“22 (OVER Soo ooN)”
Song by: Bon Iver
Every story in this collection is what I see when I listen to the title song, but I’d never write a story while listening to Bon Iver. 22 (OVER Soo ooN), instead serves as a proposal to you, kind reader, for what I have written in the following pages.
Bon Iver was a friend to me in a friendless time, or at least a period in my life where I didn’t want to listen to anyone in my general vicinity. Bon Iver was just far enough away, tucked in the Wisconsin woods, making music filled with the wisdom of ghosts and stars.
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where Bon Iver is famously from is about four and a half hours northwest of my childhood home of Park Ridge, Illinois.
Illinois and Wisconsin have a friendly rivalry, but I secretly love Wisconsin more. In Wisconsin, there is space for all my thoughts.
From the years 1998-2001, my family rented a cabin in an old Wisconsin logging town, Summit Lake. It depends on who you ask if it was a relaxing vacation spot. But if you ask me, I’ll tell you it was the place I saw stars for the first time.
Summit Lake, Wisconsin is about five hours North of my childhood home. The little logging town was completely wooded, and pitch dark when the sun went down. My siblings, family friends, and cousins made up a gaggle of kids that added volume to the quiet forests. Us kids only got out of the murky lake for food and warmth and even then we were known to eat popsicles with our toes in the water and keep our shoulders submerged for warmth as the sun set.
It was an absolutely barebones type of getaway. I slept on a cot (which I fell out of twice because I had just turned three) under my Grandpa’s army blanket from World War II. My mom took us on hikes and adventures, and my dad showed me how to tilt my head back and see what seemed like an impossible amount of stars.
We stopped going to Summit Lake when I was a six. The last time I was there, I saw The Phantom Menace in the town’s theater one night, and listened to a radio broadcast tornado warning after tornado warning the next. My parents were stressed on the drive home that year, but I still thought Wisconsin was the height of luxury and excitement.
I’ve spent years now driving to and from different Wisconsin towns. I went to camps, to my cousins, to the new house we rented in Door County, to visit my other cousins, to be chased by goats, to hike dunes, to get lost on trails, to wear sweatshirts on early mornings and late nights, to hear tall tales of people tipping cows and stories of how they found out you can’t actually tip cows.
Over my life I have accumulated hours and hours and hours watching Illinois and Wisconsin cornfields whip by. From the car, I said hello to every cow and horse I saw, and thought about who lived in each farm house that sat deep in the distance. Yet, in all those hours, while my siblings whined of boredom, I pleasantly sat and looked out the window letting the world I often kept contained in my mind play around me. I was a dream kid to take on a road trip, especially when there was music playing.
I only improved as a peaceful passenger when I got a Walkman, then an iPod, then an iPhone, then when I was finally granted the Radioshack casette aux cord from my older siblings. When there is music playing I live in a different dimension, one I can live in for however long the car keeps going.
When I listen to music I see stories. Sometimes they are the stories that the artists have created in their lyrics, but most often they are vignettes and films and folklore of my own. I don’t want to say that I create these stories because the story was already created by the melody, the lyrics, the production, the mixing and the mastering, I’m just a listener with a pen and a ruthless imagination.
I don’t touch Bon Iver’s music with my writing, not because it is so much better than the rest of the artists I listen to, but because just like the state Bon Iver inhabits, it gives me room for my thoughts to jump and explore. I don’t see stories when I listen to Bon Iver, I get to see the stars for the first time again and those are not words I can string together. If I could, I don’t know that I’d let anyone read them; they’d be mine.
22 (OVER Soo ooN) was released in 2016 on Bon Iver’s album ‘22, A Million’. Prior to ‘22, A Millon’, Bon Iver released ‘Bon Iver’ in 2011, and ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ in 2008. Each album entered my life like a new kid in school; quietly becoming my friend, only to be there for me in a massive unexpected way.
Bon Iver is what gave me the idea to turn what I see when I listen to music into short stories in the first place. ‘i,i’ was released in 2019, making friends with me right before all of us needed a shoulder to lean on. These stories were written throughout quarantine and the collective chaos of 2020-2022.
In that time, Bon Iver created a scared place in my brain that reminded me I was not always just a skin covered skeleton floating through space on a rock.
There are so many songs, so many albums, so many artists that I don’t write stories to, and so many songs and albums and artists that I do. There is no hidden meaning as to why one song was chosen, but each song in this collection told me a story that I found myself needing.
Words, just like music, can be a friend we listen to when we feel like no one else can hear us or when we don’t want to listen to anyone else. These stories are meant to be those friendly words.
