In Justin Vernon’s music as Bon Iver, beauty and meaning spring from disorienting sources: a howling falsetto, a heart-shredding guitar riff, a chorus of heavily panned woodwinds, a disintegrating synth patch, a confounding sample, a lyric that makes less sense the more you listen to it (I’m still parsing through “Honey in the hale could fill the pales of loving less with vain” more than a decade later). Vernon builds worlds where the road signs are upside down and it’s always snowing, even when it’s raining. Whether it be the cabin isolation of For Emma, Forever Ago, the pastoral fantasy of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, or the dream terrain of 22, A Million, Vernon’s sceneries itch with instability and longing, his songs at their best when they’re blood-stained and bruised.
Vernon appears newly cleansed on “Everything is Peaceful Love,” the lead single from Bon Iver’s forthcoming album, SABLE, fABLE. With help from frequent collaborators BJ Burton and Jim-E Stack, Vernon offsets a pop-soul standard with some of his signature quirks: granular synthesizer and electronic percussion, syrupy pedal steel slung across a bed of warm keys, cavernous vocal harmonies colliding with horns and strings. Never has he sounded so joyous, so sure of the goodness in himself and others. “I know that we may go and change someday/I couldn’t rightly say/That’s for parting days,” he cries in a preening falsetto, surely one of the best hooks he’s ever sung. The song’s statement of purpose may seem sappy or simple—love is everywhere, word to Pharoah Sanders—but Vernon’s sincerity overcomes any threat of sentimentality. “Everything is Peaceful Love” is an anthem of hope carved from decades of depression and failure, a love song haunted by pain, a hymn powerful enough to persuade even the harshest cynics that sorrow isn’t forever, that everything really is love if you tune in at the right frequency.
