Across the stripped-bare songs of last year’s SABLE, EP, Justin Vernon rose from a depressive baritone towards a familiarly plaintive falsetto, from torpor into anguish. Bon Iver may have warped into fascinating shapes over the years—the impressionistic pop of 2011’s Bon Iver, the glitching beauty of 2016’s 22, A Million, the gorgeous abstractions of 2019’s i, i—but the high lonesome atmosphere of his debut album For Emma, Forever Ago hung around. SABLE even cut back tendrils of metaphor that so often wrap around each other in Vernon’s lyrics. “I would like the feeling gone,” he sang at the outset. “What is wrong with me?” he asked in a near-whisper. Even the falsetto howl that pierced the mix in the middle of “S P E Y S I D E” sounded like an echo from the frozen nowhere of his mythic past.
SABLE, fABLE, his fifth album as Bon Iver, casts those songs—and the Bon Iver project as a whole—in a new light. SABLE is carried over whole to serve as the prologue, three uniformly deep-blue songs introducing an album of kaleidoscopic color. What follows on fABLE is joyful and immediate, as Vernon rhapsodizes about rebirth and romance in ways that would have seemed impossible even a few months ago. It is a genuinely surprising pop and soul record from an artist who has spent half a lifetime searching for new modes of expression. Across fABLE, he sounds unrestrained and irrepressible, as though he’s purging some ecstasy he’s kept at bay for years. This is not an album cluttered by shadows.
Vernon has been orbiting the word “fable” in his lyrics for years, though it’s always had a negative connotation, as though the mythic was something to be rejected or fought off. On “8 (circle)” from 22, A Million, he implored whoever was at the other end of the song to “say nothing of my fable” before rounding back on himself: “I’m standing in your street now, and I carry his guitar.” There was the sense that Bon Iver’s foundational story, that journey into the frozen nowhere to make For Emma, Forever Ago, had been repeated so many times that Vernon couldn’t identify with the protagonist anymore. That wasn’t his guitar he was carrying.
Here, on “Awards Season,” the last track of the prologue, he plays the fable off against the “sable”—deepest black, dressed for mourning. He absorbs it as an identity: “I’m a sable/And honey, us the fable.” He is the abyss. In an interview with The New Yorker shortly before the EP’s release, he said that adopting sable as an identity in that line was a way of questioning whether his heartbreak was self-inflicted. Perhaps he had been “pressing the bruise[...] steering this ship into the rocks over and over again.” His pain brought him two Grammy Awards, sold-out arena tours, and the admiration of some of the world’s biggest pop stars. That’s powerful positive reinforcement.
fABLE attempts to disrupt that cycle. The thinnest thread, one whisper-quiet breath of a synth, bridges the gap between SABLE and fABLE. Follow it to the other side and the atmosphere is all new. “Short Story” blooms into a flutter of electronic bleeps and piano keys, Vernon’s voice back in the clouds and an exclamation in falsetto: “Oh, the vibrance! Sun in my eyes!” Before the album’s first great crescendo, the mix calms around him singing away from the microphone, as though to himself: “January ain’t the whole world.” Winter is over. On “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” Vernon spits giddily childlike rhymes: “tripping, slipping, ripping, lipping.” The chorus is euphoric, carried skyward on a hallucinatory pedal steel and a sweep of violins, with Vernon singing in disbelieving reverie: “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now.”
There are sounds and ideas on fABLE that Vernon has toyed with in the past, but here they are followed to their extremes. There was shimmer and shine to his pop-leaning collaborations with Francis and the Lights, for example, but they produced nothing as pretty as the unabashed, hymnic love song “Walk Home.” Bon Iver may have found grandeur in diamond-cut CD-era production, but “If Only I Could Wait,” a gorgeously melodramatic ’90s R&B-pop ballad featuring Danielle Haim, is sleeker by half than anything else in his catalog. It’s a brief pause in the bliss and it never quite resolves. Instead, language breaks down: “Not for the freight/I’ll best alone/In high ways.” But it’s still a search for communion, not a capitulation to loneliness.
Most strikingly, while he’s gone in search of god before—not the Lutheran God of his upbringing, but explicitly something he’s willing to call “god”—Vernon has never leaned so heavily on praise music for inspiration. The sunny, pitched-up samples and rich harmonies on “Day One,” alongside Dijon and Jenn Wasner, aka Flock of Dimes, could have been borrowed from mixtape-era Chance the Rapper. And if that’s a nod to the history of Black praise music, “I’ll Be There” lights the church doors up in neon as Vernon invokes biblical language in his search for community: “It’s time that I do testify.” A church organ hums through the track and Vernon’s back in falsetto—though he couldn’t be further away from that plaintive, high-up howl of “S P E Y S I D E.” Sultry and slinky, it’s reminiscent of Lovesexy-era Prince. Tellingly, it’s one of the two fABLE songs on which MonoNeon, a member of Prince’s band in his later years, lays down an exuberant bassline.
Vernon may seem like an unlikely source of that sort of joy. Even putting the SABLE, EP to one side, the past five years suggested that he’d made peace with his past. He collaborated with Zach Bryan on the ruggedly melancholic “Boys of Faith,” and when Taylor Swift wanted to walk into the woods herself, Vernon seemed to be sitting at the piano, waiting. It must be tempting to keep pressing that bruise, to feel that safe, familiar pain. Particularly when others see it in you so clearly. On “There’s a Rhythmn,” fABLE’s penultimate song, over another head-nodding R&B beat, he wonders if it’s time to move on from that cycle of anguish for good: “I’ve had one home that I’ve known/Maybe it’s the time to go/I could leave behind the snow.” The album ends with a drumless two-minute improvised collaboration, Vernon having declared “there is a rhythm” before the rhythm dissolves completely, a handful of friends in Wisconsin making things up between them as they go.
For all the sonic risks and boundary-pushing distortions of previous records, SABLE, fABLE is the more daring album in Bon Iver’s catalog. Doubling down on the pop experiments of his own middle period, pulling from R&B and lap-steel country at once, and making a home in the desperately uncool surroundings of what used to be called “adult contemporary” music—that’s all unexpected. But riskier still is Vernon’s decision to turn away from the shadows and emerge from his own familiar misery, determined to experience joy, a leap into the unknown.
