Bon Iver, round two

Bon Iver, aka Justin Vernon, has made a pretty huge splash with his second, self-titled album...and given that I liked the first one a whole lot and I had $100 credit at the record store (thanks people for those full-art promos of records I could care less about...), I bought it and have been listening to it, off and on, ever since.

You may have heard that it is vastly different from For Emma...but it is not. It has the same eerie vocals, the same elliptical lyrics, the same fascination with place (though more places, certainly, this time...Perth, Michigan, Calgary, Lisbon, Ohio). It is more densely arranged than the first one, with a good deal more use made of synthesizers, but this is a detail, one that does not detract, for the most part, from the pretty melancholy of these songs. I like all but the last one, which is giving me a little bit of a Peter Frampton vibe..."Calgary" is lovely.

I think that if you bought the first one and liked it, you will probably like this one, though it's not as much of a shock, so maybe not as much. People who didn't hear the first one first may like this even better, and given the sales figures, there are going to be a lot of them.

Some of you may remember that I interviewed Justin Vernon about five minutes before he blew up huge and had one of the early versions of the "boy in the woods giving up on himself then writing a masterpiece story." You can still read it here, if you want.

Pretty funny. one time Michael Goldberg was telling me why he never put my posts on the first page, and instead favored people like IndiePixie (who is probably a nice person but yeesh!). He said, "Well, people just aren't going to be as interested in an interview with someone like Justin Vernon..." as, I don't know, whoever the hell was she slavering over at the time. Tee hee. Being early...it's a lot like being wrong, eh?

Anyway, hope you all had a lovely 4th or just a nice weekend if you live outside the US. We all ran a 4 miler yesterday...really fun, I won a shirt in the raffle after.