On Bon Iver’s ‘SABLE, fABLE’, Justin Vernon Is Himself
Myth has always shrouded Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project, starting with the 2007 debut 'For Emma, Forever Ago'. The image of the solitary artist retreating into a cabin in the woods to mend a broken heart through sonic experiments and cryptically ambiguous lyrics endlessly followed, even as the sound grew richer and added collaborators to traverse abstraction, pop, and electronic flourishes. While the meaning obscured in lyrics gave listeners space to project their own, it maintained a distance from biography for the artist – a deliberate choice maintained over much of Bon Iver’s musical catalogue. Until now.
The album launch was marked by a campaign that embraced the absurd and gave fans of Bon Iver something they're not accustomed to: Justin Vernon himself. The typically media-shy musician gave interviews to The Guardian and The New Yorker; he sat down with the BBC, Zane Lowe, and Lil Yachty; and – most unexpectedly – collaborated with a number of brands to mark the album’s release.
‘SABLE, fABLE’ is an album of dualities. 'SABLE' was released as an EP late last year; three introspective, forlorn tracks under a name denoting a deepest black, singing about regret and unrealised dreams. In April, 'fABLE' followed on the full LP – nine tracks blooming from the abyss to declare the artist present, perhaps even healed. Pitched against the darkness of the EP and represented by a black square, ‘fABLE’s’ arrival signalled a transformation, rebirth, connection, wrapping the square in a salmon-hued embrace.
While working on the album campaign “we talked a lot about the album having not only a duality between lightness and darkness but also a seasonality,” says Ali Murphy, international marketing director of independent record label, Secretly Group, of the decision to release the album in two parts across different seasons.
“We have also talked a lot about the playfulness of the marketing campaign and the way we presented the record visually. All the emotions on the record are very heartfelt but there’s an implicit fun on the ‘fABLE’ side of the record. What separates this album from others is that sense of fun,” adds Robby Morris, Secretary Group’s VP of creative marketing.
Playfulness is the defining word of ‘SABLE, fABLE’s’ marketing campaign, perhaps most evident in how the salmon hue of the album art showed up literally at multiple touchpoints like billboards, merchandise, and promotional imagery. It caused a stir online with fans finding it equal parts amusing and pleasingly absurd. “We were not going for the ‘what is happening?’ reaction but as soon as we picked up on it, we really leaned into it,” says Robby with a laugh. He explains that Vernon has loved salmon for a long time, it’s his favourite colour. It has a human quality to it, the flesh beneath all our flesh. How perfect is that as a symbol for our humanity?” Robby asks.
At what point did the team decide that the symbolism had to be incorporated into the campaign? “We just kept on seeing salmon, honestly,” Robby says. “It became a bit of a joke and then it became reality when the fish emerged into the photos. It was kind of badass and it became a thing – we kept talking about it and pushing it a little bit and then it materialised in all the ways that it did. But it started from a very genuine place.”
A sense of community has always been a part of the Bon Iver project, a consistent presence bringing together fans even when the artist himself was at a remove. The marketing campaign for Bon Iver’s third album, ‘22, A Million’, saw dedicated murals promoting the record with boom boxes underneath, inviting people to listen to and flip cassettes; listening parties were arranged for people to gather and hear it for the first time with others. Much of this now feels commonplace but it was largely a first of its kind back in 2016. With ‘SABLE, fABLE’, Secretly Group created fABLE sPACEs – a global series of location-specific listening events where fans could go to hear the forthcoming album.
The idea behind it was simple and once again rooted in creating and giving fans a way to have an experience with the music first and foremost. Robby says the focus was on “bringing people together and asking them to congregate outside, ideally, to listen to the record in a moment that was very unattached [to the rest of the campaign]. Justin wanted to get people to go listen to the record in beautiful spaces.” The team built a salmon-hued map leading listeners to geographically-defined locations where they could hear the record, alone and with others, experiencing the duality of the record’s mood: solitude and togetherness.
The collaborations for this campaign ranged from the very affordable, like special drinks or beagle; to mid priced – think note books, home fragrance, tinned fish; to the luxury with an apparel collaboration with designer Todd Snyder. Robby says that a lot of the collaborations were really organic. “[Justin] has been friends with Todd and a fan of the brand for a while so it emerged from that relationship. He also told us that he’s always been fascinated by scents so we partnered with Earl of East as a nod to that.”
A lot of the partnerships were a push and pull “between irony and the meta-narrative of how we ask artists to be super present and do things to create ubiquity," Robby explains. “What happens if we push that to the next level? What if we overdo it? That was the fun of it. But instead of being antagonistic or overly tongue-in-cheek with it, we wanted to do it from a pure space.” Robby says a lot of it came down to making calls from local offices to local businesses in cities all over the world and asking if they were fans of Bon Iver “which were pretty easy to find,” he reports. “You send an email and knock on a door and you’ll likely find a fan there.”
It was this ‘by fans for fans’ attitude that drove much of the campaign, finally giving them a multisensory experience of the Bon Iver project that, until this album, has been elusive and immaterial. “We had so many collaborations that it was slightly verging on the absurd. And we kind of liked that,” says Robby. Having multiple campaign touchpoints was a deliberate choice stemming from Vernon. “He wanted to be present during this campaign and to live the experience,” Ali adds.
An eyebrow or two shot up when an LA-based basketball tournament to celebrate the album launch was announced, but only by people not familiar with Vernon’s longstanding love of the game. Fans turned up to watch him and a few other familiar places play – not music – just basketball. “A few publications said that this was peak event marketing,” laughs Robby. “Fans pushed back because they knew that [Vernon] has been a basketball fan for a long time and they were excited to watch him play.”
“None of it was forced,” says Ali of the overall energy and MO of the campaign. Trust between the team and Vernon – he’s been signed with Secretly Group’s Jagjaguwar since 2007 – made every decision authentic. “We’ve all grown together. There’s a lot of mutual admiration, trust, and shared values. The length of our partnership meant that we were always on the same page like when we were talking about the absurdist nature of the campaign,” Ali explains.
“Not to peel back the curtain too much but Justin has been joining our marketing meetings. It's gotten to that point. So it is a true family. We are one team,” adds Robby. Over the years, the team has broken a lot of traditional artist and album marketing rules like when they had to obscure Vernon’s face in promo imagery and work around him “frankly, not wanting to do too much press,” says Robby. “We made a lot of creative ground with those confines. I think and hope that created a lot of trust as well, so that when he was ready to step out of the shadows a little bit more, we were ready to embrace that.”
After close to two decades of the Bon Iver myth, Vernon’s deliberate and joyful rejection of the shadows and spot in the sunlight was welcomed by fans. The ‘SABLE, fABLE’ campaign proves that when an artist is really in tune with his fans, and has built up decades of goodwill, marketing can take on the lightness of a feather – giving fans what they want and delivering a few absurd winks that delight and surprise along the way.
