Bon Iver, “Woods” (Blood Bank, 2009)

[See post to listen to audio]

Imogen Heap, “Hide and Seek” (Speak For Yourself, 2003)

[See post to listen to audio]

Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon is the very model of a modern Indie Mountain Man. If you’ve read any press about Bon Iver at all, you know the backstory behind last year’s For Emma, Forever Ago, wherein Vernon fled the wreckage of a broken band and a dissolved relationship and decided to cut people out of his life altogether for a while. Over three months in his father’s hunting cabin in Vermont, he wiled away the hours recording his own warbly falsetto over and over and stacking the copies on top of each other, emerging with one of the most talked-about albums of 2008. That’s great press, but it certainly raises expectations; what do you do when it’s time for a sophomore effort and you’ve got no backstory? Will people still like your music when, God forbid, you record it in a studio?

There’s no second album yet, so the jury’s still out. However, we do have January’s Blood Bank EP, which isn’t spectacular, but is a good sign Vernon (a) still has some fight in him, and (b) can be weird even in a studio setting. On the closing track, “Woods,” he employs that very quintessence of studio effects, auto-tune (I guess those weird “Be Kanye” posters from last year had an effect after all). But unlike ‘Ye, T-Pain, Cher, or any of pop music’s other resident robots, Vernon sounds as fragile as ever with the effect on. As before, he layers vocal tracks into a thick sound sandwich, only his timing and intonation are obviously off the mark, to a twitchy, spasmodic effect. “Woods” may not be the kind of thing you want to listen to more than twice, but props for turning the tables on everyone’s favorite new fad.

For contrast, I’m including the key track from Imogen Heap’s Speak for Yourself, a song I adore despite its association with The O.C. and, well, Imogen Heap. There’s no “right” way to use auto-tune, but if there were, this would probably be it.

UPDATE — Seems I spoke too soon about Heap; this insight came courtesy of my buddy Casey Holford:

“Hey man, just wanted to say, i’m not 100 percent sure about this, but I don’t think the vocal effects you hear on “Hide and Seek” were created with the program autotune. Actually I believe it’s layers of vocoder primarily, which is basically vocals processed through a synthesizer where notes are played to create pitch inside the articulation of an existing voice- this explains the chordal effect you hear there and the very keyboard-centric way that the notes move. I don’t know exactly how she does this stuff but I do know she can approximate a solo performance of this song live, I believe there is tape of it somewhere.”

Thanks for keeping me in line, Casey. Let this be a lesson to all of you not to let smarty-pants bloggers tell you what to think.

Download Blood Bank: Amazon MP3
Download Speak for Yourself: Amazon MP3

Dibs, “Staircase Song”
[See post to listen to audio]

Let’s begin at the beginning. Casey Holford’s 2006 split single with Yoko Kikuchi may have been what gave the This Song/That Song project its name, but the idea for the site was birthed from another, older song of his, one from his wonderful 2005 full-length, All Young and Beautiful.

An album’s final track can’t help but serve in some way as a commentary on what’s preceded it; it is the artist’s closing argument by default, and stands to color a listener’s impressions of everything that has come before. All Young and Beautiful, for all of its bright, bouncy arrangements and snappy production, is essentially a catalog of crises, cycling through highly relatable anxieties about privacy (”Junk”), identity (”Beard Song”), artistic integrity (”Too Good”), and political inaction (”Something’s Wrong 1″). But the pain here is of a redemptive sort, and Holford manages to throw the whole intimidating mess into sharp perspective with his closing argument, a heartstring-tugger called “New Year.”

Simply arranged for guitar and keyboard, the song gives its lyrics plenty of room to breathe; those breaths are deep, heavy ones, suffused with the simultaneous joy and terror of growing older, becoming ever more intensely aware of time’s unrelenting march and of one’s own powerlessness to curb or comprehend it. With the occasion of a dawning new year as a backdrop, Holford sends his narrator to wander aimlessly, lost in thoughts of what will make this year different from the last. In his musings he confronts the ever-present scariness of adult responsibility (”Clean up your room / There’s no one but you / To tell you to do what you’re told”), the monotony of the everyday (”Time to find a new tape to play / It’s been a while since B flipped back to A), and the seeming futility of doing anything at all (”Let’s go find some new streets today / Almost doesn’t matter which way”). Finally, overcome with fatigue, he stops to rest. It’s now officially New Year’s Day, and as the morning breaks, he scans the horizon for some kind of purpose:

Let’s sit and watch the sun rise
Let it get in our eyes
Want to feel the Earth spin back around
Listen while the silence makes a sound

The actual silence that follows these lines on the recording is brief, only seven or eight beats in total. But the first time I heard it, it was long enough to make me sick with panic; for one infinitesimal moment, I believed that the song (and thus the album) ended there. No redemption, no solace. All that we are, all that we know, everything we say and do and think and feel on this planet of ours, is inconsequential—a barely audible murmur in the infinite void of space. I suddenly felt very, very lonely.

You can imagine my relief a second later, then, when the silence was broken by a gentle guitar riff and a final verse:

What do we know
About getting old?
We are brand new
And we’re just passing through
Let’s look around before we go.

It’s hard to recall another time when I’ve been so thoroughly chilled and firmly reassured within a space of seconds. On a handful of repeat listens to “New Year,” I actually found myself fooled again, brought once more to the brink of despair only to be snapped back into a much more heartening frame of mind. There may be no point in trying to comprehend our existence, or attaching to it any more significance than that befitting random assortments of molecules bumping into one another, with no governing principles beyond the simple laws of physics. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ourselves and indulge in the rapturous sweetness of just being alive—the question of whether it means anything to the universe at large, that’s what’s irrelevant. Time may well be an elaborate fiction, and all our personal crises vain and immaterial, but as long as we’re here, we may as well make the most of it.

I spent the first half of 2006 listening to All Young and Beautiful near-obsessively, and the dread that accompanied that silence eventually faded with the repeat exposure. Nonetheless, I experienced some pretty acute déjà vu that fall with the release of Dibs‘ third album, Dibs Bleeds Books, whose penultimate track “Staircase Song” is a sweet but wistful number with a pregnant pause of its own. “Staircase Song” details the breakdown of a friendship through miscommunication, passive aggression, and slow-burning resentment. Through it all, Dibs’ guitar serves as a mouthpiece—his protagonist sits and strums incessantly, not because he’d rather do that than talk things through, but because it’s the only way he feels he can express himself. He cops to this shortcoming with the line, “If I could speak, I would not need this instrument,” and as if to prove his point, the words are forced into an awkward rhythm, betraying his extreme discomfort at having made himself vulnerable for a moment. Finally, near the song’s end, all communication breaks down:

Now it’s been four days since you and I last spoke
I can’t play this guitar; the strings have all broke

Words and music are subtracted, in that order, from the equation, without which the song has nothing to do but stop. The silence following these lines didn’t alarm me quite as much as the one in “New Year”—perhaps because the setup hadn’t involved such crushing existential drama—but I felt the very same pang of fear that this was where things ended, in defeat, with no hope of recovery.

When, after a few seconds, voice and guitar return to end the song for real, there is no pat resolution, just a return to the longing refrain: “I wonder if we’ll ever be the same again.” Whatever happened in that silence, the songwriter has decided to keep it to himself. We can at least hope, though, that since he no longer has his instrument to hide behind, he speaks these last words out loud, with his own voice, and that like the narrator of “New Year,” he has emerged from the silence revived, his doomsday perspective amended, newly able to see his world for what it is—full of things worth fighting not to lose.