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9:16 · 1,560 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The collapse that precedes the record is specific: pneumonia and mono leading to a liver infection, no job, being pushed out of a band he had been in for ten years, a breakup, and an online gambling habit.
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- At 25 he packed everything and drove from North Carolina to his father's cabin in Dunn County, Wisconsin, looking for silence rather than for songs.
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- The first stretch there was not productive. He kept the grounds, learned to hunt deer for food, drank, watched television and by his own account did nothing for weeks.
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- The turn came on a cold night after a week without seeing anyone, with a choir sound stuck in his head, and he wrote and finished the choral piece that opens Lump Sum in one sitting.
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- The guitar that shaped the record was a 1960s Sears catalogue instrument he bought on eBay while sick in bed. Nearly every song came from it, miked close to the f-hole for a brittle, creaky, woody sound.
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- The whole album was made on a Mac running Pro Tools with a single SM57 microphone, which is the technical fact the legend usually leaves out.
▶ 00:03:13
- The stacked choral effect that became his signature came from autotune layered across many vocal takes, with the mix deliberately worked to keep it from sounding digital.
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- Skinny Love's fragility is engineered. A 1930s resonator guitar in drop C gives it the rough, unfixed quality of an instrument picked up and played in whatever tuning it was found.
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- Vernon says the record is not about the relationship he had just left. It is about a first love he never got past, and Emma stands for a painful place a person cannot leave.
▶ 00:05:20
- He came out in February with nine songs he assumed were demos he would re-record later, and only released them as they were because friends and other musicians pushed him to.
▶ 00:07:32