’ve lived in Eau Claire my whole life, but from this new vantage point I couldn’t recognize any of the landmarks. All I could see was their abstract, impressionistic beauty, smeared across the night, floating away in the water.
I’m always a sucker for a good end-of-year review. What went right, what went wrong. The highlights, the lowlights. So without further ado…
Best Decision: Starting this blog.
Best Readers: You, obviously. *obsequious smile*
Best Concert as Performer: Community Table, April 2011. It impressed upon me what’s really important about our art. It’s not about the repertoire or the competition or playing every note perfectly. It’s about passion and communication – saying things that can’t be said in words. Everything else is a bonus.
Worst Concert as Performer: Let’s just say I’m glad I was paid for playing this concert. Interpret that as you will…
Best Concert as Audience Member: This category was super-difficult. I had the immense honor of seeing the Minnesota Orchestra three times this year. Only two of the concerts got written up in reviews. But I think my favorite was actually the one concert I never wrote about – the Ravel Inside the Classics concert in Minneapolis in March. First of all, it was repertoire I’ve loved forever, and second, it was a lot of fun to hear musicians talking about it. That weekend opened so many doors for me, intellectually, emotionally, professionally… It was everything a good concert should be, and more. Possible Honorable Mention – I have tickets to one of the music world’s most coveted concerts of 2011…the final Bon Iver homecoming concert in Eau Claire on December 13. I have a gut instinct it will be one of the musical highlights of not just the year, but my life.
Worst Concert as Audience Member: Once again, won’t say, but the problem wasn’t actually the music, it was the snotty people around me!
Biggest Musical Regret: Not being part of an orchestra. I’m in a string orchestra, and I love that, but there…are times…that…I miss the brass and woodwinds. Okay, I said it. I won’t say it again.
Favorite Repertoire: Bach g-minor adagio. I will work on that piece until the end of my days and still not get to the bottom of it. But it’s so satisfying to try.
Favorite Impromptu Concert: A friend played some solo Bach for me on a warm breezy August afternoon. We were in the parlor of an 1880 house and the porch door was open and the birds were chirruping out the bay window. Those few moments were perfect. For the rest of my life, whenever I hear that piece, I will remember that moment in the parlor, and how the tears started draining down my face.
Best Remix: The Oh Long Johnson cat remix. Obviously.
Best Comment by a Conductor: “Okay, guys, let’s get out our Jewish Christmas carols!”
Worst Comment by a Conductor: From a guest conductor, and inappropriate to reproduce here.
Best Non-Classical Group And Track: Bon Iver. I love just about every one of their songs, but… The one that was the gateway drug for me was Skinny Love. Yeah, I’m a few years behind the times. Sue me.
Best Musical Movie Scene: Actually, make that seventy years behind the times. This year I discovered Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and in particular, their dance to Night and Day. I covet Ginger’s dress, which is the single most beautiful gown I’ve ever seen.
Favorite Soundtrack: The Fountain.
Favorite SotL Blog Entry, Tagged “My Writing”: Out of the fifty I’ve posted this year, this one.
Favorite SotL Blog Entry, Tagged “Not My Writing”:This one with Marie Hall. Her personality just shines through the pages. She was fearless.
Best Lyrics: From Bon Iver’s Holocene – And at once I knew I was not magnificent / strayed above the highway aisle / jagged vacance, thick with ice / I could see for miles, miles, miles. Those words say it all, really. They celebrate the significance of insignificance. If that makes any sense. It’s my Song of the Year already.
Best Music Book: I’m not exactly in the center of the music book biz (/understatement); everything I read is courtesy of the Internet or the library. But the best book of the year that I did get my hands on was Alex Ross’s collection of essays, Listen to This.
Most Blatantly Obvious String Instrument Dub: The violinist on Celtic Woman.
Cruellest Violin-Related Tweet: Sherlock co-creator, writer, and deity Mark Gatiss, tweeting an image of Sherlock’s violin from the filming of season 2, with a quote from Doyle about Sarasate. New season of the show starts January first! (Forgive my enthusiasm, but when you’re 22, and you’ve been a Holmesian for over half your life, this show becomes a pretty big deal.)
Favorite Single Line I Wrote This Year, Taken Completely Out of Context: Everything about her was predictable: her eagerness, her enthusiasm, her obsequiousness, her obsessive thirstiness for knowledge, her conviction that classical music is a sacred art and every semi-talented practitioner of it a kind of high priest.
Best Colbert Report Duet: Technically not on the Colbert Report, but Stephen’s rendition of the modern-day classic “Friday” on Jimmy Fallon’s show. It was done to raise money for arts education in public schools, which is a cause I think anyone reading this blog can get behind.
Favorite Bit of SotL Spam: You guys miss so much spam on my blog. So much of it is so entertaining that I almost feel like starting a separate blog for hilarious spam. But the best one came about a week or so ago, when I had one from a diarrhea prevention website that quoted Mark Twain. Not even kidding.
Favorite Tumblr: Aside from mine, of course? Cough. Actually, Facepalmmozart. About half of the entries I reblog on my Tumblr come from there.
Favorite Tumblr Post from the Song of the Lark Tumblr
Best Lesson I’ve Learned: Do what you want to do as an artist. Trust your gut. If you’re good at what you do, and you have potential, then seize that potential, and don’t make excuses. Don’t let anyone keep you from doing what you want to do. If people keeping you hostage emotionally, and you decide to keep quiet about it to not upset them… You’ve lost. You’re either going to do what you want to do and have them be angry with you, or you’re not going to do what you want to do, and then you’ll get angry with them, and then they’ll get angry back. Both alternatives are painful. Incredibly painful. But the first one less so.
Thinking toward 2012…
Best Bet for Best Concert of 2012: Minnesota Orchestra and Ehnes in Brahms concerto in January 2012. Or the premiere of Judd Greenstein’s new Microcommission work for the Orchestra in March. But who knows…it may turn out that the best concert will actually be the one I have no idea is happening yet. Now that is an exciting thought.
Crazy Musical Goal That I Feel Insecure About And Will Continue To Waffle About Over The Next Several Months: Auditioning for a local orchestra.
Secret Musical Goal That I Feel More Confident About: To become semi-fluent in alto clef. Yes, I’ll admit it: I’m seventy-five percent sure I’m going to rent a viola next year. Edith Lynwood Winn said every violinist should be able to play viola, and I definitely think there’s some truth to that. I can’t imagine it will ever become my first instrument, though. I enjoy viola jokes too much. (And more seriously, I’m a very high-strung tension-prone double-jointed small person, and it remains to be seen how well I’ll take to a bigger instrument.) But in any case, I do hope to do this, and blog about the experience.
What You Can Expect From This Blog In 2012: I don’t even know what to expect on this blog in 2012! But safe to say it’ll probably include a lot more discussion about female violinists and, more broadly, the history of women in classical music, period. Because there just is not enough information out there about the wonderful women who made it possible for me and all the other ladies out there to partake in this beautiful art form.
I love this blog and I love my readers. Really and truly. Thank you for coming back again and again, and as always, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know. A happy holiday season to you and yours.
Come on skinny love just last the year Pour a little salt, we were never here My my my, my my my, my my Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
Musically speaking, I live under a rock. I’m so busy with violin stuff – classical violin stuff, to be exact – that I tend to be ignorant about other styles of music. I’m not proud of the fact, and I know I’m missing out on a lot, but to be honest, I don’t even know how to start listening to non-classical stuff. My situation is a bit unique, I think. Unlike most people, I didn’t listen to a single pop, rock, or folk album for my entire childhood; it was all classical or classically influenced instrumental. (I actually laughed while reading Alex Ross’s Listen to This, where he recounts a musical childhood eerily similar to mine.) I have no frame of reference for anything else. I just don’t speak the non-classical language, at all. And it’s intimidating to wander into a new country when you don’t speak the language. It’s easier just to stay on your side of the border, right?
I tell my love to wreck it all Cut out all the ropes and let me fall My my my, my my my, my my Right in this moment this order’s tall
I’ve heard about Bon Iver for a few years now. If I didn’t, I’d have to live under not just a rock, but a frigging Stonehenge. They’re probably the most famous thing to have come out of my hometown. In fact, Eau Claire has actually become an integral part of the allure of the band. Justin Vernon, the lead singer, wrote the first Bon Iver album, For Emma, Forever Ago, holed up in a tiny cabin in northern Wisconsin. He still lives here when he’s not touring the world, and if his place is where I think it is (and I think it is), I’ve been past it countless times. He actually once brought a New York Times critic down Putnam Drive, where I ride my bike.
And I told you to be patient And I told you to be fine And I told you to be balanced And I told you to be kind
I’m a huge fan of The Colbert Report, and about a week ago Stephen interviewed Justin Vernon on the show. I identified straightaway with Vernon. He has the same shy quiet mannerisms a lot of people from this part of the country have…not to mention the same fashion sense. (Some people think that he’s a poseur and trying to up his indie rocker cred by dressing the way he does, but I can assure you, he’s not; to paraphrase Lady Gaga, people in rural Wisconsin are just born that way.) Seeing one of Eau Claire’s own on national – international – television was…weird. And weirdly gratifying. No, we aren’t from the center of the universe. Yes, we exist. And yes, we have something to say. I hadn’t actually heard any of Bon Iver’s stuff before, so I listened to their performance of Calgary. I thought it was interesting, although nothing special. But the web extra Skinny Love really struck me. After steeping myself a bit in the sound of the band, I came back to Calgary and loved it. I’m gradually, and happily, working my way through their discography.
And in the morning I’ll be with you But it will be a different kind And I’ll be holding all the tickets And you’ll be owning all the fines
I’m always fighting being from Eau Claire, being a country bumpkin. To be blunt, I’m embarrassed of where I’m from; I’m embarrassed of my relatively limited scope of reference; I’m self-conscious of my less-than-stellar education, and I’m only too aware what a different person I’d be if I’d been able to get a good one in New York or Philadelphia or heck, even Minneapolis. Classical music culture in particular fetishizes urbanity and big cities; that’s where all the talent drains, and I suppose it’s only natural. But this phenomenon can have the unintended consequence of making culture-lovers who aren’t in those urban centers feel insecure in their own experiences. Heck, how can you not feel a little naive when The Scotsman writes this about your “Wisconsin lumber town” home: “The Wikipedia list of Eau Claire’s local notables previously ranged from a girlfriend of Charles Manson to the inventor of the fraud-proof ballot paper, so Bon Iver quickly qualified.” Ouch. Seeing someone like Justin Vernon, who embraces and celebrates where he came from, who isn’t afraid of being called a hick, who isn’t frantically trying to scrub all scent of Eau Claire off himself and his body and his art…well, that’s food for thought. That’s good. He’s found that geography doesn’t necessarily impact your ability to connect to other people. He and his success make me wonder if being from a small town might actually give me a valuable perspective as a musician and as a writer. And yes, I’m well aware that indie-rock and classical music aren’t exactly the same genre. But still.
Come on skinny love what happened here We suckled on the hope in lite brassieres My my my, my my my, my my Sullen load is full, so slow on the split
Reading Bon Iver reviews is interesting. People either think it’s the most gorgeous beautiful lyrical stuff ever written, or ridiculous whiney indie wangst. There’s not many people on the middle ground. I think I’m one of the few. Bon Iver doesn’t replace my Brahms or Beethoven. But Brahms or Beethoven doesn’t replace Bon Iver, either. Brahms and Beethoven didn’t have anything approaching my life experience, at all, and it’s disorienting and wonderful to know of an artist who has. And he’s alive, to boot! Happily there’s room for everybody on my mp3 player. Why has it taken me so long to figure this out? Has my insecurity really seeped into my listening? Really? … Pathetic as it sounds, I think it did.
And now all your love is wasted Then who the hell was I? And I’m breaking at the britches And at the end of all your lines
I’m heartened that most of the younger classical players I know are just as familiar with the popular world as the “classical” world. I’m relieved that the type of classical-only childhood I had is an increasingly rare one. I’m proud I’m finally opening up a bit more, and willing to listen to and appreciate new sounds. I’m glad that I’ve realized there may be certain advantages to having grown up in a small town. (Maybe.) And I’m thrilled that it turns out I don’t need to speak the language to understand.
Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?
Song of the Lark 