Bon Iver - "Woods" (this is for sampling purposes)
Last week I was invited to a friend's home for dinner. I was not the only guest, and then there was her family, there were maybe eight or nine of us altogether so we had to collect chairs. I took an office chair, spent most of the meal rolling back and forth between the dining table and a computer, playing DJ. I played the new Bon Iver EP in its entirety and I couldn't contain my excitement for "Woods", which meant I blabbed all about the song, what it is, what it's built out of. I played it loud and I smiled BIG, BIG, BIG. One of my friends laughed and kept laughing; vocoders crack her up, auto-tune cracks her up. Her husband (an incredible musician, a thoughtful man) was struggling not to. He told me that, to him, the use of vocoder and/or auto-tune auto-matically "makes the song so urban." I felt compelled to recite the lyrics to them --
I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind.
I'm building a still to slow down the time.
It was a coat-of-arms, a panoply, not like prayer but like worship -- ostentatious, but beautiful. I listened through the table sounds. I thought if I told everyone to keep going with me, to wait until the end, then they'd listen too and they'd get it. I told them it was like Prince and I was mostly kidding. I told them it was like T-Pain and I was flat-out lying. I couldn't imagine how anyone could hear this music, really hear it, and hear urban, which to me suggests at a minimum that people run rampant, that the heat you feel comes from living bodies. The landscape knows your secrets. "Woods" is the landscape. It's dead, celestial and full. It could never be alone, it's too free.
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[photograph by {the excellent} Derek Vincent]
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