forever ago - a review

 My earliest memories of music was 9xm or MTV beats, earliest English song memories from VH1 when memorizing as a child watching Bollywood music videos on Girls like you by Maroon 5 and Shape of you by Ed Sheeran. As i grew up and had a device on my hand i had this big decision about what will be my music taste to be made. It came naturally, i was drawn to sad songs, lyrically awakening and emotionally driven. I liked when i could feel the vulnerability and relate to the artist. It slowly moved into Urdu rappers and hip hop giants like Jcole. But i never believed music could move a person to his core, make someone cry, make someone sit there just thinking on life, music that would take someone on a journey, that would change him. I never was much of a music listener but everything changed when an unaware me put on the earphones and set the album on play. 

 

The original album cover


Vernon was sick and tired looking for a way to escape his life and just be away from everyone, because he knew it was the only way he could fix everything. He realized he was mostly sad and that he wasn't as happy as he was. Suffering from a break up and a illness he finally decided to get away for some time and drove to his fathers farm house looking to be alone. He'd cook and hunt food alone. He started creating rough melodies where he'd later add lyrics and just had recorded them without any thought in mind. These rough songs later is what became the album, the beauty being that the final audio were those he had recorded in the cabin away from mankind. 

I always believed that art comes from suffering, that a person has to be broken, has to hug the pain most would reject to create art, to become in the making and Justin Vernon made it all so much more true. The album plays as if its a background music, as if its a question looking for something in oneself. Its the type of album one would listen to in solitude and it became that for me. With every passing song and every lyric i would be pushed to think, and the beauty is that it never loses its spark, being just as impactful on every play. Today most music has become individual cash grabbing opportunity with no implications or deeper meaning, and that music does have a place but music like this is different. Music like these are ones you'd hang on the walls of museums, you'd keep to yourself, the ones you'd let play as you'd sit there looking at the sunset, the music for which gramophones are made. In its authentic raw and roughness, in its simplicity, in its loneliness, in those 37 minutes Vernon heals, heals by revealing everything hided in one. 

My favorite track from the album was Creature fear, a song which starts off slow and slowly rises just to return. My interpretation would be that it is a song about how all of us fear the unknown, how we fear the world and the future and its uncertainty. he calls this creature fear. He talks of how we sometimes love so much that we think this is that, that there would be no one else for us. The song's beauty lies in the fact that everyone can have their own interpretations of it. 

The album's core theme is how at times we cling onto our pasts, as an earlier annotation states, Vernon describes Emma as not a person, but “a place that you get stuck in. Emma’s a pain that you can’t erase.”

Every song has its own journey and at the end it becomes a picture. Vernon through these songs has given me something id wanna take to my grave. As someone who always wanted to live a life of isolation, who maybe found myself too wanting a change, this album gave me hope. 

My songwriting and composing journey was also greatly affected by Vernon.

Bon Iver the band  

 

At the end, its the hums of the universe  that Vernon has collected, it the glitters of the stary nigh, the whisper of winds and the rays of sunlight on the winter morning that became For Emma, Forever Ago.

 - neil 


Location: XCVR+47 Mazeok Forest, West Bengal, India

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