Before Bon Iver and Megafaun, There Was DeYarmond Edison

This article is adapted from the first chapter of Grayson Haver Currin’s 114-page biography of DeYarmond Edison—which will accompany the 5-LP, 4-CD definitive box set Epoch—that tells the story of how childhood friends Brad Cook, Phil Cook, Justin Vernon and Joe Westerlund came to form the band that would later spawn Bon Iver and Megafaun. Used with permission from Jagjaguwar and Shore Fire Media, © 2023.

Phil Cook could not sleep. He was ready to go—even if he didn’t yet know where.

In December 2004, Phil and his very new girlfriend, Heather Williams, had driven 11 hours from Eau Claire to Nashville, stopping only for gas and food as necessary. They had known one another for years, college party pals, but, as Heather tells it, this road trip was their first real date.

Phil had just purchased his first nice banjo, a Deering, with his tax refund, and was fawning over traditional Appalachian music—bluegrass, old-time, and country, stuff he encountered in Wisconsin largely through records and books. When a mutual friend had given the couple a CD-R of a performance by Old Crow Medicine Show, they’d fallen for the music together. Its energy summoned the jam bands of their youth, only in an exotic, exciting language. When they learned that the group was playing a three-night stand at Nashville’s legendary Station Inn in a kind of capstone celebration for their breakout year, Phil and Heather decided to go for it.

Nashville electrified them. Rather improbably, they managed to secure tickets for every night by standing in line. Heather ate cake backstage with Gillian Welch. Phil giggled upon hearing his name yelled out at a pizza stand in a rich Southern accent. They couldn’t get this from Wisconsin.

“I felt the pulse of a city that really had a lot to give to music,” Phil says 15 years later, beaming at the dining room table he then shared with his wife, Heather Williams Cook. “The excitement of being at the Station Inn and feeling this vibrant thing happening right there—but that was so steeped in all this tradition—just felt alive.”

For weeks back home, Phil stewed on the experience and the adventure. A recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, he was working as a counselor for a pre-college program. He liked the job, but, at 25, he wondered if that was what he wanted for the rest of his life.

After all, there was also music. A childhood piano whiz, Phil was currently playing in two bands alongside his younger brother, Brad. Amateur Love was a radiant electronic pop quartet, fronted by a dynamo songwriter who was still rather new to town. The other, DeYarmond Edison, was an earnest folk-rock group fronted by Justin Vernon, one of Phil’s closest friends and someone he’d played music with for more than half a decade. For years the band leaders were friendly rivals, the brooding dude and the melodic livewire, but it had started to escalate. Justin had plainly told the brothers he no longer wanted to share his band.

“They were far cooler, better,” Justin remembers. “I was definitely up against a wall, very jealous and insecure. I was saying things like, ‘You guys quit that band, or I’m done.’”

Suddenly inspired by Nashville and perpetually uneasy with conflict, Phil hatched a plan. Long after midnight in the earliest days of 2005, he burst through the doors of his bandmates and roommates, Justin and Brad. He needed to move. He wanted DeYarmond Edison to come, too.

Justin and Brad wiped the sleep from their eyes and agreed to talk it through that night. They drove a few miles to Country Kitchen, an all-night greasy spoon where the smells of cigarette smoke and deep fryers commingled as a hangover curative. Brad ordered country-fried steak. Justin had the chicken tenders, or maybe the country-fried steak, too. Phil asked for eggs Benedict. And then he asked his bandmates to write down the names of places where they’d like to be a band. Minneapolis, they agreed, was too close for the clean break they desired. San Francisco and Austin were on a list or two, as were Nashville and Denver. But only one location was on all three: Raleigh, North Carolina.

No one at that table had even been to North Carolina. But they knew about Merge Records, and Phil liked Whiskeytown. They knew the Ryan Adams song “Oh My Sweet Carolina” but not necessarily that he had once been an infamous Raleigh fixture. It seemed like a place with cool people and good bands.

“I think I wrote Raleigh because of Old Crow Medicine Show—‘If I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free,’” says Phil, doubling over with laughter. “Oh, god.”

Reasons aside, it was settled: They were moving to North Carolina as soon as they could get out of Eau Claire. The next day, their childhood friend Keil Jansen came over and saw a bunch of online searches about Raleigh real estate on a laptop screen. They told him about the plan. He enlisted, as did Heather. When Brad told his new girlfriend, Kati Johnson, about the idea during a subsequent country drive, she didn’t consider it a feasible option. But as their relationship grew and she neared graduation in Madison, she realized she didn’t have anything to lose either.

“It wasn’t like we were committing to this thing forever,” Heather says. “We all had clear breaks with our careers and our pasts, so why not?”

The next day, Brad called Joe Westerlund, the drummer in their high school band who had left Eau Claire to study improvisation and 20th-century composition at Vermont’s Bennington College. Joe was done with school and pondering his next move, perhaps as a free-jazz musician in New York. When Brad asked him to join DeYarmond Edison in North Carolina, it offered the safety net of old friends, even if it did mean playing folk-rock. And his girlfriend, Carson Efird, was from there, anyway.

“There was this promise that they wanted to get further out,” Joe says. “And they said, ‘We know we can do that with you.’”

They knew the move wouldn’t be seamless or easy; for weeks, they even guarded the news, so they could decide how and when to let lifelong friends know they were leaving. Their families all lived within a 20-minute drive and always had. During the previous decade, the Cook brothers and Justin had become pillars of an active local music scene, whether booking clubs or recording albums or simply playing lots of shows. They’d need to finish and release their second album, Silent Signs, before leaving.

And their departure meant they were effectively breaking up Amateur Love, the Eau Claire band that seemed most ready to move beyond the city. They’d be leaving behind Brian Moen, the drummer in both bands, and Chris Porterfield, their pedal steel player. Not long after finding out, he took a swing at Brad after sitting in on one of DeYarmond Edison’s last sets in town.

Again, it didn’t have to be forever.

“All it means for our band is that we’re going to play six fewer shows a year in Eau Claire. It’s not going to change much,” Justin told Volume One, the town’s weekly magazine, of the move to Raleigh days before their three-night farewell stand. “We have a year lease. If it sucks, we might come back.”

He was right, at least in part.

Epoch is out everywhere today. Order the box set and stream DeYarmond Edison’s career-spanning compilation here.