olivehearts:

^ [Old friends: Beth Tacular and Justin Vernon backstage last summer.]

»———> Bowerbirds, Bon Iver, and Ticonderoga, the band that got away.

Back in early spring of 2006, Phil Moore was in two bands, Ticonderoga, an experimental post-rock band, and his new project with Beth, called Bowerbirds.   Justin Vernon had recently moved to Raleigh with his band Deyarmond Edison, because of good things they had heard about the Triangle’s music scene. 

Justin came to a Bowerbirds show on a recommendation of a friend, became a fan, and bought our first e.p., Danger at Sea.  You can read him talking to La Blogotheque about that night and his favorite song on the e.p. here.

He didn’t speak to us then, but we later talked and became friends and realized he was in a band as well, Deyarmond Edison. A few months later, our bands played a show together, where we were really impressed with Justin’s voice and musicianship.

The following summer, Justin watched our cat for us while we were squatting in an abandoned schoolhouse in the swamps of South Carolina, an hour’s drive from civilization, while we wrote the songs that would become 2007’s Hymns for a Dark Horse — it was the same summer Justin was sick with mononucleosis of the liver, and while he was still living with his girlfriend at the time that he was soon to break up with, and her cat, Tony.  The cats became best friends and helped take care of sick Justin. 

That next fall, we returned from the wilderness with a new album.  Justin meanwhile quit Deyarmond Edison and for a short while was planning to join Ticonderoga with Mark and Phil after the other member left the band.

Mark and Justin had some long late-night talks about music and started working on songs together.  But then while we were buying land and settling into our AirStream trailer in the North Carolina woods, to start building our cabin, Justin went home to his own cabin in the Wisconsin woods and got enough songs together himself to make the gorgeous For Emma, Forever Ago.  We all got way too busy for Ticonderoga to continue, and we went our own ways.

In summer 2008 Justin asked us to tour with Bon Iver, and it was one of our favorite tours we have ever done.  There were late night swimming parties, a lot of group singing of Rihanna’s Umbrella song, the Yahtzee drink was invented, and this happened every night.  The guys in that band all are total sweethearts and amazing people, and that’s also when we met sound engineer Brian Joseph, who ended up engineering Bon Iver, Bon Iver, as well as a lot of our new album, The Clearing.

We still don’t get to see Justin as often as we’d like, but it was nice to be up in his world in cold Wisconsin as we began to record our new album, and it was great to hang out with him and watch his band play an incredible live set on a sweltering night last August.

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We are planning to bring the last remaining copies of Ticonderoga’s two albums to our upcoming Bowerbirds shows, to sell at our merch table.  You can hear in these songs some of the experimental art-rock elements that come back out in more developed form on our new album, The Clearing, and you can hear some of Phil’s earlier songs, before he decided to strip it all down to the barest elements for the early Bowerbirds sound.

You can hear previews of these songs, and also buy the albums as mp3s on Amazon.com, here, and here.  But pretty much the only physical copies left are in a cabinet in our house, and will soon be nestled on our merch table between soft shirts and our own albums, and maybe going home with those of you who want them.