Bon Iver's Justin Vernon is a prolific collaborator, having worked with Taylor Swift, Kanye West and many more across his almost two-decade career. His latest release, SABLE, fABLE, expands Vernon's musical universe even further, bringing in a number of featured artists on several tracks, including Dijon, Flock of Dimes and Danielle Haim.
Vernon recently joined Zane Lowe to discuss the new project in an interview for Apple Music, sharing a surprising story that reveals how he and Haim - frontwoman of the Grammy-nominated trio of the same name - ended up teaming up on SABLE, fABLE's If Only I Could Wait.
Vernon reveals that he first met Haim early on in her career, when she was playing guitar and percussion in Jenny Lewis's band at just 19 years old. "We did a co-headlining show in Utah, us and Jenny," Vernon says. He didn't meet the group as a whole until several years later, however, when Vernon's side project Volcano Choir shared a billing with Haim at Montreal music festival Osheaga, in 2014.
Ranked: Bon Iver's albums, from Sable, Fable to For Emma, Forever Ago
Rather than a polite chat in the green room, though, it appears that Vernon and the Haim sisters bonded over a slightly more unlikely activity: getting high while sampling soft-rock crooner Steve Winwood on Vernon's Teenage Engineering OP-1. "I met the girls in a dressing hut in a Montreal music festival," Vernon says. "We were sampling Steve Winwood in between bong rips on my OP-1... so, not an incredibly quality amount of time. [laughs]"
Eight years later, and Vernon's being visited by Danielle Haim and producer Jim-e Stack in his Wisconsin studio. The trio are unexpectedly snowed in for several days, but one of tracks that they end up recording - a heartfelt duet between Vernon and Haim, framed by Stack's luminous production - ends up becoming the creative spark that inspired the remainder of the album.
"I didn't really know her super well by the time she showed up, and we made a lot of stuff that really ran the gamut," Vernon says. "But for whatever reason, If Only I Could Wait, as a shell, as a seed, had this feeling. I suppose there was an opportunity to be like, 'oh, this is a duet, I could think about me and Danielle writing this for anyone to sing'.
"But I could never separate the way her voice sounded with mine when she was coming up with her melodies, then I started playing them at the same time, and being like: 'wait, they're talking to each other!' They're talking through the strings of time, through space, you know?"
"It took a long time to figure out what the song needed to say," Vernon concludes. "I've never heard her sing like that, and we worked on it for a really long time. I'm just thrilled with how truthful the song really is."
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