We gather around music like we gather around fire. We listen, we gaze.

Two ancient traditions that

keep the story of humankind spinning with heat and vibration.

Around the fire we communicate our shared Pasts to welcome shared Futures; releasing evil spirits
in order to let in divine spirits. We tell ourselves these histories to make us stronger.

So goes the ritual around the fire.

Yet fire is more than heat. Music is more than vibration. Fire's indiscriminate force both destroys
and creates. But music, we give it power by making ourselves powerless. We become vulnerable to
what music gives us; a real or unreal person, place or time. Music gives us the space to yearn, to
forgive, to let go if only for a moment.

For Emma, Forever Ago is this space. It is music of many fires.

"Emma" is the imagined spirit of lost loves, of first loves or of the first real experience of love. It is
the most powerful energy we know. It is Emma when you hear the entire universe in the sound of
someone's voice. It is Emma when your vision expands to see the Earth's rotation. It is the pendulum
of heat that oscillates between a pair of hearts. It is the Meta-sense. Music realizes this absence of
an unknown companion we seek, even if we do not know we are seeking.

"Your love will be safe with me"

We all have our "Emma". For Justin and I, the muse of this album is the same person. Emma was a
first love to both of us at different points in our youth. Theirs was a first love of young adulthood, a
love of summits and canyons. There were times when either would be atop a pinnacle, looking for
the other who was elsewhere. It appeared as a polar energy. For me, Emma remains part of a
delicate innocence. Those fragile memories can be the most powerful.

I first met Emma on our soccer team when we were fourteen years old. On the field, we would throw
handfuls of grass at each other as the game played passed us. Our attention on each other. That
laugh. Someone like me. I cherish these memories of my youth - the courage I had to discover inside
me to reach out and hold her hand for the first time. I waited a year to finally kiss her. It was her
first kiss too (as the heart remembers). Learning how to love for the first time.

When you meet someone who shows you something about your heart, you encounter two
unknowns: because you do not yet know everything about that person , you can project onto them
all of your heart's hopes and mind's wishes for fulfillment. Imagined reciprocation then turns to real:
the excitement of late night telephone talks about our obscure interests. Opening up for the first
time to someone else. The other unknown in the encounter is everything you could never possibly
imagine that person might show you. How do you know what someone else is thinking? Exhilarating.

As any teenage couple, we went to our first high school dance together. Before this rite-of-passage,
Justin and his girlfriend at that time joined us at my folks' home in Eau Claire to take photos. That
autumn evening, Justin and I discovered through our parents' chit-chat that we share not-so-distant
relatives - Norwegians who homesteaded it only miles from where we grew up, where I write this
now. Like Justin, those immigrant never left the area. They stayed and quilted wild fields into
farmland for generations to harvest.
Months after that homecoming ball, my heart fell in love with another. And by the next harvest,
Emma’s attention was on Justin, even if her seventeen-year-old feminist self refused to wear his
football jersey on those Friday game nights. Later in our lives, she told me about their first kiss. It
made me smile because it is something Justin had never told me. It only proved how precious that
love once was to him. How he guarded it. How sharing this music must have been so difficult. That
kiss made him feel like something he had never felt before. From there, the two entered an
impermeable effervescence.

”Swing wide your crane, swing wide your crane and run me through”

Our Emma has an enchanting spirit. It is the same spirit that emanates from her mother, father, and
sister. I see it now in the eyes of her daughter, nephew and niece. Their family home attracted our
group of friends while growing up. They did not have Eau Claire fancy things like a Nintendo or a
trampoline, but they had outdoor speakers by their firepit along with a curious music collection.
Transfixed by the flames; Rickie Lee Jones “Pirates” and Miles Davis “1964 & More” have never
sounded better.

From here, we made sense of this world through each other. In fact, we still do. Around this fire
with these friends, we talked about what we heard, what it made us think of, how it related to our
lives, or just watched each other listening together in amazement at the beauty of a tune. It was a
space for us to explore our imagination and share curiosity. The ritual. Building our hearts by
understanding our ears.

”Sky is womb, she’s the moon”

Our Emma is a person that I would have done anything for, as would any of my close friends. She
has done so much for us already. She is a person that travels across the world to be there for the
moment in which you need her the most. During Emma’s wedding celebration, Justin and I stepped
outside for a smoke. We smiled and laughed about this woman who is now like a sister to us, who
first opened our hearts, and all of what that experience of first love has led to. Justin and I still have
this conversation and it will never end. Emma gave us a beautiful friendship.

While forever ago implies an impossible measurement of time, it is an agreed upon sentiment,
understood through the people of your past. Old friends from around the fire. Those who have
known you across many selves, who accept everything about you, yet hold you accountable for your
character as you have shown them throughout your life together. The wells of time and the water
of youth offer powerfully clear vision. Undisturbed and waiting to be drunk up. That is a forever I
can count on. At least we know music as a way to live this youth, always in a wholly new perspective
of understanding, which the elapsing of time reveals. If curiosity is the way to imagination, then
realizing, performing your imagination with others is the key to joy. And joy is the only true
expression of happiness. That is one of music’s many affordances: the conversion of the inner Howl
through people into fulfillment. Healing. That’s one reason why we play. We must. Equally part of
the responsibility of making music is not just touching many should through ubiquitous radio play,
it is about connecting them together in a shared aesthetic experience. A return to the fire where
this forever began.

”Cut out all the ropes and let me fall”

Around that fire as youth, we would talk about the Future. Now we talk about the memories of what
we thought the Future would be like. These memories of the Future. . . everything we imagined life
would be when we were young. This is the blessing and curse of consciousnessL your mind can be
in any time or place but it is most difficult to be here, which is the most real thing ever. As youth
looking to the Future or adults looking to the Past, we still do not seem to understand this.

How entangled it all becomes. Even if we take just the decade that marks this moment of reflection.
Maybe you have been fooled. Possibly people have taken everything from you. Your Care. Your
Time. Your Love. Your Dignity. Maybe you have been strung along or you have stung someone along.
Do you reside in a past Future? Can you fight that? Can you flee from that? Who are you fleeing?
Who are you fighting for? The underrated answer: the self.

Many of For Emma’s lyrics are another person singing these words to Justin. They are the composed
phrases of self-criticism. The remorse of having unmistakingly mistreated someone. As we all have.
Reflections on heart ways, those habits of love that we know about ourselves only through pattern
and time.

Music shows us that unposed experience of humanness, when all there is left is honesty. It carries
us from our crafted public-selves to the shared-self. In a moment, music can destabilize and stabilize
your thoughts, feelings, and being. For Emma, Forever Ago has exhaled into many lives in countless
situations. It has offered precisely the breath that is needed, if not by comfort then by rupture. It
has helped us open up and rebuild. And that endeavor comes from reflection on deep, shared
struggles of one’s place in the world.

One could dismiss yet another privileged person speaking about the struggles of life. But I am
speaking about the life struggles that we all share - through kinship, relationships, childhood,
fellowship - social experiences that connect humanity. Perhaps not in the particular, but at least in
the universal. For Emma, Forever Ago reminds us of those universal struggles of getting by together.
Tuning into these shared struggles allows us to identify with our neighbor or a faceless Other.
Because we all weep, drive and mourn. Once you are able to look into anyone’s eyes and see those
shared struggles of social inequality, or hunger, of shelter, of clothes, of disability, of geography, of
censorship. That is a peopled pathway to knowing.

People, by Music.

Even with music, though, that pathway to knowing is not stable nor certain. It is achieved together,
so trust becomes the question. Otherwise forever - like that - changes to for-never. This is all to say
that any quest for stability, the quest for harmony that Emma may evoke, has as many consequences
as the dissonant wanderer with nothing, no root. The difference is that one has everything to lose,
and the other does not.

”Balance we won’t know, We will see when it gets warm”

I have saved a decade of tears to give today as I write. It is not because of the Past. Or the loss of
something by time passing. Nor is it because of the confusing memories of everything that did not
happen in my life as I had imagined. Quite the opposite. When I listen to For Emma, now I hear
beautiful associations - a wonderful history that unfolds throughout Bon Iver’s albums. This record
was the beginning, a consolidation of the Past. I remember a moment during the For Emma tour
years ago, at the seaside in England. I had not seen Justin for some years. It was in the middle of
some kind of after-show hijinx, when he put his hand on my shoulder, “It’s starting, it’s happening
again,” he told me. It is difficult to explain what he meant, but it was about re-establishing so much
we had believed in.

While the music of For Emma plays, I smile at these memories.

However in between the albums’ songs, those silent seconds conjure a distinct sadness. It is as if
you allow music to take away your doubts only to realize it has just exposed them to you and left
you with no solution. No answers, only questions. It is in those seconds that I think of all the
wonderful possible lives that did not come to be with people who have passed through my intimate
life, those “Emmas” of my adulthood I suppose. That was the vanity of youth: the shifting of heart
because of the Future and its agitation from nowhere. Erstwhile paralysis.

But the Future is just a concept. I am not going to convert myself with it anymore. Now only musical
time exists.

”Don’t let it form us, don’t let it form us”

At least I know how those imagined Futures are featured in my mind when I close my eyes. I know
where the boundaries of those memories lay. But there are other memories. A recent haunting that
shows me the struggle will always continue. Where those memories might possibly live inside me, I
do not know nor do I understand.

Of being a breath away from her face,

The feeling of her fingertips on my side,

The sound her lips make when she whispers.

Those memories are somewhere so far away, sunken. However beautiful they once were to me, I
have attempted to drown them because I know they can hurt me. What is weakness?

And then music, with its deep-water line, catches a memory from the ocean of my Past. It is from a
depth I cannot see because sunlight does not reach there like it once did. . . I watched that memory
sink before. . . down. . . down. . . down. . . Now from the security I have made above, I see it rise. . .
up. . . up. . . up.

The music, with the life it can give, helplessly attempts to resuscitate a feeling that long ago lost its
breath in my heart.

Then the music, with its wide net, begins to ensnare more.

Memories that have just released their final breath into the water as the sun’s rays touch them for
the last time while they sink into my abyss of the forgotten:

A pocket of breath floats to my soul’s surface and releases the tiniest, quietest sound into the
universe.

The last dying shimmer of a memory’s energy.

”Everything that happens is from now on”

With For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin released himself from a Past, into a Future. Perhaps that is what
this music has done for many others at different points for whatever reasons.

But we must not mistake this release. The Past remains a part of us: it is in our gestures, our beliefs,
our sense, our knowledge, our patterns, our heat, our vibrations.

The Past is neither chosen, taken nor given: it emerges in the improvised moment.

It is our story, our continuum, in real time. The one we share together around the fire.

That story is shared now, the shared struggle, the shared joy. That is why people and music are here.

Trevor Hagen April Base September 2017

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