Song in Focus : 'Love More' by Bon Iver

Bon Iver makes very strange songs - there could be no doubt about that. However, this is a level apart from even 'For Emma' or 'Skinny Love'. As for someone like me who's a sucker for good poetry and is perpetually concerned about lyrics more than musical composition, this should be an exception. The song sounds like a composition of human-whale calls put together, as one of the comments in YouTube had pointed out and is both psychedelic and very surreal as an experience. You could transcend into spaces you have never come across before and then hit the walls of your room and float back into nowhere again. 

I had literally gotten down two stations later at the metro and had to manage my way back to the right place by getting rid of the headphones for the while this afternoon - so if you're talking about levels of getting song-high, this could be an ultimatum. 

Lyrics

Chained to the wall of our room

Yeah you chained me like a dog in our room

I thought that's how it was

I thought that we were fine

Then the day was night

You were high you were high when i was doomed

And dying for with no light with no light

Tied to my bed

I was younger then

I had nothing to spend but time on you

But it made me love it made me love it made me love more

It made me love it made me love it made me love more

Do what you said the words she said left out

Over unto the sky where i'll soon fly

And she took the time

To believe in to believe in what she said

And she made me love she made me love she made me love more

She made me love she made me love she made me love more

The lyrics to the song is fairly simple considering Vernon has penned down songs like 'Flume'. This song is more on the Justin Vernon than Bon Iver side of things, the basic tenets matching with songs such as 'Song for a Lover of Long Ago' or 'When It Rains Down Here'. 

Vernon also happens to be one of those musicians I absolutely adore, and could add to my list of perpetually sad people in general and go on listening to him at times the world looks absolutely doomed and about to collapse. The kind of crude emotions that he puts into his performances is resemblant to both the quality and the method of his songs. 

About this particular track though, I think the Bon Iver and Sharon Van Ettan version has done justice to the entire composition. I honestly cannot recall the last time I saw a woman that involved during a performance and I checked her solo performances - singing this particular track brings something else into her. With almost tear-filled eyes, that amazing fluidity that she puts into the performance is breathtaking and not something you come across a lot in times of music-less rhythm. 

'Love More' is a gem of a song in all its entirety and is an experience, more than a song, more than poetry, more than the aura and shadow of itself. It is still amusing me as I write this how a song with components as simple could transcend your mindscape

to a whole new version of reality altogether. Beyond other things, it sounds like an all-encompassing call, from a distance you cannot decode, like the sound of music underwater or from spaces we haven't visited and never will.