On God and Justin Vernon

There is no artist, living or dead, whose music has moved me like Bon Iver’s. When I’m lost in my head and need to return to myself, Bon Iver brings me back. When I was searching for my own artistic identity, unable to see beyond my nose, Bon Iver shone a light. And when I first visited Wisconsin, the heart of Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project, I felt deeply grounded in a land I’d never previously been to. On that trip, I spent the peak of a mushroom induced experience listening to 2011’s Bon Iver, crying tears of love and pain while facing an entanglement of self unlike any other I’ve known. As the world weathered my young adulthood, and I began to see the shoes I was to step into more clearly, Bon Iver’s music seeped into my inner rings and forever permeated my bloodstream.

Even so, I never dwelled much on the concrete meaning of Vernon’s songs. He often imbues his lyrics with fragments of his system of philosophy alongside opaque and hyper specific references, making it easier to just experience and let the words wash over than to get caught up deciphering an uncrackable code. In that way, certain lines can resonate and haunt deeply (“Everything that happens is from now on,” “The days have no numbers,” etc.), but their connection to what came before and after isn’t preoccupying. Without trying to connect all the dots, these lyrical fragments left me with a deep sense of kinship to Vernon, feeling that our worldviews were well aligned without any robust justification.

Recently, however, after a bit of obsessive listening, I grew fascinated by “Heavenly Father,” a non-album track I was introduced to when I saw Bon Iver live in 2019. It’s become a live staple of the band, but it was first made for a movie soundtrack (Wish I Was Here) in 2014, and if I were a fan at the time I probably would’ve lost my mind. The song’s backbone of chopped vocal loops and programmed beat were an early indication of many electronic experiments to follow, and listening back now after internalizing the Bon Iver catalogue is incredibly satisfying. Of course, it was the sonics that drew me in, but after catching a few intriguing lines that threw my conception of Vernon as a traditional Christian (one place I’d assumed our philosophies diverged) for a loop, I decided to take a closer look.

“Heavenly Father,” as I understand it, is about Vernon finding God on his own terms. While some lines read as specific references to Wish I Was Here, the arc of the song extends beyond the film’s narrative, and paints a picture of confinement and confusion within Christianity contrasted against liberation outside of it. It opens with the lines “Ever since I heard the howlin’ wind, I didn’t need to go where a bible went,” gesturing at a spiritual transcendence in nature reshaping Vernon’s religious outlook. By comparison, lines like “I don’t know how you house the sin” and “Filling up hulls with god damn fears” reference the guilt and fear embedded in the Christian faith which were instilled in Vernon. They are immediately followed by “But you’re/I am free now,” indicating Vernon is no longer plagued by such weight.

But “Heavenly Father” isn’t about losing faith in God, it’s about rediscovering faith with more clarity and less baggage. Vernon writes, “Heavenly father, is whose brought to his autumn, and love is left in end,” describing a replacement of a stricter and more intangible conception of God with a looser one that lives and breathes in the world we inhabit. One of my favorite stanzas in the song goes, “Heavenly father, it’s definitely lava, why you don’t carry other names?” With so many religions and articulations of God around the world, Vernon seems to be questioning why God needs to be tightly packaged in a particular box, when it is more likely those practicing different faiths are tapping into the same source.

Unlike Vernon, I wasn’t raised religiously; rather than feeling trapped within it, I entirely dismissed it. But as I got older—lived with myself and others, experienced natural beauty, took drugs, studied philosophy—I fell into a comfortable understanding of God, one who is with me every day, alive in the space between me and everyone I interact with. So I resonate deeply with Vernon’s journey, even if we approached our understanding from opposite sides. It’s a faith that colors every day of existence, instead of hedging everything for some promised afterlife, something Vernon calls out in the song’s last lines, “Heavenly father, is all that he offers, a safety in the end?” One day, I would love to be more precise in describing this fluid manifestation of God. For now, I can only gesture toward it, something Vernon does immaculately with his music. But it’s useful to know where to look, and often easier to feel something before seeing it. So if you want to find God, the best advice I can give you for now is to listen to Bon Iver.

Justin Vernon, photo by Graham Tolbert, illustrations by Carolina Munce