My Life In 35 Songs, Track 21: “Holocene” by Bon Iver

This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

At once I knew: I was not magnificent.

If you want a cheat code for making every piece of art you see or hear suddenly seem incredibly moving and profound, might I suggest suffering the most crushing failure of your life?

Justin Vernon knows a thing or two about heartbreak and failure. For years and years, the singer-songwriter behind the Bon Iver project was perhaps the person in the indie rock world most synonymous with sadness. Bon Iver’s debut, 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, was famously the outcome of Vernon retreating to a remote Wisconsin cabin to nurse a broken heart. The follow-up, 2011’s Bon Iver, Bon Iver, was far more sonically audacious, but often circled back to the same kind of tender pain as its predecessor – especially on “Holocene,” my favorite Bon Iver song, and one of those songs that will always, always put a lump in my throat.

For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my go-to wintertime albums. I fell in love with it during the December of my senior year of high school, listening to those delicate, beautiful songs over and over while driving to school on cold, snowy mornings. A choir kid in high school, I loved how Bon Iver songs felt almost choral in their composition, with Vernon frequently layering his falsetto vocals on top of one another in songs like “Lump Sum.”

Bon Iver, Bon Iver felt different. A summertime release that I listened to for the first time in the midst of a mighty northern Michigan rainstorm, that album came to evoke for me, so clearly, the feel of muggy summer nights. Where For Emma, Forever Ago had essentially become Christmas music to my ears, the follow-up was a go-to driving soundtrack for late, late nights that summer. I especially loved how the closer, the ‘80s-washed power ballad “Beth/Rest,” sounded against the backdrop of pitch-dark roads.

Most summer albums aren’t transmutable to wintertime, and vice versa. For Emma doesn’t get a lot of play from me in the warm months, just like, say, Jack’s Mannequin’s Everything in Transit isn’t the album I’m usually reaching for in December. But when winter break rolled around that year, I circled back to Bon Iver, Bon Iver. I was reeling that day from a broken heart – not the kind that comes from a romantic relationship gone wrong, but the kind you get when your longest-held dream sputters and runs out of gas on the side of the road. Justin Vernon’s music proved to be precisely the source of comfort I needed. It felt like a cozy warm blanket. And so it was that Bon Iver, Bon Iver became the rare album that I associate very strongly with the vibes of both summertime and wintertime.

I went into college as a music major – a vocal performance major, to be exact. What does that major entail, you may ask? Well, the easiest way to explain is to tell you about my former classmates. One of them sings with the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Another sang at the funeral of Barbara Bush. Several perform as parts of beloved professional choral ensembles, both domestically and abroad. My best friend from college is both a pro choral singer, in England, and a respected composer and arranger; incidentally, given the topic of this week’s essay, you can hear his voice on the latest Bon Iver LP.

The people I went to school with were and are magnificent. I wanted to be magnificent, too. I wanted it so, so badly. I had started singing in middle school and fallen in love with it fast, particularly with the sensation of hearing my voice join with dozens of others in choral ensembles. I was lucky enough to go to a high school with a truly stellar choral program, and there, I thrived. Singing felt like it came so naturally to me, and I loved hearing people tell me that they liked the sound of my voice. I landed lead roles in school musicals, scored slots at prestigious arts camps, and even performed on the Kennedy Center stage, before a certain Nazi president ruined that venue’s hallowed reputation for excellence.

Throughout my young life, music took me to so many incredible places and was the conduit that led to so many of my most cherished friendships. So, when the time came to make college plans, I didn’t think twice about deciding to pursue music. Even when that path proved hard and I got rejected from most of the schools where I auditioned, I pressed on with an unflappable belief that if I kept pushing, kept working, kept trying, I would eventually find my way to success.

That belief proved right in the short term and wrong in the long run. One of the most memorable days of my young life came in late April 2009, toward the end of my senior year of high school, when I found out I’d been accepted into the voice program at Western Michigan University. I’d spent a month on the waitlist, living in limbo while all my friends nailed down their college plans. It was such a massive relief to get that acceptance letter, and to know I was headed for a well-respected music school to major in something I truly loved. It also reaffirmed my confidence that, if I worked hard and believed in myself, other triumphs would come.

For the most part, they didn’t – at least not in music. From the start, Western was a mixed bag. On the one hand, I got to sing as part of world-class choral ensembles, alongside singers who were as passionate about music as I was. It wasn’t just classical music, either; one of my favorite memories from my freshman year came when the men’s choir I was a part of got to sing a gorgeous choral arrangement of the Iron & Wine tune “Naked As We Came.” But on the other hand, I clocked very early on that I was outclassed on all sides by many of my fellow music majors. I had a voice built for choirs and pop music, not for operatic classical solos, which unfortunately were the cornerstone of this university’s vocal instruction. I struggled to make progress in my voice lessons, and quickly grew self-conscious about my singing in a way I’d never been in high school. Looking back, I should have realized within the first two months of college that I was in the wrong major.

Maybe it was blind hope, or stubbornness, or fear of letting go of a dream that I’d chased for so long. But instead of accepting my own shortcomings and finding my way to a different major on my own terms, I ended up running out the clock as a vocal performance major. That clock finally hit zero on the evening of December 15, 2011, and it’s a night I have thought back on so many times in the years since because it truly did decide the course of the rest of my life.

For a period in the early 2000s, one of the most recognizable touchstones in popular culture was the American Idol audition. You know the basic setup: someone walks into a room and sings in front of 3-4 judges who then deliver either heartwarming praise or heartbreaking criticism. Well, the voice program at Western Michigan University was essentially built around American Idol-style experiences – not just the initial audition, but also multiple “juries” throughout the course of study that could decide whether or not you were permitted to continue on with a degree path in the music school. The biggest of those barrier exams is called the “performance hearing,” and it requires voice majors to prepare a slate of five pieces of classical music, to be sung from memory in front of a panel of vocal faculty professors. Just like in American Idol, you end up singing for your life, where each “judge” casts a yes or no vote that can tip the scales in one direction or another. For me, the panel spanned four professors and the vote deadlocked at 2-2. I needed three professors on my side to pass, so I failed. Simple as that.

While the performance hearing carried the highest stakes, every semester as a voice major ended with a similar kind of nerve-wracking assessment in front of the voice faculty, and I came to loathe those jury exams more than I’d ever hated any other kind of test in my life. Music was not built to be this clinical or academic, at least in my opinion. I abhorred the way my professors picked apart the performances of their students, and how the highly stressful nature of the test itself sapped any passion or energy from the performances. It made me angry to see music reduced to something so mathematical and hollow and cruel, and it makes me even angrier, looking back, to know that I went along with it. But I did go along with it, right up until the moment my professors failed me and booted me from the voice program.

Failing my performance hearing was something I’d known was a possibility, and I’d deliberately set things up so that the hearing was the very last thing I had to do that semester, before I headed home for Christmas break. I did not want to risk the possibility of having to go study for more exams – let alone face my friends and fellow music majors – after having my life implode at the hands of the Western Michigan voice faculty. Instead, when I got out of my failed hearing, I went straight back to my apartment, packed my car, and hit the road. For not the first time, I wanted to get the stain of this place off of me – to leave this town and this school in my rearview. Home would be a refuge, obviously, but the car and the highway felt like a refuge, too.

I still vividly remember that drive – working through something akin to the seven stages of grief while listening to a playlist of sad little pep talks. The first track I played was M83’s “Intro,” from the band’s acclaimed 2011 LP Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, because I liked the idea of recontextualizing a night full of endings as a new start. Just like graduation ceremonies are called “commencements,” this song both laid a past version of myself to rest and introduced another. “Carry on, carry on,” M83 maestro Anthony Gonzalez sang at the top of that song; it felt like a nice note of encouragement amidst a moment of epic failure.

I found similar solace in songs like Rob Thomas’s “Someday” (“You can go/You can start all over again/You can try to find a way to make another day go by”), Will Hoge’s “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” (“Keep on dreaming, even if it breaks your heart”), Snow Patrol’s “This Isn’t Everything You Are” (“There’s joy not far from here, I know there is/This isn’t everything you are”), and Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” (“I don’t need to be kind to the armies of night/That would do such injustice to you/Or bow down and be grateful/And say, ‘Sure, take all that you see’/To the men who move only in dimly lit halls/And determine my future for me”). I could have made any one of those songs the subject of this essay and been happy with my choice.

Throughout my life, the one silver lining to getting shattered has always been the way music rushes in to bandage my wounds, unbreak my bones, and ease my weary soul. It’s happened when I’ve gotten my heart broken, when loved ones have died, and when a global pandemic walloped all my best-laid plans. It’s happened when I’ve said painful goodbyes, and dealt with endings to life’s major chapters. It’s happened when people have betrayed me and fallen out of my life. It’s happened again and again and again, and I’ve written about – or will write about – many of those bracing moments over the course of this series. But I wasn’t sure it would happen that night. Music had always been the thing to comfort me when something broke my heart. But could music realistically be the thing to comfort me this time, given that it was music itself that had broken my heart?

I needn’t have worried. The version of music that the Western Michigan University voice faculty believed in wasn’t the version that had always brought me joy and solace, and getting into the car with all those songs felt every bit as rejuvenating as it always had in moments of strife.

The next day, I woke bleary-eyed in my childhood bedroom – wondering, at first, whether I’d dreamed my failure. When it turned out I hadn’t, I decided to busy myself for the day, to distract from the residual pain of the moment they’d told me I failed. I wasn’t ready yet, for instance, to log into my university account, drop all the music classes already on my schedule for the next semester, and figure out my new plan. Instead, I left the house and went out to do my Christmas shopping. I only remember one thing that I bought that day: a vinyl copy of Bon Iver, Bon Iver for my older brother. He didn’t end up caring for the album much, but buying it sent be back to those songs when I needed them most.

I felt a bit, that winter break, like Justin Vernon in the gestation period that led to For Emma, Forever Ago. Sometimes, the best thing you can do with heartbreak is to retreat, hide away for a little while. And that’s exactly how I spent those first few days of vacation: holed up in my room, the snow falling outside, listening to Bon Iver, Bon Iver on repeat, and mostly in a daze. Once my girlfriend and siblings got home for Christmas, I rallied for social time and celebration. But those first days I kept mostly to myself – just me and the music. I liked how Vernon’s songs, which are lyrically opaque, felt like Rorschach tests that I could read however I wanted to. “Holocene,” especially, suddenly seemed both massively profound and incredibly relevant to where I was sitting. “At once I knew: I was not magnificent,” Vernon sang, and it punched me right in the gut. I’d pursued a music major in part because so many people had told me when I was young that my talent was something special. What was I to do now that I’d learned it wasn’t?

Speaking about “Holocene” to NPR back when Bon Iver, Bon Iver came out, Vernon explained it thusly: “Holocene is a bar in Portland, Oregon, but it’s also the name of a geologic era, an epoch if you will. It’s a good example of how all the songs [on Bon Iver, Bon Iver] are all meant to come together as this idea that places are times and people are places and times are…people? They can all be different and the same at the same time. Most of our lives feel like these epochs. That’s kind of what that song’s about. ‘Once I knew I was not magnificent.’ Our lives feel like these epochs, but really we are dust in the wind. But I think there’s a significance in that insignificance that I was trying to look at in that song.”

I didn’t read that quote until years later, but I think I felt that theme of “significance in insignificance” that Christmastime. We’re all the protagonists of our own stories, and sometimes, we fool ourselves into believing that the world will end if something goes terribly wrong in our lives. I realized, for instance, that I had been absolutely terrified of my performance hearing, and about what would become of me if I failed it – to the point where I was hardly allowing myself to imagine what life could look like on the other side. In my brain, the possibility of falling on my face in that way felt like it really would be the end of the world.

But Christmas morning still came, and my friends and family still loved me, and music still sounded sweet, and everything, as it turned out, was okay. Before my hearing, it had felt like my entire future was in a dense fog, with no visible pathways forward in any direction. Now, the fog had lifted. The epoch was still in progress. I didn’t know, yet, which road I would travel on my journey forward, but there were many, many roads laid out in front of me, just waiting for me to take the first step.

And I could see for miles, miles, miles.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers
• Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine
• Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional
• Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard

more

Not all embedded content is displayed here. You can view the original to see embedded videos and other embedded content.