Sometimes you’ve just gotta hunker down.
Feeling tired of the world and all the people in it? Go into airplane mode and hunker down. Work piling up? Hunker down. Driven to sort out what to do with the next five years of your life? Hunker.
After his band and his long-term relationship melted down, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver famously hunkered down in an isolated cabin to record his excellent debut album. When Vernon started performing live at his university, fellow student and drummer Sean Carey was so taken by it that he hunkered down and listened to it repeatedly on Myspace for two weeks, learning every drum part and backup vocal. Carey did this so that the next time he attended one of Vernon’s performances he could, with confidence, declare that Bon Iver needed a drummer, and that he was it.
Sean Carey did indeed become Bon Iver’s drummer, and was along for that band’s rise to the top of the indie folk mountain of the 2000s.
By the end of that decade, he was releasing music of his own under the S. Carey moniker on Bon Iver’s Jagjaguwar label. Critics praised Carey’s work as possessing “filtered approximation[s] of natural beauty.” This connection to natural beauty, both as inspiration and evocation, is on full display on his 2018 record Hundred Acres, which can be seen as a manifesto for immersion in, even hunkering down in, nature.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. S. Carey is a drummer, but also a classical percussionist, and it’s clear here that for him, percussion is about more than timekeeping. Various percussive elements are at work in this song, covering a variety of pitches and timbres.
2. The main vocal melody – that opening ascending line – is just so pretty. He uses a falsetto similar to Justin Vernon’s, but it sounds less pained.
3. The time signature is weird, and I have a hard time pinning it down, because the guitar riff doesn’t start on the downbeat. Is it a bar of 7/8 mixed in with a few bars of 4/4? No, that’s not quite right. I might have to lock myself in my room and listen to it on repeat for a couple weeks until I can get it right.
Recommended listening activity:
Mono-tasking.