Fresh from the release of his fifth studio album as Bon Iver, Justin Vernon has stopped by BBC's Maida Vale Studios to break down three tracks from the new project alongside co-producer Jim-E Stack.
Released in April, SABLE, fABLE is Bon Iver's first full-length project in five years, and features contributions from Dijon, Flock of Dimes, Mk.gee and Jacob Collier, among others. As part of an hour-long session with BBC Radio 6 Music, Vernon has given viewers an insight into the songwriting and production behind three tracks from the new album: Speyside, Walk Home and Danielle Haim collaboration If Only I Could Wait.
Initially released as part of a three-track EP in October last year, Speyside is a sparse and confessional ballad that Vernon says was inspired by a period of "guilt and reckoning" in his personal life. He shares an early demo recorded on an iPhone in 2021, and recalls trying to recreate the vibe of that recording during sessions in the studio: "There was something about the iPhone demo... the iPhone just has that great compression on it."
Early on in the recording, Vernon headed to Minnesota guitar shop Willy's Guitars with the intention of finding the perfect instrument for the song: "I was like: 'I'm going to go find the guitar!'", he says. "I got a very nice '60s Martin because I was like ‘this song's important, we've gotta get the guitar for it.’”
Vernon quickly realized that he was after a specific guitar sound for the track, one that gives the listener the feeling of being "inside the guitar", with treble and bass strings panned on either side of the stereo field. "I wanted the left part of the guitar to be in the left ear when you put the headphones on, and the right ear has the upper part of the guitar," he says.
After settling on the Martin, Vernon asked guitar tech Wyatt Overman to make his dream of placing the listener "inside" the instrument a reality by opening up the guitar and installing pickups on both the bass and treble sides, each with a dedicated output.
Vernon asked Overman test the concept by modifying a cheap, disposable guitar and sending him a demo recording. Overman settled on an Ibanez V70CE he happened to have laying around his workshop, a budget electro-acoustic that Vernon affectionately describes as "hideous".
"I was like: 'what's the story with this guitar, because it is god ugly'", Vernon says. "Wyatt does this work where he sets up guitars for folks in recovery, at this recovery centre in Minneapolis called Hazeltons. And this was such a crappy guitar that they wouldn't take it - they wouldn't even take it for inpatient recovery. So we got it."
Satisfied with the results of Overman's experiment, Vernon asked him to install the same modifications on his pricey '60s Martin, but asked that he bring the "god ugly" Ibanez along so they could A/B the pair, just in case.
"He takes this rather expensive Martin from the '60s, drilling holes in it and putting all this hardware in it to do the pickups, and we test it and I'm like... 'cool, awesome, that's cool.'" Vernon recalls. "And we're playing it, but it's just not quite making me excited, it's not doing the thing.
"So I'm like, 'Wyatt, did you bring the beater guitar? We plug it in, and it's very quiet, and kind of noisy... but it just has 'the sound’." As it turned out, not even Vernon's expensive vintage Martin could recreate the magic of a battered $199 dreadnought rejected by a rehab clinic, and the Ibanez made it on to the track.
"We had to bring it with us because it's the only guitar that sounded like this, for some reason. We put the same hardware, even nicer hardware, in other nicer guitars, and shout out Wyatt Overman for really making that happen. So we had to bring this today to show you guys," says Vernon.
"This guitar really is the song," adds Stack. "I can't ever imagine you playing this song without it."
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